Storytime: How It Began

Learning to breathe and drive (kinda the same thing).

My parents didnʻt send me to a training program to learn to breathe. Learning to drive was no different. It seemed instinctual. I can still picture myself inhaling that first big gasp of air, and taking that first big inhalationof driving. The driving gasp involved the clutch pedal, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

From the moment I attended my first race at the naïve age of five, driving captivated me. It didn’t matter where I was or who I was with, I’d study driving. And it didn’t matter what kind of driving it was, either. Whether I was watching racing or simply observing a driver loping along in an old Buick next to us on the road, I’d scrutinize it like a starving cat studying every move of an unsuspecting mouse. That someone could combine the use of the steering wheel, gas pedal, gear lever, clutch pedal, and brakes in a single exquisite dance that resulted in quick and flowing motions forward simply mesmerized me.

Okay, for most drivers, that dance is more like the herky-jerkiness seen in video of an old punk rock concert. But for a rare few, like Helio Castroneves, driving was like Fred Astaire’s dancing. It looked effortless, the exercising of thousands of subtle skills all at once with the deftness of a George Martin production and the spot-on timing of a Cirque du Soleil performance.

Recognizing the difference between the gifted and not-so-gifted driver was something I could do by the age of six or seven, and it triggered my own inner driver.

Well before my first moment behind the wheel, I could see myself driving. I could feel and hear it. And when I finally did start, it felt as though I’d been doing it forever, just like breathing. It came so naturally that I’m sure it was all my intense observation and visualization that made it that way.

At eight years old, I would imagine myself driving the family Ford Galaxie. With the car parked in the driveway, I’d sit behind the wheel and drive to my grandparent’s house, thirty miles away—in my mind. I’d smoothly accelerate away from the traffic lights, use the turn signals, and then come to the very best part: going around corners. I loved corners! I saw myself as a cross between an Indy 500 champion and a chauffeur. I drove thousands of miles before ever turning an actual key to start the engine.

For many teens, learning to drive is a big deal. It’s a huge moment. Getting a license means freedom. And learning to drive marks a point in time, a rite of passage. If you ask a person when they learned to drive, they’ll often name a specific time, an age, a location. I didn’t experience that. Formal driver training? Nope. Only in my mind.

***

My most formal driver training occurred when I was ten years old. My teacher? Mitch, my thirteen-year-old brother. Our vehicle of choice? Dad’s 1948 Ford pickup truck, painted red and blue for the colors of his Chevron gas station. The scene of the crime? Our driveway, which was no more than forty feet long.

Not my Dad’s real truck, but the closest I could find to what it kinda looked like. And yes, it does resemble Tow Mater.

For this first lesson, the truck is sitting at the head of the driveway, right on the edge of the street, where Mitch has stopped it for me. The engine purring as smoothly as any flathead Ford has ever idled. I’d supervised its rebuilding just months before, cleaning parts to prepare for Dad to reassemble.

I’m sitting on the front edge of this old pickup’s big bench seat, feeling the rough edges of its cracked, worn black leather prickling through my thin pants. I can barely see under the top of the huge three-spoke steering wheel and over the dashboard. Looking around, I can see the sky well enough, but not much of the driveway in front of me. The truck’s floor is bare metal, shiny and worn just below the gas, brake, and clutch pedals, but still its original black color elsewhere.

I place my right foot on the gas pedal, which is just a thin, shiny metal rod, as the actual pedal broke off long ago and my dad never bothered to replace it (something about a mechanic’s car always being the last to get fixed). Meanwhile, my left foot is pushing with all its might down on the clutch pedal. I’m aware that my skinny ten-year-old leg is helplessly quivering, either from the effort to depress the clutch, my mounting nervousness, or both.

I grip the hard, thin, black plastic of the steering wheel, which is about the size of a hula hoop. My trusty teacher Mitch is sitting next to me on the seat. The transmission is in first gear, its long handle protruding from the floor, pushed somewhere forward and to the left.

An experienced driver at the ripe old age of thirteen (I’ve never asked how he learned to drive, let alone become an instructor), Mitch provides the only instructions he knows: “Push down on the gas pedal and take your foot off the clutch.”

This is where the “gasp” part comes in. The next thing I know we’re heading straight for the shrubs at the front end of the driveway…I’d taken my foot off the clutch, all right! Straight off, with the leisurely speed of a jack-in-the-box’s head tasting freedom. It seems Mitch had neglected to suggest taking my foot off the clutch slowly. And I didn’t ask.

Gasp.

There is something good about instincts: They work instinctively. My instinct was to take my foot off the gas pedal and step on the brake. Hard. That may have come from years of intensely studying drivers. We lurched to a stop with the bobbing nose of the truck just a foot or two into the shrubs.

For lesson number two, I learned how to restart the engine, shift into reverse gear, and s-l-o-w-l-y release the clutch pedal, backing up the driveway to the edge of the street. Lesson number three had us heading toward the shrubs again, with some amount of control. The lessons continued, me driving the truck back and forth over that forty-foot driveway for what could have been hours but seemed like only minutes. I could have kept doing it forever. We covered lessons one through ninety-eight that day, and I did get pretty good at starting and stopping.

While going up and down the driveway quickly became very natural to me, it also set fire to something deep inside, something that still burns today: the sense of challenge and control when manipulating and matching the gas, brake, and clutch pedals and steering wheel to smoothly, efficiently, and quickly drive a vehicle. It is something that I will never, ever perfect, but always strive to get better at. I love dancing with a car.

***

The next phase of my driver training began a few weeks later when I started piloting the old truck ‘round and ‘round Dad’s gas station. I could even get it into a swift third gear in the lot circling the building. This was back in the day before self-serve gas stations, so every time I passed the pumps, it was ding, ding—over the hose that rung the bell inside to let Dad know that someone was wanting gas pumped. How he put up with that I’ll never know. Ding, ding.

A few times through the years, Mitch and I talked Dad into taking us to the nearby go-kart track. When I was about nine or ten, for Christmas I got a book all about racing in England; one of the chapters was about the line a race driver uses through a corner. The book even had an illustration of the Silverstone circuit with a line drawn describing the path that a racer would drive to turn the fastest lap time.

After reading that chapter hundreds of times and committing those curving arcs to memory, I’d practice my line around the go-kart track until I was faster than everyone else. I’d also test different lines on my bike off the street and into our driveway. I’d even think about the line as I circled Dad’s Chevron in the truck, apexing the back corner of the building and accelerating past the pumps. Ding, ding.

The morning of the day I went to take my driver’s license test, Dad suggested I try parallel parking. This was the only formal driver training he provided. We knew that parallel parking was one of the death-defying and lifesaving maneuvers I’d be tested on, so I tried it once. No problem. So off we went and a few hours later I came home with a piece of paper saying I was qualified to drive. It was anticlimactic, like getting a license to breathe.

Mom said I was always obsessed with cars and the act of making them move. I continued to read everything I could get my hands and eyes on that had anything to do with driving. I’d go out and drive for three or four hours each day, practicing meshing together the steering wheel, pedals, and gear shifter. I’d imagine that someone was sitting next to me, and my goal would be that my passenger would never feel when one movement of the wheel or pedal began or ended—seamless was my objective. I was learning to do that dance with the car. Just like someone who practices breathing as part of meditation, I practiced driving. I got good.

Driving is my breathing. It’s what makes (and keeps) me alive.