On racing a Porsche

The set up

Era: sometime in the 80's.
Time: approx 3am.
Location: Detroit, MI 8 mile and Gratiot heading North.

A Porsche 911 Carrera pulls up beside me an invites a race. I am in a 71 Cutlass, Van Halen blasting from my ridiculously awesome speaker system....mullet just sitting there being a cool 80's mullet destined to be one silly hairstyle any second but in the moment it was cool....uhm, maybe you had to be there. :)

Anyway, the way it works is a car pulls up beside you, guns it a little and inches about 3" ahead of you and waits for your response. If you don't do anything when the light turns green he will peel out. You get to go back to doing nothing after calling him a jackass.

But if you pull up even 0.5" it's on.

I'm making the decision on what to do at the same time I am pulling up 1" ahead of him. I already know I'm beat by the way but it's not that easy. For one thing was that I was sitting in Detroit muscle....in Detroit and as such was obligated to to my best into a loosing proposition, it just had to be done. That and some other things...

Light turns green off we go. Long about 90 MPH I was pretty excited that I was able to hold his rear wheel At about 95 or so I started to catch him and when we got window to window he smiled a BIG smile at me, tipped his head a little and just like that POOF...he hit it and left me standing still like I was in a VW bug the whole time. He was just letting me buy into it a little is all.


Era: the present
Time 11:30 AM
Location in the kitchen of an endurance athlete athlete trainer/coach Shaun Taylor.

We are getting ready to get into the coffee of the day when he slides me a scrambled egg wrapped in a multi-grain tortilla. A few sprinkles of hot sauce and I am digging it because all I've eaten so far was a scoop of Whey protein and 4oz of milk. I have no idea where this is heading....

After 2 nice small milk espressi (is that right)? He goes for Vietnamese iced over some experimental double cream milk and as he slides one across the table to me he guns the engine and pulls the 911 Carrera a few inches ahead of me. "I'm going to work out in a little while you are welcome to come if you want". I have instant recognition but start trying to stall..when are you thinking about going I say and immediately it was pretty sad...I don't have a 71 Cutlass even right now, I am rocking a station wagon of some sort at best in this race....but high end supplements are coming off the shelf and when a dose of JP8 goes down the hatch my fate is sealed... help.

I could tell you the play by play but I won't. I developed a philosophy a while back when I was doing some seriously hard shit that if anybody wanted to see what it was about they would have to pay the price to see it first hand (just like I was doing) and so now this is my deal. Some things you have to do in order to know and everything else is a disservice to the doers of the stuff. The gist of it is we were doing things that required you to balance, stabilize, lift, move, twist, concentrate, and re-balance and stabilize the entire time or else you would fall down and bust your ass in a spectacular fashion.

So I tried to hold his back wheel as best I could but I know it was the Carrera all over again....damn fast cars. ;)

I'm not sure what the point of all this is other than to say that sometimes you have to get in a race even if you know you are outgunned. You have to get up to 95 MPH in Detroit blowing lights like you can't possibly get hit or pulled over in order to see that you won't. Sometimes you have to see the Porsche pull away with ease...you have to see it in real time because just knowing the Carerra is fast is too generic. You have to get in that race and get a taste of how fast it really is so that you can make informed decisions about future races. Maybe you work on your car a little and go driving a few weeks later at 3 AM to see if you can find him, or maybe you don't move next time...what do you do? You just can't know if you never take a race you knew you couldn't win before you ever took it.

20 something years ago I raced a guy in a Carrera that slowed down to let me keep up a little and show me what Detroit looks like at 95 MPH. Last weekend an athlete slowed down to let me play along a little (I like to pretend it was just a smidge) to see what that type of race looks like.

Thanks dudes!