Lights Out! Away I Go!

Photo by Jahanzeb Ahsan on Unsplash

The men in my family suffer from an affliction. To paraphrase an SNL skit catchphrase, we’ve got a fever and the only prescription is speed. Like many men, we are completely enamored with horsepower, grippy handling, burbling exhausts and the sounds of a hot catalytic converter ticking after you shut the car down.

Tap pretty much every man on either side of my family on the shoulder, dangle the keys to something speedy and the promise of a lightly traveled windy road, and they’ll be at the driver-side door of that vehicle faster than light rays leave a room after flipping the wall switch off. Lead feet are genetic on both sides. It’s a curse that has on some occasions conjured up ceiling-mounted Jello lights in the rearview mirror for some of us, followed by inquiries for paperwork and a pop quiz on our speed before we pulled to a stop on the shoulder.

I’ve loved cars since I was a small boy. I had a collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels miniature cars as a kid. I thought Matchbox offered a better variety of models, especially when it came to imports. If you wanted a 3-series BMW, a Rothman’s livery Porsche 962, de Tomaso Pantera or a Miura, Matchbox was your brand. However, what Hot Wheels didn’t accomplish in exotic offerings, they more than made up for in their smooth rolling performance. In my humble opinion, the smoothness with which they rolled on your kitchen table or wood floor offered a level of refinement that Matchbox couldn’t equal, for all of its foreign flare.

Around fifth grade, in trying to patronize a magazine subscription fund drive, I pored over the selections. It was the 80’s and ninja action movies were all the rage. Sho Kosugi was reeling off a string of hit ninja-themed martial arts films with him as the lead, and boys my age were buying up copies of magazines like Black Belt and Ninja. Were they all perfecting the arts of silently moving around their homes to spring out of the dark as adults and dish out certain death as assassins for hire? Not exactly. Did they covet the order forms at the back of those magazines to order nunchaku, ninja costumes, throwing stars and other paraphernalia they saw in films. Absolutely.

I was tempted to settle my chits to join them until my sirens called: Car and Driver and Road & Track. Most of the local men I knew subscribed to Car and Driver, known for its annual anointing of some lucky manufacturer’s offering as Car of the Year. Familiarity almost reflexively completed this selection for me, but something stopped me, some automotive cam sprite perhaps. I loved cars but more than that I loved cars going racing.

I knew Car and Driver would give me the specs I would memorize for schoolyard debates about which car was better based on horsepower, torque, 0-60 times, braking distances, highest lateral g-forces, shapes with superior Cd (drag coefficient for improved wind resistance performance) and more. As useful as that arsenal of statistics would be, it was missing something. Track. I was tempted by the promise of not only road cars but track exploits. With that, my decision was made and I chose Road & Track, a car magazine I had never read before.

This would turn out to be a momentous and fortuitous choice. Road & Track not only had a beautifully stylized ampersand in its title, but some of, if not the finest written automotive reviews around, accompanied by automotive schematics drawn by a man named David Kimble. They were exquisitely detailed, drawn on a graph paper background, with x-ray layers that were like looking at a cutaway illustration of a finely engineered timepiece that happened to produce 280 hp.

Their issues used diction that wasn’t so much “cars and coffee” but concours de elegance and slingback racing gloves. As a kid who grew up in a small town, lower-income household, it was like eavesdropping on a conversation between a Jaguar owner and the owner of a Maserati, each one presenting the merits of their purchases. These drivers didn’t write like they earned seat time doing late night moonshine runs. No, they threw their coveted chariots in and out of corners on the Pacific Coast Highway, optional convertible tops down, of course. Growing up in the “greed is good” 80’s and dreaming of one day being rich enough to have my own episode hosted by Robin Leach, this was right up my alley.

They also threw around terms that would come to have more meaning in time. Unsprung weight, understeer, oversteer, inline or V-engine configuration; longitudinal or transposed engine orientation; front, mid or rear engine mounting; low polar moments of inertia and others gave me a layman’s appreciation of the engineering and technical explanations behind the performance and handling characteristics of the road-tested vehicles. In my youthful obsession for numbers, I failed to appreciate a column titled At Large, written by Henry N. Manney, III. It wouldn’t be until later on when I’d slow down to read the column Miscellaneous Ramblings, written by his spiritual successor Peter Egan, that I’d realize what I had blown past in my laser-guided hunt for the latest road test results. I’d get glimpses in excerpts, callback references and reprints of Manney’s articles in later years and lament my poor youthful judgment.

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in what I recently came to realize was a pseudo-Christian fundamentalist cult with lots of rules for spartan “godly” living. One of those was no television or movies. This particular rule was complicated in my household. My mom steadily kept her membership and attendance in this group, fully believing that she was doing the best thing for herself and her kids. I don’t fault her. The preachers were piously convincing, and she did everything to ensure we had solid morals, character and above all divine guidance. Dad, on the other hand, started out in it and fell out for a good long time before returning. While he was not going, and they weren’t in one of their periods of separation, we had a TV.

He liked reruns of old black and white programs, some newer sitcoms, boxing and baseball. I liked the sitcoms could take or leave boxing, and in what would be anathema to adult me, childhood me was bored by baseball unless there were home runs. One thing we did fully agree on was auto racing. For any whippersnappers reading along, this was a time when many sporting events were broadcast over the air on major networks, before you needed a cable subscription for every possible event under the sun. Every once in a while, there would be a race being broadcast on Saturday during the hours that competitors experienced either, “the thrill of victory” or “the agony of defeat.”

Sometimes it was NASCAR. NASCAR was ok, but for me open-wheeled Indy Car was where it was at. For one thing, NASCAR vehicles looked to me like someone took your neighbor’s Ford or Chevy to their backyard, gutted the interior, welded in a roll cage, covered it in stickers and handed it to a driver to wail on in a circle. Indy Cars looked purpose built in a pristine lab by exacting scientists in white coats to fulfill their singular mission: maintaining top speeds for hours through a grueling circuit, sometimes on ovals but better still, serpentine courses that went left and right. It was the broadcast of these races that I lived for.

Other than one race at Indianapolis, where driver Danny Sullivan’s car spun in a full 360, that he miraculously recovered to avoid wadding up into the wall and go on to win, I don’t remember many details of the handful of others I saw that aired. No matter. The bug bit and burrowed in to continue secreting speed serum for the rest of my life.

After Dad moved out again, we kept a little black and white TV in our room as kids. Mom let us have that one. She was cool like that and honestly, so long as what we were watching wasn’t overly violent or sexualized, she was fine. We didn’t broadcast this to the other sect members, of course. They wouldn’t have understood, and would have judged her as failing to be a good example to us kids. It was our secret from the cult and that was fine by me. Movies in a theater were still a no, and I’d have to cobble together bits of advertised trailers, scenes from it that kids at school recounted and fill in blanks with my imagination to recreate a close mental facsimile of the movies in question. It was an odd skill but would come in handy as an adult, when trying to forecast the likelihood of a movie being worthwhile from what I could glean from the trailers in its ad campaign.

This skill would find use sooner when my dad renewed his membership in the cult when I was about to enter high school and “re-professed.” He went from ignoring its rules, to the strict adherence of a converted zealot. We didn’t get rid of the TV completely but he clamped down on its use drastically. Any channels we got came over the air and basic cable was out of the question. Instead, we drove all over creation to every worship meeting within 2 hours drive or so of our apartment. We also hustled off to every funeral among the people who were part of the cult, whether we knew them well or at all. Funeral and meeting attendance were lionized by preachers and members as a sign of devotion to God and were a testament to your seriousness about your soul’s salvation. He also seemed to be trying to make up for lost time when he wasn’t going and was a “wayward soul.”

My issues of Road & Track kept coming, with their road tests, columns, auto show reviews with concept car photos and reports from all of the racing leagues. Although I loved seeing Indy Car, there was one series I was desperate to see but couldn’t: Formula 1. Formula 1 is the crown jewel of all automotive series. It’s the most expensive, has the best drivers, fastest cars and the tracks are in the most glamorous locations, with the road course in Monaco being the prime example. No other racing circuit in the world shuts down the public streets of a resort city for open wheeled racecars to go screaming through its streets at over 150MPH, and portions of the course going by five-star hotels, flagship stores of luxury retailers and a marina with a collection of the most expensive yachts on earth.

I’d devour issues reading the exploits of Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda, Michael Schumacher, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell. I’d try to picture the rain races, the tire changes, race strategies, the shrieks of engines and heat of the tropical tracks like Rio or Mexico City. Of all racers during this time, I was partial to the Brazilian phenom, Ayrton Senna. He was skilled, fast, fiery and an absolute magician behind the wheel, wet or dry conditions. He would become a world champion, and I would cheer reading about his accomplishment as though I knew him personally and gave him pep talks throughout the season to realize his dreams.

His races probably were broadcast during those years, either on ESPN or a channel called Speedvision, but both required cable TV and so were out of reach. I’d make due with vivid writing and a creative imagination. I put the still photos on the pages in motion, dreaming of what it was like to watch coiled suspensions hold cars to the ground, as they’re propelled by engines powered by barely controlled internal explosions moving internal parts at 11,000 revolutions per minute.

As a college student and then a recent graduate, cobbling together entry-level pay to cover rent, utilities, insurance, car payment and student loans, I would keep cracking those issues open every month. Money was so tight that going out to eat even once a month was a stretch and I barely bought fast food lunchtime at work. I cooked in big batches, carried leftovers to work and ate food I made in my apartment to save cash. I was still a card-carrying member of the cult, and as an observant adult trying to be the right example, I eschewed television in my apartment. Even if I had one, I couldn’t afford cable TV to watch Formula 1 races anyway. I definitely didn’t make enough money or have enough credit card room to even dream of taking in a Formula 1 race in person in a place like Montreal or a race of Champ Car, Indy Car’s successor held in places like Toronto, Cleveland or Detroit.

Adulthood offered more of the same. I continued righteous denial of self, abstaining from a sinful TV or cable subscription before and after marriage. The expense of a home purchase and its necessary repairs and improvements served to keep any in person dreams of F1 fairies dancing in my head unfulfilled. This pattern repeated annually until we discovered our “precious little church” was a cult rife with abuse and left.

After battling variable over the air signal strength from our local broadcasters, my wife and I discussed biting the bullet and getting a cable package. I compared them, and decided on one carried over high speed internet that included the channels we’d use most. One of those carries Formula 1 races live here in the states.

About two weeks ago, Formula 1 had its season opener. The Australian Gran Prix at Melbourne took place in the wee hours of the morning here but I didn’t care. I sat up and watched the pre-race interviews, the prognostications of race outcomes and finally it was time. Rain was pouring over the track as drivers and teams decided whether to use intermediate or full wet tread tires. They made their decisions after a few warm up laps and then lined up by their pole position results. The five lights glowed red one by one in succession as the cars roared to life, screaming as the drivers depressed accelerators and put engines under load. After a few moments, the lights went dark and race announcer David Croft yelled his signature call, “Lights out and away we go!!”

The race was hairy with quite a few crashes. The announcers explained that Melbourne is a temporary track, and the prior races held on it and the painted lines for guidance left residue that make the racing surface slick and tricky in the rain. One race team principal described it like driving on ice. I watched every second of it including restarts, passes, crashes, debris removal and miraculous saves. It was glorious! That night into early morning, the kid trying to recreate automotive drama by imagination, the younger man who couldn't afford to attend live and the old man whose religion told him and the younger man that God would be mad if they had TV and cable service watched from lights out to checkered flag. All three of us were beaming from ear to ear.