IRWINDALE, Calif. – I sign a waiver, strap on a helmet and step toward my first rally car ride.
The tires are caked in mud and the car is sprinkled with dust. It’s bright orange and littered with sponsored stickers. Rally cars don’t go quite as fast as stock cars, but they race nfl jerseys over gravel and under any weather. The cars are four-wheel drive and built to handle all elements.
I climb in over the roll bar and fasten myself to a seat with four buckles. The floorboard is metal cut like swiss cheese, and a fire extinguisher is stuffed beneath my seat. Thankfully, the doors lock and the windows are bolted shut. The dashboard looks like the cockpit of a plane, covered with switches and gears and levers. One sticker reads “don’t slow down.”
The driver, Andrew Comrie-Picard, is tall but climbs in the car comfortably and casually. His helmet covers his long brown hair and scruffy beard. He’s the top driver in North America and is competing for the fifth time in the X Games on Saturday, but he’s only taken passengers along a few times. He tells me to raise my hand if I start to feel sick or scared. Then he explains to me this car he built by hand. I try my best to understand. The parts are worth a hundred grand. The time and labor he put into it doubles its value.
He’s about to drive it on a makeshift track built just last week – a track on which he’s had a total of two practice laps. And I’m strapped in right next to him.
The track is dusty, so we wait a moment as a truck with sprinklers turns the gravel into mud. All the while, Andrew revs the engine and readies for what I’ll later find out is called a “launch control start,” in which he revs his engine to build a boost before dumping the clutch and propelling his car forward.
He dumps the clutch. Off we go.
________________________________________
Andrew was born to be a rally car racer, but he was raised to be so much more.
His parents were racers. Forty-five years ago, his mom and some of her friends set out hay stacks on a frozen pond, and hell, they just started ice racing. She and her friends formed a club and continued racing for years. His dad was a rally car racer, but it was different back then – the courses were longer and not quite as quick. “I wish I had been born later,” says his mom, Ellen. “I would love to be doing what Andrew is doing now.”
He grew up on a 40-acre wheat farm and horse ranch in Alberta, Canada. He was surrounded by earth – dirt and mud and trees and crops – and learned to love them all. He also loved to make stuff – and to take stuff apart. When he was in elementary school, his mother came home to find that Andrew had dismantled all the locks in the house. She gave him a look, and he put them back in place.
“Growing up in the country, on the farm, it gives you a couple of things,” Andrew says. “First off, it gives you a lot of free time. It also separates you from any facilities. You have to figure everything out on your own, which makes you look at things in a different way. It makes you innovative and resourceful.”
Before long, he was taking apart tractor engines and sneaking behind whatever wheel he could see over. When he was 8, he blew across the backyard in a snowmobile. By 10, he’d gotten a dirt bike from relatives – against the wishes of his mother – and constructed a ramp in the woods behind the house for it. At 12, he was drifting the family’s pickup truck through their pasture.
The cops caught him and dragged him to the door to tell his parents “to keep an eye on him,” but they didn’t give him a ticket. The chief of police’s son gave Andrew piano lessons.
“He seemed to be born on wheels,” Ellen says, “rather than on two legs.”
His mom hatched a plan to balance Andrew’s mechanical mind and wild heart. She wanted him to compete with remote-control cars, so she bought him one from Radio Shack. He took it apart, put it back together and came back to her a few minutes later. “You know,” he told her, “this isn’t very well built.” He became the fifth-best remote control racer in the world by the time he was a teenager.
His mother could see this race Andrew was already embarking on, that his life was taking a launch control start toward becoming a driver. But she didn’t want the sport to define him. She sat him down and talked about one of Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey his heroes, Wayne Gretzky. The NHL star was famous and successful, but would only be remembered as a hockey star. Ellen, a law professor who valued education, wanted more for her son.
And even young Andrew, consumed by cars, didn’t believe that racing could ever be a career choice. So he delayed his driving career. For 10 years.
He started at the University of Toronto and ended, five degrees later, at Oxford University in England. He started with a choral scholarship (he was a baritone), but much of his work explored human behavior, which, he says, has helped him race. He was also a competitive rower. And wrote plays. And acted in them. And he ran the wine society. Sometimes still he goes to the south of France to pick grapes.
He’s a Renaissance man hidden in a rally car.
________________________________________
Back in the car, the engine screams and sends us soaring down the first 50 yards of the track.
He spins the car 180 degrees around safety cones. The back tires drift as we splash through a puddle and climb up a hill and take a turn toward the blind corner. He lets the car drift again, the bumper less than a foot from the right wall I think we’re going to slam into. Before I know it, the car isn’t facing the wall, it’s parallel to it and Andrew is throttling it down the straightaway.
The car sways back and forth at his will, coming within feet of photographers who are frantically trying to focus their cameras and increase their shutter speeds to capture him.
Can anything ever capture Andrew?
The five college degrees could not. The extracurricular activities could not. He got his first taste of rally car racing – after years of dabbling in other motorsports – at the Monte Carlo Historique in France. He and his friends Leigh and Michael bought three beatup Volvos on the cheap and spent their nights and weekends working in an old barn to create one usable car out of the parts from all three. Then the first night they took it into London, it was stolen. They had no insurance, so they were forced to settle for a cheaper car that they hadn’t put any heart into. But the new car was more robust and ready for the race.
“We thought it would be this polite, gentleman’s race,” Leigh says, “but it was a full-out road race.”
They rode in style. Riding with three passengers isn’t illegal, but it’s highly unusual because it adds more weight to the car. One man drove, one man navigated, and one man functioned as the hospitality manager in the back, serving cappuccinos and selecting the music. They even had their ski equipment in the trunk for another adventure after the race.
Andrew didn’t drive – even though he was the best driver – because he was the best navigator. The trio won its class.
“I knew right away that I’d be good at it,” he says. “It was the most natural thing in the world.”
After college, Andrew and Leigh spent a year touring Europe and living in an old VW van. “He always seems to have the right the car for the right phases of his life,” Leigh says.
He moved back to Canada and got a summer law job in Toronto. With his first paycheck, he bought an ex-factory 1995 Lada Samara for $2,000.
He climbed the corporate ladder as an entertainment lawyer in New York. His income was impressive and steady. But it became clear that this wasn’t the right career for him. “I was sort of sorry to see him go into law,” Ellen says. The client list didn’t impress him, and the money was only important for his car collection. With every upgrade in pay, he upgraded his wheels. He started to rally again on weekends.
As if practicing law wasn’t enough of Super Bowl XLIV jersey a grind, he hardly slept on weekends. One time, he flew out of New York on Friday to British Columbia for a race. When he arrived, his car’s engine was broken so he and his crew worked all Friday night to replace it, but the replacement didn’t fit properly. So they stayed up all night again, raced on Sunday, flew back to New York and walked back into the office on Monday morning.
“You can’t suppress that stuff that you really wanna do,” he says. “I found little ways to get back into racing.”
After six years, he joined the Manhattan choir. In some strange way, changing out of his three-piece suit and into a choir robe transformed him. He was ready to live the steady life. Then one Friday afternoon, a big entertainment company called and announced a new deal with his law firm. All the senior associates – Andrew among them – went out for dinner and drinks. It was the only time they could celebrate because the rest of their weekend would be spent working.
Andrew had a thought that night, that even if he became a partner, he still wouldn’t be pleased with his life.
So he did what almost everyone dreams of but never has the nerve to do: He walked into his boss’s office and quit. He looked out the 31st-floor window for the last time and took a leap of faith.
________________________________________
I pick up my stomach where I left it at the start and am ready to watch Andrew more closely on the second try.
There’s never a moment where he looks the slightest bit concerned. His hands are all over the car – flipping levers and switching gears. His eyes dart among the many monitors flashing critical information for our safety. And of football jerseys course, he’s watching the road.
“He’s got a gift in that way – he can focus,” Ellen says. “The more pressure, the more calm he gets.”
It’s a combination of instincts and science. He knows this car like he knows his own body. He knows what it can handle and what it can’t, and how it will respond in almost any situation.
We come around that blind corner again, and I trust him more this time – but it’s still startling. He slams the brakes and the ride is finished.
“Man, sorry it was so slippery,” he says to me. “We could have gone a lot faster.”
没有评论:
发表评论