I’ve been lucky in life to have had a wide range of awesome experiences. I’ve flown five feet off of the ground at over 140 miles per hour in a helicopter before going just about straight up. I’ve done autorotations in helicopters…if you don’t know what that is, it means that you put more faith in gravity and air flow than you put into the engine. I’ve fired off some of the military’s wicked noisemakers, and I’ve been present when the really frightening stuff got popped off. I’ve been near car bombs, impacting mortar rounds, poorly-aimed RPGs and more. And that’s just nine years of my life. But what was the most impactful moment? What really got me? The day four dudes and my dumb ass piled into a worn-out and left-for-dead Plymouth Valiant and did triple-digit speeds on 40-mph tires on some backroads to a gas station and back one day. Feeling a car moving that fast, on the genuine ragged edge of control, set the speed addiction in concrete and steel. Ever since then I’ve been chasing that same adrenaline rush.
But what about introducing others to the fun? My ex-wife went with me on two scare rides…one in the Chevelle and one in my Diplomat. Both times she spent the next hour looking like she had seen into the other side and found that she didn’t like the view one bit. I took a few college friends on some spirited drives around the canyon roads in Arizona and most seemed to like the feeling. It’s always cool to see someone’s reaction to the moment they’ve crossed past acceptable Interstate speeds or across the line into any kind of true performance driving styles, whether it’s autocross, or drag racing, or even a wild-ass nitrous-assisted scratch on some backroad. I’ll never tell the best story I’ve got in this regard (I promised the other person I wouldn’t and the story can’t be skewed enough to avoid recognition) but I still consider it a point of pride and smile a bit about it to this day.
That’s the lead up for today’s question…what’s the story you always tell when it comes to introducing someone to the action? Did you have claw marks where an “oh, shit” bar should have been? Did they pray to everything under the sun? Did you wind up getting punched? And why does that seem to happen a lot?
Used to talk about going to Seafair Hydro races, sprint cars, NHRA, Mickey Thompson stadium trucks, Monster trucks, Tractor pulls, Supercross with a guy I worked with. He didn’t get it? Years later he was consultant and doing work in Indianapolis. The company he was working with gave him tickets to the Indy 500, seats were across from pit lane no less. This was his first motorsport race ever and he was blown away. When we ran into one another he could stop raving about his Indy experience and totally understood my fascination with motorsports.