Gamers recall Parthunaax’s great conundrum in Skyrim: “What is better? To be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?” Like the fictitious dragon, I faced a transitional period. The split between living as a wannabe street racer with my head in the clouds, and eventually coming back down to Earth.
I always wanted to be a racecar driver. How original of me, right? What other dream job was there for a child raised on Gran Turismo? But I was drilled into believing any form of motorsports, as a hobby or a career, was prohibitively expensive unobtanium. So, I did what I could when I got my license. I did really stupid things.
Our high school clique took to our nearby mountain, a mere 20 minutes from the neighborhood, like a woeful caricature of the Akina Speed Stars. Our clapped-out econoboxes’ bargain-bin all-season tires howled in agony as friends yapped about moves they saw in Initial D. We were dumb teenagers looking for escapism and tasting that mythic freedom of driving for the first time. A sentiment that grew stronger as we grew up, bought faster cars, and became faster drivers.
On a group drive years ago, a good friend and I bolted from the convoy in our new (to us) Ford Mustangs, my S197 V6 with its smorgasborg of handling goodies and his S550 GT. We were clamoring to stretch our legs on the road we had become all too familiar with, where we both grew up. Suspecting something went wrong when the convoy vanished, we pulled off two-thirds of the way up the road, where it took five minutes for the next car to appear.
We punk kids did oxymoronically adhere to some semblance of an honor code: Never cross the double-yellow, and no hooliganism in residential or city streets. We may have been idiots, but not complete menaces. But these rules started to ring louder as we grew older.
By my mid-twenties, my frontal cortex decided enough was enough, and that life was better spent on the road than behind bars. Maturing friends and automotive content creators whom I admired pointed out where we delinquents should’ve looked in our younger years: grassroots motorsports.
Following a military deployment to northern Africa, I found myself with funds to enjoy hoonage without fearing the state trooper. I scrounged up some dough and embarked on my first event at Utah Motorsports Campus as part of a grand road trip to visit friends in the area. The bug bit me instantly, exacerbated by gigs covering racing events when I began my career as an automotive journalist for a few outlets.
Suddenly, racing felt tangible. I didn’t have to be the delinquent anymore. My Mustang has since traded hands with another young enthusiast, so I could start chasing lap times in my track-built Subaru BRZ. However, even after several track days and a round of time attack, I can still look back on those formative years and smile.
Years after those first backroad battles, I had chances to revisit the mountain we played cat-and-mouse on. Once, as part of a group drive to celebrate one’s birthday, and another was running solo. Both times, I let loose a smidge, my BRZ’s modified flat-four growling its way to 7,600rpm ceiling as the subtle g-forces in each corner lit my body aflame and had my soul sing. Ultimately, my pace had fallen a ways off. Same with my friends. By now, we’ve realized we’ve grown up, and the wannabe Speed Stars days are over.
Do I condone what we did? Absolutely not. Don’t ever gamble with your luck, your life, and your clean driving record as I did, because all it takes is for that luck to run out once. But I definitely grew as a driver and a person experiencing it all. I made my choices and learned from them, the good and the bad. And here I stand today, doing track prep for the next time attack, ready to test my mettle carving apexes with the skills my kid self learned carving mountains.
