Car racing...what's the deal?

I have some new young friends who are now, or have been, involved with car racing. They are mostly 20-something, and at least one seems to have a future in racing. I am keenly interested in them, and eager to be allowed into their world, because I have been a car nut since I was about three years old. I wanted to be on wheels early, and none other than the Mayo Clinic actually discovered (with some medical amusement, I might add) that I have a "hole" in my head due to the fact that when I was about a year old, I crashed my ride-in-car down the full length of the basement stairs and cracked my head pretty hard. I remember nothing about it, except the sound of my mother screaming and the feeling of riding in the car to the hospital. This "hole" in the head amuses my current wife, ...and probably causes my ex-wives to nod sagely, I am sure.

But here's the thing. This car love has always been there, even despite the nose-dive down the basement steps. I think it could be that Howard Gardner needs to add another kind of "intelligence", or perhaps add a sub-set of "kinesthetic intelligence," or maybe he should start a list of genetic oddities-- the first one to be called: car racing. It is not just "racing," by the way, because joggers and party game competitors and people running the Iditerod race do these things due to, perhaps, other genetic aberrations. Even these other "racers" are often just like all the non-car racing fan humans, who simply do not get why a person would watch a bunch of people drive fast...or even worse, drive fast in themselves. One hundred and fifty miles an hour into a 90 degree hair-pin turn? Not for them! When you try to explain to them, their eyes glaze over, as though you were trying to prove the existence of trolls in a forest.

Now, not all car nuts like car racing. Collectors, fans of artistic design, and state troopers might like cars for entirely other reasons. Only racing people like racing, except sometimes in Europe, where the cultural history of this small geographical region has tied Formula racing and rallying to people's national identity and pride. Even grandmas wave Ferrari flags in Modena.

Car racing is a hard thing to generalize about, because world of outlaw race drivers live in a separate world from open wheel folks whose world is not that of NASCAR folks whose world is hardly the same as vintage car folks. They give a nod to the other guys, but really don't want to go there to do their thing. Also social class distinctions exist among the different car racing crowds. Formula 1 fan-dom in America is supposed to like fine wine more than cheap beer; NASCAR fan-dom is supposed to drink ANY beer and wear lots of sleeveless T-shirts with messages like "MOPAR" and "MILLER LITE" and "I'm the guy yer wife knew before!"; the drag race crowd drinks 5W10 and talks to piston rings...you get the idea of class biases. However, the passion and level of interest in the details of car racing is shared by all by all of them.

Car racing is a hard thing to generalize because it is sometimes hard to like even for the fans. One challenge is that everyone knows it's all about who has the most money...either of their own or donated by people who will put a decal on your car and your hat. The money aspect makes it as American as apple pie,....and also corruptible, unfair, open to cheaters and idiots,and able to be slimed by corporate types and those laundering gang money.

Then there is the hard issue of death; all drivers know and all car racing fans know that there is deadly risk in racing. The long-time fans like me know that racing can reach out and bite you...hard! I liken it to the "steppenwolf" of drivers: the steppenwolf is ever and always out in the woods, just past your sight line into the apex of every turn. He waits. He can squander time measured in years, while racers sweat to save time measured in tenths of a second. If you are a fan long enough, you'll cry on account of his sudden bite. I listened as a kid to the announcements about Glen Roberts and Tiny Lund; later in life I witnessed the end of Lorenzo Bandini and Ayrton Senna in replayed video; I was washing my car when the radio blared the methanol inferno that took Davey MacDonald and Eddie Sachs. I loved these people just as people loved Carole Lombard or John Belushi. Why them? Why now? That's racing.

So why would you like car racing, knowing these negatives, these quirks, these boundaries?

First, speed is addictive. Some people will understand this when you ask them why they ride a roller coaster and, by doing so, actually trust their lives to an engineer and a fabricator and a maintenance crew who assure the machinery won't send them flying off to their deaths. Second, cars are works of art, created out of a shared psychological understanding of how speed should LOOK. People do tend to get the art idea, because they can look at a Bugatti and understand it's shape and the relation of its shape to its purpose. Third, cars are about control. True, control freaks come in all walks of life, but for racers it is a precious gift to be able to take this artwork/automobile, go exhilaratingly fast in it, and actually control it...not just by REacting, but through knowledge of the physics of it, the machinery of it, ... and having conscious fore-thought about what each piece of race track will require on this lap, at this time in the race, in this traffic, with this tire wear, under these temperatures, knowing my fatigue level, my skill level and the enticing likelihood that I could actually win this race or place in the ranks of the top drivers on this day. Fans of racing seem to be able to put themselves out there on the track knowing and feeling what the drivers know and feel. It is the textbook definition of "vicarious" experience.

Despite the power and "high" of all this, few racers get rich racing and all racers will also need rich friends/sponsors. The fans also pay dearly to see racing live, and all cable companies know never to offer the SPEED channel for free. The money always goes ultimately to somebody else, or back into the car, and the work of racing is not only low-paying but requires gypsy blood. I watch my new friends and wonder if they understand how lonely the life they are choosing can be. Like musicians, racing people are out on the road. It's very hard to take love with you, and equally hard to keep a lover in every city. Want to have kids...OK, but will they be on the road or will you be the parent the school never sees? Odd hours, bad food, endless interstates that all look the same, close quarters with people you may not like...whether you are sick or healthy. Arrive at the gig at 4 a.m., practice at 10. Then a nap, or practice some more? Show time, and it's pouring rain. The stage is like a furnace. Everything is being delayed. Maybe I'll take the uppers after all.... "Where do we gotta be next?" The trucks' await, but the weather does not.

To me, as I watch my young friends have oceans of fun racing, and dream about their futures as drivers, the very saddest thing is related to the money. Of course money is necessary and competitive cars are expensive. But all of us worker bees in other walks of life have faced the moral dilemmas of money and the need for it and its subsequent power over our behavior. In race car driving, it goes like this: once racing has got you, every next step will require more money; more money makes you more beholden and under more pressure to do well; more pressure to do well makes you maybe, just maybe,... stay in the higher gear longer, brake a tad later, or push the pedal just bit harder. The money knows that if you risk more and, especially, if you can win, the logos and decals are on the screen just a tic longer. So the money people love risk-takers,...and they always, always want more and more and more. And every driver out there doing it for a living is experiencing the same gnawing in their gut, just underneath their exhilaration. " I've got to...I've got to."

Meanwhile, no matter what race or how many are competing, the steppenwolf has all the time in the world.

"I can wait," he whispers from the woods.