Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008 - (Page 32)

Who wouldn’t want to be a Formula One champion, taking the pole at Monte Carlo, celebrating at the casino, thinking nothing of your losses because you make $50,000,000 a year? You wake from a night of champagne bubble sex, and are picked up in a helicopter, which takes you to a racetrack in the forest. There lies a Ferrari, its carbon fibre safety cell glistening red, light on its tires, propelled by a small, 2.4 liter engine, spinning to 19,000 rpm, and 750 horsepower. The Ferrari is like a fighter jet with the wings on upside down, pushing it into the ground, holding the tires to the asphalt during 5g turns. Surrounding the car is your $400,000,000 a year team. Your job is to drive these cars at the edge of their ability, no more, no less. And it is a fun job, with great appeal, considering the cubicled options. Racing is a sport for rich boys, like polo, because the path to a Formula One championship is expensive. Most racers start young, around ten years old, and race shifter go-karts that corner so hard the kids have to wear special padding to prevent bruising their ribs. After karts, there are a series of underclasses which must be stepladdered. Lower priced series like Formula Ford cost about $80,000 a season. Formula Mazda costs $300,000 a season. It is sort of like your kid telling you that he wants to be a movie star – and the acting lessons cost hundreds of thousands a year. But if I were a rich parent I would just be thankful that my son didn’t want to chew tobacky, and drive big, crude cars in a circle. That would be a good tweak if you were the black sheep of a mannered Pacific Heights family; drop out of Stanford and race NASCAR. Before little Mario goes road racing, he must get his racing license. And if he is in the United States, he will most likely get one from Skip Barber or Jim Russell racing schools. I attended a one day racing school at Skip Barber at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Monterey. It was clearing from a drizzle the morning I arrived at the oak studded racetrack, which dips and crests along the spine of a small mountain range. I welcomed the rain, because it would allow me to explore the limits of the race car at less deadly speeds. A minority of the class were rich kids on their way to Formula One. But most of the students were professionals or business owners who wanted to lap a single-seat, open-wheeled race car around Laguna Seca. The class cost $1500 for the day, half of which was spent in a race car, the other half sliding production Mazdas around orange cones. First we suited up in Nomex fireproof racing suits and gathered in a classroom. Andrew Shoen, our chief instructor, worked the blackboard, and explained the physics of cornering. We were led to the Formula Skip Barber race cars, 1100 pounds and 150 horsepower: sans wings and shod with street tires in order to lower the cornering speeds. I wiggled down into a fuselage barely wider than my body, and lay down into a hard plastic seat. Before me were a small black steering wheel, a tachometer and a four-speed gearbox. I started the engine and the whole car vibrated, metal on metal. The four speed gearbox felt bolt-like in action, like a pre-64 Winchester. The clutch was light and smooth. A Mazda 3 sedan, driven by an instructor, paced the laps. At first, I rode in one of the pace cars with two other students. The instructor led the pack along the proper racing line, holding the steering wheel in one hard, checking his cell phone with the other, perfectly in control, as students spun out their race cars trying to keep up. Once out on the track in my own blue beauty, the Formula car felt like a large, fast, four speed go-kart. It surged forward, its light body easy to motivate. Braking compressed me against the harness, which also held me in place during cornering. Unlike the days of skinny tires and loose rear ends swinging gently, these cars stick and stick and stick until they let go. There is no drifting through corners, feeding in opposite lock. During the early, wet laps the rear end could snap out of line and was hard to catch with the limited steering lock. But once the track dried the limits of the car approached more gradually, and were signaled with squeal. As I grew more comfortable with the car my distance to the pace car shrunk until I became a frustrated tailgater. So I signed up for the three day racing school. I want to spend eight hours a day lapping the Formula car and get my racing license. Because maybe then I will be able to figure out this whole champagne bubble sex thing. 32 coastaltraveler spring

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Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008 Contents Coastal Connoisseur Coastal Picks Coastal Scenario Coastal Art Coastal Driver Coastal Roadkill Coastal Eco Coastal Hotel Coastal Desert San Diego La Jolla Laguna Beach Malibu Santa Barbara San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station Fairfax Inverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast

Coastal Traveler - Spring 2008

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