Track Day photos

Have Skills, Will Drive

If you haven't heard by now - and that's a possibility since I tend to speak softly - I had a rare and thrilling Monday. That's right, a thrilling Monday. Probably the most surprising part of it all. I didn't wake with the "ugh, weekend over" feeling despite the fact I was coming off a Vegas weekend of all things! No, I woke with the thought, "what is appropriate apparel for driving a race car?" Answer: Depends. Depends on what? No, just Depends. Get it? No? Oops-I-Crapped-My-Pants? Ring a bell with anyone? From the scary fast driving? You'll get it later on.

A couple design guys I work with gave me the opportunity to drive their cars, really fast, on an incredible road course here in Utah called Miller Motorsports Park. Our caravan from Salt Lake to the track included a Shelby Mustang GT, which I drove, a Lotus Elise, and a Shelby Cobra. (Not actual images of the owners' cars, just for reference.) I don't know all the car guy details of these vehicles, so don't ask. I know that they are all fast, and they make a terrific rumbly sound when the engines are revved. The Mustang had what's called a "Hurst shifter" with a "short throw". I looked it up on the Internet. It means that when you put the shifter thingy into gear and then go to another gear you don't have to throw anything very far, unless you are trying to get your opponent off the track with a green turtle shell, like in Mario Kart. "Here we gooooo!"

Once we arrived, we parked our cars amongst a variety of other souped-up rigs, like Porsches, Corvettes, an actual pointy-nosed race car, some BMWs, a Mini Cooper or two, and I'm pretty sure there was a Mazda Miata thrown in for good measure. Don't hate, it did very well on the track. The Lotuses and Cobras were the best looking cars in my opinion, very track-ready vehicles. I received an orange paper bracelet that said, "You are in the slow group, so don't try and go all Tony Stewart out there. Maybe more like Tony Randall." It didn't say all those things on the bracelet, but orange indicated my status as a novice. I could tell the organizers there weren't used to true rookies, as more than one asked me to clarify my claim of having zero experience.

"I'm Steve. This is my first time doing this."

"So what high performance vehicles have you driven?"

"Uh...my old Taurus SHO that had a stick shift? I grew up on a lot of country roads, so..."

"So how many laps have you driven before?"

"This is my first time here. It's my first time doing this."

"And which other tracks have you driven on?"

"You shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition. It would be, 'On which other tracks have you drived fastly?' and the answer would be NONE, this is my first..."

This happened at sign in, in casual discussion with other drivers, and mostly with the instructor with whom I was paired. (I forced that one a little.) Ron, who I outweighed by a good 150 lbs, seemed REALLY alarmed that I had nary a lap of track driving in my career as an amateur race car driver. I mention his size because I found driving to be a very physical activity, but his slight stature was clearly a non-factor when he threw that Mustang into the first corner off the straightaway. I gripped the door handle, the center console, the dashboard - anything I could grab to keep me from flying out the side of the car. There is NO WAY I'm going to be able to drive this car like that. How does it not spin out or flip entirely?

As Ron is whipping through the first several corners, he is trying to explain the strategy to me. A real-time tutorial on how to make your passenger barf in 10 turns or less.

"Now in this corner, it starts sharp but it levels off here, so let the car stay out wide a little longer and then get into your turn HERE and aim for the apex..."

After the word "HERE" I'm totally tuned out as I try and get my bearings after another sharp left. High speed corners have a way of reminding you what's important in life: balance, control, just living. Fortunately, I am wearing a helmet and, as prescribed, narrow shoes with a rounded heel. Surely that's all the protection I'll need in a fiery crash! We get to turn twenty-something, and we're finally on the long straightaway. I can breathe for a moment. Ron decides we better do another lap with him driving, since I hadn't spoken or even nodded my giant helmet the entire circuit. After a second lap on the 4+ mile course, we pit, and do a quick Chinese fire drill where I end up as the driver! BONUS. I shove the Hurst shifter into first gear, and promptly forget everything Ron told me. The first lesson in the driver's meeting was "coming out of the pits, do NOT cross the double white lines. Cars are doing about 140 down the straightaway here." While I did remember to check my mirrors and felt comfortable accelerating, I did maybe inch over the line just a hair. Fortunately, the coast was clear and I was into turn one before I knew it.

I mentioned the word "apex" before. I heard this word roughly 1,000 times during my laps. It's the point at the inside of corners where your vehicle should ideally reach the edge before gradually straightening out of the corner. "Use the whole track!" was another repeated phrase. Anyway, proper cornering for maximum lap speeds involves speeding frantically toward a cone on the outside of the track pre-turn, braking like you're told not to in driver's ed (stand on it!), then turning sharply to make a bee-line to the apex cone. All the while gripping the wheel like it's pulling you behind a boat and bracing your body with your knees against the door and center console, respectively. At least, that was my style. A more comfortable position, as the "pros" mentioned, was moving your seat so close to the wheel that you look like your Grandma Edna, except you can see over the steering wheel. This lets you drive with your elbows and wrists, not with your shoulders and entire torso, as I was. Again, I don't think racing is designed for people with legs longer than a newt's so that wasn't going to work for me.

These minor details are endless and I cannot possibly do them justice. So let me get to the point which is HOW AWESOME WAS DRIVING A RACE CAR ON A RACE TRACK?! In my 14 or 15 laps over 3 sessions, I got better and better at the throttle-brake-turn-apex scenario and started really having fun and really testing the car. The hardest part is learning to trust the vehicle through these corners. Especially considering it was not my vehicle! A man I've known less than a year was trusting me with this machine, and that may have been the subconscious restrictor plate that kept me on the track. (WHOA! Race-speak in metaphor, kids!) If you've never been subjected to G-forces like this in a car, as I hadn't (despite my Mom's best efforts on the way to church years back), you just can't imagine that you'll come out of the turn with the nose pointing forward. But it did, over and over, and I hit straightaways at 120+, and I bested S-curves at 80+, and I only maybe lost a layer or two of rubber in the process (sorry, Zach). Ron was super pumped with my very last lap, where I reached deep within my 40 minutes of racing experience to finally nail the double-apex turn in the middle of the track, and certainly pull off my best lap time. My shirt was entirely sweat through, my arms and knees ached, and my ears burned from being shoved into that helmet, but I had the biggest grin on my face the whole way down pit row the final time.

An epic experience, and I recommend it to anyone who truly enjoys driving. My folks always bought cars with a little "extra" under the hood - even if it was a giant, gold Oldsmobile, which I proudly drove for several years as a hand-me-down - and I've always been the "I'll drive" volunteer when it comes to friends or family or road trips. I also had the benefit of learning how to drive on manual shifters from permit days on, which took out a potentially challenging part of this event. So this was a true thrill, and I'm very grateful to Zach and Allen for the opportunity. I have some photos and video footage from them, and I'll try to get it online somehow for those who think I'm a big fat liar.

Did I mention they let me drive the Lotus home from the track? That is, after I folded my legs up into my body so I could get in. Rolling at 90 down I-80 in a yellow convertible import didn't suck.

And if anyone needs an amateur race car driver with an impressive resume driving one car on one track with a professional instructor, then I'm your man. Shake and bake, baby!

Why Reading is Good

[NERD ALERT! This is about reading.]

It's not because your parents tell you it's good. They're right, but the reason they say it at the time is because they simply want you to quit asking for snacks.

"No, you can't have a brownie sundae with crushed candy canes on top. What even made you think of that? You should go read a book or something. It's good for you."

Seriously, if my kids haven't asked for a snack during a particular 15 minute time period, I start to worry. And if I haven't responded in complete disbelief that these children ask child-like questions with impunity, they start to think I'm not an old grumpy bugger after all. But I normally do. This paragraph is like a triple negative. I’m not even sure what it says now that I haven’t continued writing it.

 

To reading, then. I started writing a thoughtful, what-does-it-all-mean essay on the effect reading has on our psyches, but it disappeared. Twice. I saved it as a draft here in this Blogger control center, and it completely vanished. So I re-wrote it, naively in Blogger again, and it vanished again. It was Blogger's way of saying, "Dude, that was way over your own head. Stop now before you subject your readers to this painful, meandering interpretation of the long-stirring thoughts in your usually sealed off brain."

 

So instead, I'll try and summarize in a few sentences. The more I read, the more information I absorb. Duh. More specifically, the more I read books set in historical, real-life contexts, the more I understand about myself and my own humanity. I haven’t even read these books with that purpose (I’m off to find myself! blah blah blah), but the result is just that. Confused? I’ll use a quick example with the book I’m reading now, Angela’s Ashes. Frank McCourt, the author, is a kid growing up first in Brooklyn, then back in native Ireland in the 1930s and '40s. He’s Irish-Catholic of course, lives in squalid conditions I’ve never had to endure, sees the depression in America and something altogether more bleak in Ireland; basically, we have nothing in common. Except he is a boy, and he is human. And when I find myself relating to the dreams, needs, questions, and “sinful thoughts” of little Francis in his boyhood, I just feel like my life is a little more normal. I also feel really grateful to have been born and raised in the late 20th century in America, in West Michigan, to my parents, in my little world.

 

See? That’s just one perspective out of one part of one book! I go through this like 3 or 4 times every time I read something now. Reading is good because the stories are experienced in your own head, using your own creativity, and stirring your own emotions. I love TV and movies, but they’re created with someone else’s imagination, and often produce false senses of emotion through musical crescendos or REALLY INTENSE CLOSE UPS.

 

Your teachers were right. Reading is good. They just weren’t explaining it right. It’s not because you’ll know the correct answers to a test, or because you’ll be able to recite Shakespearean lines when you’re picking up chicks, or because you truly need to understand transcendentalism. It’s because you’ll understand your place in this world a little bit better.

 

And you may pick up a few answers (questions?) on Jeopardy!, which is never a bad thing.

It's Thursday, yet it's the weekend

This week, my company "let" us work four 10-hr days, and take Friday off. It's the 2nd time they've done it, but I was on vacation the last time. So this week, I woke up at my normal time every morning, but instead of hitting snooze 18 times, I got up, stood in half-slumber in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, then either plugged in the laptop at home or headed to work for some early meetings. A few late evenings and working around the kids' after school activities, and I'm done on a Thursday night! All in all, probably worth it for an extra day off, but not something I'd love to do every week.

On Wednesday, I attended a lovely breakfast reception for the Utah chapter of Operation Smile, an organization with whom my company has recently partnered. Due to the early start (7:30 am), I did not brew my home coffee as usual but instead thought, "I'll just get the coffee there!"

[quiet inner voice] Well, the meeting is at the "Joseph Smith Memorial Building". Don't the Mormons reject coffee and most caffeinated products?
[louder inner voice] Yes, but this is not a church-related event. It's an opportunity for non-profits and corporations to come together and celebrate in perfect harmony! With coffee!

Needless to say, the event provided any breakfast lover's best choices (eggs benny, potatoes, fruit, pastries, juices) but NO java. My inner voices combined to drown out any and all speakers or musicians (Osmond, of course), repeating, "What? Really? Is that a carafe over there? How do I get coffee? Where am I going to get coffee? When is this over? Is there a coffee shop within 1 block of my location? Is that a headache I'm getting? Is this some cruel joke, orchestrated just for me to sit in disbelief and confusion? How do I get coffee?"

The potatoes helped shake me out of my funk, and I listened as my company's CEO told the cookie story and introduced our partnership. It really was a tremendous event. The local community is perfectly built for the Operation Smile charity: educated and well respected dentists and plastic surgeons, a strong volunteer base, and people comfortable with travelling globally (missionary influence). It's no wonder they are one of the strongest chapters of the global charity. The partnership has given our employees a shot in the arm, too, after a pretty morale-crushing past 12 months. We raised over $17,000 through employee fundraisers and vendor donations, and are building programs for our product lines to start contributing, too.

After a pretty packed week, I'm diggin' my day off tomorrow. Annie, being the really hard worker of the family, will be working and the kids are at Grandma's, so it's another day of freedom for me. I'm praying no major home emergencies arise between now and then, like the ceiling fan detaching and flying through the slider and killing a neighborhood cat. Actually, I wouldn't be totally devastated by that. If nothing else, it would give me something great to write about. The post would start something like:

"So yesterday, the ceiling fan detached and flew through the slider and killed a neighborhood cat! As expected, I wasn't totally devastated."

Marketers

http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/09/marketing.html