Vroom, Vroom

Mike, my nieces fiancé, invited me to join him for some Marlboro cigarette promotion where you get to ride around in an IROC car with a professional driver around the Michigan International Speedway. I accepted the invitation immediately, not because I’m a race fan at all, but for two reasons. First of all because I never go out. Seriously, I spend, easily, six out of seven evenings a week sitting in this here chair and watching television, messing around on the computer or writing.

The second reason, and this is exactly what I meant in the previous post, was that I figured it would give me something to write about. I figured I’d start the essay a week or so before the event and kind of relay the excitement and nerves I was feeling leading up to the event. So I waited, and waited but the nerves never came. Don’t get me wrong, I was looking forward to it but I thought I’d get that feeling I get every time I go out to do something with others. The feeling that I would start looking for reasons to bail out of whatever I might be doing that might cause me to enjoy myself. Those reasons never came.

This was the first time I can remember that I actually allowed myself to have fun. I wasn’t worried about what I looked like to others. I wasn’t concerned with what others thought. I just plain didn’t care. There wasn’t any time during the entire three hours we were there that I felt nervous. I realize that during normal situations nobody would ever know that I’m all abuzz inside but I am. Not this time though. It was almost disappointing, like I was missing part of me. Almost a numb feeling. Different.

When we got there it was rather odd to me. Being sponsored by a tobacco company even the parking attendants had Marlboro jackets and hats. Once we showed our identification to get in and got to a parking space a guy came up to give us some rules that we’d already heard from the other folks as we pulled in. he said to make sure that we had our picture ID and to not forget our cigarettes as smoking was permitted inside. I don’t smoke cigarettes and thought the statement encouraging us to “make sure you bring them” was humorous.

They put us in our suits that were basically walk around saunas and fitted us for helmets. We then went to a tent that had a couple example cars in it and a number of coolers with water and “PowerAde” to keep us hydrated. There were also snacks of nutrition bars and high carb stuff. This was the case for every new section we went to. Very well thought out.

When it came time for the first part of our speedway experience we were led out to the main raceway and each put into a car with a professional driver. I was a bit nervous about getting in because we had to go in through the window and I’m not the most flexible of men. I surprised myself with my flexibility and was able to get in without much effort and away we went. They told us beforehand to give a thumbs up if we wanted go faster and down if it was too fast. They also told us a signal to use if we’d had enough but there was no way I was gonna use that.

I wasn’t quite sure when to start putting my thumb up so I waited until we got to what I thought was a normal speed during the first lap and out it up and held it there for the rest of the ride. It was a much smoother trip than I thought it would be. I felt the g-force holding me against the seat and got a true appreciation of how hard it would be to drive while feeling the push against you. We went around the track three times for a total of six miles and after we were through I asked the driver how fast we got up to and he told me we were right around 150 miles per hour. Pretty cool.

The next thing we did was get into these Mustangs and did what they call drifting. This was easily the highlight of the day for me. This was just going around a course and taking really tight curves at high speeds. We were slipping and sliding all over the place. Once again I had my thumb up the whole time and it was great. The driver had some thrash metal music going on and it fit quite well with what we were doing.

After that they fed us a pretty good meal and gave us the picture you see to the left. Cool thing about the picture is that when they took it the car wasn’t there. We were just standing in front of a blue screen. Anyway, we had a real good time and my urge to buy some chewing tobacco so I could feel at home with these people was overtaken by common sense. I didn’t see one person there with tobacco stains on their shirts.