Last Christmas, my parents got me a gift certificate for the Richard Petty Driving Experience, which entitled me to take 8 laps around any NASCAR track in the country in a real life stock car. Understanding and appreciating my newfound love for NASCAR, my parents knew that this would be the perfect gift, topping my piss-your-pants excitement on Christmas Day in 1988, when I received the highly-coveted Super Mario Bros. 2 for Nintendo 64.
For most of the summer, I had kind of jerked around when it came to picking the track I wanted to race and choosing my date. At first, I wanted to head down to Atlanta Motor Speedway and run on the hometown track of my favorite driver, Reed Sorenson. I had pretty much cashed in all of my chips for a trip to Atlanta a few months earlier, as I convinced my wife, 6 months pregnant at the time, that we should really go see a race in Atlanta and treat ourselves to a weekend getaway. When I mentioned going to Atlanta for my driving experience to a friend and fellow NASCAR fan, he seemed shocked that I simply wouldn't go up the street to Lowe's Motor Speedway, "The Beast of the Southeast!" he declared several times. That settled it. I was going to tame The Beast of the Southeast, preferably without a load in my pants.
I set my date for Friday morning, August 22nd, with Friday being the new start to my weekends these days. I couldn't have asked for a better day weather-wise, particularly given the brutal heat wave and drought we endured last year at this time. A nice cool breeze, 70 degrees, and not a cloud in the sky. I arrived at the track a half an hour early, at 7:30 a.m., and was surprised to see I was the first in my class to arrive. I took a picture of the sign that read "Drive a Race Car Here" and sent it to my boss who immediately responded with a text that read, "Gentleman, Start Your Engine! Have a blast!" A cool boss, imagine that.
My first order of business was to get fitted for my firesuit, amazing. But holy smokes, it didn't take long for me to work up a sweat under that thing, and a number of my classmates later commented in the day what it must be like to be in that firesuit for the better part of 4 hours on race day, doing 200 MPH around a concrete track. Nuts. I gotta say, I was nervous as hell for my ride and just wanted to get out there. It had been several years since I had driven a stick shift, so I was a little worried about how well my stick skills would come back to me as I rolled down pit row behind the wheel of a 600+ horsepower machine that made my 2001 Honda Civic look like a matchbox car.
The instructors came out at 8:00 a.m. sharp, introduced themselves and made a few jokes to loosen people up and at the same time get them pumped up for their experience. One of the instructors started going around the room and asked people who their favorite driver was. Jeff Gordon. Tony Stewart. Jimmie Johnson. He had some pretty funny remarks to say about each driver, all good-natured, then scanned the room and pointed to me. "What about you?" he asked. "Reed Sorenson," I shot back proudly, without hesitation. Talk about a gay guy walking into a biker bar with the music on the juke box coming to a screeching halt and the earth just about stop spinning on its axis. "Oh yeah," he said, "I see the little bullseye there on your hat." I wanted to ask him if it was the first time he had ever heard someone declare the driver of the #41 Target Dodge as their favorite driver during the entire time he has been an instructor with the school, but he wanted to keep the conversation going and asked what the latest word on Reed's status for 2009 was. "I hear there is a 3-year deal on the table but he hasn't signed it yet," speaking as if I had just left a meeting with the higher-up executives at Chip Ganassi Racing that morning and was sharing top secret information that only a select few had access to. "Is he thinking he's too good to sign it?" the instructor asked. "I sure hope that's not what he's thinking, this Target hat he signed won't be worth as much next year if he doesn't." Having garnered a few chuckles from the class and a smile from this instructor, I ended things on a high note, having represented Reed Nation proudly.
We broke off into groups of about 5 and were assigned an instructor. Each small group went through a different part of that morning's instruction: in-car gages and operation, safety, the line we needed to follow on the track, etc. Our group was the first to hop in a passenger van and take a lap around the track, learning where we needed to hit the gas and where to let off, and the particular line they wanted us to follow when we got out there. Everyone in my group agreed that there was little chance we were going to retain all of this information, but I tried to remember as much as I could. Plus, they couldn't have made things much easier for us, as a variety of cones were placed at certain intervals around the track. Two cones = gas, one cone = no gas. I mean, come on.
The safety instructions put me on the verge of my first truly nervous moment, as we were taught how to unleash the emergency foam from inside the car should a fire break out. You had to pull this blue strap then yank this red pole, and foam was "supposed" to fill up the entire inside of the car. "Hey, stuff happens," our instructor matter-of-factly said. At that point, I wondered just how much "stuff" had happened over the years with the Richard Petty Driving Experience. Anyone every blow a tire? Just blow up? Either way, I was at the point of no return and wanted to get things fired up.
It was pretty cool when they rolled the different cars down pit road, the same cars that I see on TV every single weekend during the races and the same cars that each of us would be driving that morning. There was the #9 Budweiser Dodge, the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet, as well as some Nationwide Series cars that included my ride, the #5 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet, which included Dale Jr.'s signature right above the opening to the driver's side of the car. As it turned out, I would be the only person driving this car, and I'm not sure why, but it was pretty damn sweet. Everyone was given a little memory card that was on an elastic wrist band, witch each card individually numbered. Before we went on our ride, we gave this card to one of the employees who plugged it into a computer so that it matched up our lap times and in-car DVD recording with the correct driver.
My number was fairly high, 24 or something, so it was going to be a wait before it was my turn to get on the track. There was a corporate group there of about 12 or so, in town for some weekend conference. They had a day to kill in the area, and what better thing to do when you're in Charlotte than to go to the race track. A few guys my age were there, along with a younger kid who couldn't have been more than a junior in high school. Each and every person that exited the car after his or her respective run was purely exhilarated, beaming from ear to ear. A handful of people stalled their cars leaving pit row, but the instructors were right by each car and helped keep it rolling; one person, I later found out, was instructed to put the car into 4th gear from 1st gear, the cheater's version of getting the car going. When they called my name and it was time for me to hop into my ride, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach akin to the first time I got called down to the principal's office in first grade. Although this time, I knew I was in for something good, something amazing. I was strapped into the seat of the car with some assistance from one of the instructors, and while most people characterize seatbelts and various restraining apparatuses as either "tight" or "loose" or "snug," my particular setup was airtight. I could not move anything except my arms and legs. As my car fired up, there was no more time to focus on the high line or the blue strap or this gage or that gage; all I could focus on at that particular moment was getting this machine into first gear, then to second gear at approximately 4500 RPM's, then who knows after that. I eased the car into first gear, remarkably smoothly given the layoff from my last time driving a standard. I rolled down pit road and soon realized I was reaching the 4500 RPM mark and shifted into second gear. It was a smooth transition, and with just a hundred feet or so left before I exited pit road, there was no going back. I didn't want to go back.
As I pit road and made my first of several left turns (insert NASCAR joke here), I quickly shifted to third gear then pushed the gas pedal closer and closer to the floor of the car. The instructor in front of me, who we were taught to follow around the track in order to driver the proper line and speed, began to pull away. I put the car into fourth gear and it was go time. The next time I would shift would be heading down pit row at the conclusion of my experience, putting the car into neutral from fourth gear. This would also be the next time I would hit my brakes.
It's difficult to describe the feeling of flying around a track at 144 MPH, just you and your thoughts and fears riding shotgun, gusts of wind and various debris blowing through the car at various points throughout the ride. "Watch what you say out there," we were instructed earlier in the day, as an in-car recording of our experience would pick up everything we muttered or screamed during the ride. I ran afoul of this rule at least a dozen times, in particular on a couple of occasions when I felt the car slide away from me and head increasingly closer to "the wall." The other times I was either laughing or screaming or yelling or talking to an imaginary crew chief and asking things like, "Where's the 41?" in reference to my favorite driver. I pulled right up on the tail of my instructor a couple of times and got the hand wave to back off a bit, but I continued to bury it. "Buried it," I later told my wife that day when she asked me how I did. Buried it. The gas pedal went down and I buried it. Had I pushed any harder I would have been dangerously close to putting the pedal through the floor of the car and finishing my ride looking like Fred Flinstone frantically pedaling the ground. And for anyone who knows the dimensions of Lowe's Motor Speedway or most speedways for that matter, the absolute best part was heading into turn 3, letting off the gas ever so slightly going into turn 4, then just burying it coming off the 24-degree banking and blowing down the front stretch as if I was fired out of a cannon or a slingshot, gunning by the grandstands to my right and pit road to my left, hitting my marks and hugging the track with surprising precision. Buried it. Absolutely, positively, buried it.
As I rolled down pit road and my car came to a stop, I slid out of the car where a couple of instructors helped walked me over to the staging area, as they did with each driver. "Fastest in the class," the lead instructor told me. "144 miles per hour, nice job." I was so thrilled. I went to the merchandise trailer, purchased my photo and the DVD of my ride, then headed to the ticket window to purchase my tickets for the Bank of America 500 in October. I'll never look at that track the same way again, but I'm not sure I'll look at myself the same way, either.
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