Settling for Mediocrity: Part II
The saga continues...and concludes.
Read Settling for Mediocrity Part I
I arrived at night in the ski town of Mont Tremblant. My passenger seat was empty, save for an empty Clif Bar wrapper and the wrinkled inkjet pages scrawled with MapQuest's finest navigations. I could tell the pedestrians glancing through my windshield knew I didn't know where I was or where I was going. I could just tell. It was after 10pm and I was surprised at how busy the town was. I always forget that other people actually like to leave the house once in a while. It was a fool's hope to be invisible in a car with a cracked windshield, a dented quarter-panel, and New Jersey plates. I was hard on my little Integra.
Some watched me pass without looking, as one does in conversation between rounds of eye contact. I crawled along between stop signs looking for my turn. The light of the town faded as I left it far behind me. Normally, fear of the darkening path would lead my mind to wander into thoughts of getting stopped along the road somehow, overpowered and subdued by a burly man of the bush, and chopped into meaty chunks via off-season snowblower. But this was Canada. The worst they would do is offer me their worst maple syrup as a cruel joke, not knowing it was still better than what I could get at home. With warm Belgian waffles now dominating my subconscious, I saw my turn pass without a hint of a throttle lift. I slowed to initiate a U-turn without stopping, afraid my syrup-laden fantasies would prove an overestimate of Hoser hospitality.
The sound of a car coming up the gravel road coupled with the unfilled entry in his logbook stirred the owner of this remote Bed & Breakfast enough to turn on the light above the entrance door. Looking at the humble sign next to the humble side door, I opened the car door to the sobering understanding that a hotel and a Bed & Breakfast are not the same thing. A fact made only more real by the very real and clearly puzzled older couple who answered my knock on their door. Their puzzlement puzzled me, as I would have thought these kinds of things went with the territory of supplying accommodations for strangers for a living. But as this was my first exposure to the world of non-chain-hotel travel arrangements, my guesses are as follows: (1) They normally do not receive guests this late. By the time I relieved my overworked and underappreciated 1.8 liter 4 cylinder Honda engine for the night, she'd been revving through the gears and droning on the interstate for over 7 hours, cementing my arrival at a few minutes past 10:30pm. (2) They did not expect the face of what any reasonable person would perceive as an unaccompanied minor to be the only one standing at the door. Proving this hypothesis further, the husband even peeked over my right shoulder toward the parked cars to see if my parent or guardian was presently in tow. I regretted my decision to shoot first and ask questions later vis-a-vis booking this so-called non-chain-hotel the way people who think they want to commit suicide regret jumping from great and tragically unsurvivable heights, only to learn that their every problem had viable solutions except the problem they just caused: a terminally approaching meeting with the earth's surface. Luckily the moment passed, and with this awkward exchange of bludgeoned expectations behind us, they cordially invited me in.
The interior had the countenance of an old Norse lodge, with an expansive open atrium surrounding a stone hearth, an open staircase to one side that led up to the guest rooms, at the base of which was a long table reclaimed from what appeared to be a dining hall for Vikings. The polished onyx-colored planks making up the top looked to be cut straight from an ancient warship. The next morning I'd be eating sunny-side-up eggs over a square of lumber where the blood of one's enemies was spilled. Neat. They told me the breakfast hours and directed me to my room, and with the final occupant accounted for, we all called it a night.
For breakfast, along with the eggs and bacon, I was served a helping of reassurance that my choice of accommodations wasn't as outlandish as I thought. Two other drivers from my race group were also staying there. Both were in their forties and both had families, careers, and well-established lives. In other words, they had something to lose. This is only relevant to illustrate that they were there for fun while I was there on business. My presence was scientific. The hypothesis I wanted to test was whether or not my most recent racing experience was an accurate depiction of my level or just a bad day at the office. I was half their age, still figuring out what my life would be like. I wanted to do more than just participate that day. I wanted to push.
Their names long escape me, but one was an American from New England somewhere and the other was a French Canadian from just around the corner. They were both kinder than I was expecting. I saw them in a competitive light and I assumed they would do the same, but now that I'm older than they were at the time, it's clear to see the differences in mindset between a single-minded naive twenty-something and a pair of middle-aged family men. Everything seems so important when we're young because there are so few things happening, relatively speaking. To them, this was merely an aside. A way to have a little fun and get away from the pressure and gravity of being the responsible, appointment-keeping, tax-paying, shed-building, lawn-mowing, early-waking superglue of society. But to me, this was the biggest, most important thing I would do all year. It would prove or disprove the ongoing self-assessment, or rather, my very ability to accurately judge my own abilities. Abject failure would mean recalibrating a great many things I thought about myself. So for me, the stakes were steep.
After completing the breakfast portion of Bed & Breakfast, we had a long day ahead. We'd lap. We'd laugh. I'd meet a girl and, still new to the meeting girls game, forget to get her number. At one point, a dozen of us packed into an enormous Dodge Ram Van that seemed as long as the short bus they put all the special kids on. In middle school, I learned that the myth of the short bus only being for special kids was only true insofar as there weren't usually enough special kids to fill the normal-sized school buses. Further, I learned that if your particular route (hypothetically, of course), was such that you were very far away from the school and only a fraction of other kids were also very far away, you, special or not (hypothetically, of course), would also ride the short bus to school. Anyway, you wouldn't think someone could powerslide in one of those, but the instructor showed us how it was done. He then regaled a story about one of his colleagues the prior week entering into a similar slide and not being able to recover it, sending the whole group into a lazy spin that came to rest half-in and half-out of a gravel trap. For his part, our guy kept it on the pavement, at least.
As we geared up to start putting some laps in, I cursed the unfamiliar European sizing charts that led to my Nomexâ„¢ suit being one size too small and my Nomexâ„¢ boots being one size too big. Neither sounds like a lot, but each presents unique problems. A too-tight suit pulls the already uncomfortable places even tighter when the 5-point safety belts are cinched properly. Too-big shoes will have you tripping over your own feet in the coffin-like pedal box while you're trying to make semi-precise movements at 140 mph.
Summer in Quebec wasn't particularly tropical, but I failed to anticipate the time we would spend outside the car watching the drivers from Group A in between sessions. The racing suits are like a toddler's onesie – long pants and long sleeves all sewn up as a unitard with a long zipper up the middle to close you all up. The Nomex™ fireproofing is also not very breathable, what with all the proofing of fire, so they become glorified sweat-boxes. We always unzipped them halfway and tied the sleeves around our waist as soon as we squirreled out of the cockpit. With an exposed upper body, and distracted by the other cars, instructors' pointers, and fish stories to each other about our laps, my face, neck, and forearms were subjected to unbridled solar abuse. A discovery I would not make until deep into the following day after waking up to the reality of what racing, baking, and driving 7.5 hours to get home the same night can do to a human body.
Another chromatic discovery came courtesy of my mother when she inquired about my purple elbow. The monocoque of our little Formula Dodge single-seaters had a fiberglass shell over welded steel tube framing, the latter of which was tighter than I remembered. The gearboxes in these cars were a sequential shift-without-lift setup, meaning you pulled back on the gear lever to shift up and push forward on it to go down, and all gears came in sequence so you couldn't skip from say 4th to 2nd without going to 3rd first like you could on a conventional H-pattern. The crunching of my elbow into the steel tube that ran down behind my right shoulder only happened every time I didn't tuck my arm tightly to my ribs. With a few dozen upshifts per lap, the mound of swelling and yellow-purple hue of my elbow the next day signified I lacked the elbow-to-rib discipline to which I was certain I was staying true.
It was a mixture of audacity and ignorance that led me to think it a fine idea to confine a trip like this to 2 days. Anyone of sound mind, when booking the accommodations (they inherently knew were materially different than a standard hotel), would have booked another night because they would predict the exhaustion after driving 7 hours and lapping hard the entire next day. They would know in their bones it was objectively wrong to get out of a race car at 5pm and expect to make it home by 1am without subjecting themselves to windows-open, radio-blasting, face-slapping fatigue. But being audacious and ignorant, I did not know this in my bones. In fact, the thought didn't even occur to me. 2 days is cheaper than 3 days, right? In the end, it cost me a white-knuckle death-grip final hour of driving. At one point I resorted to closing one eye for 30 seconds, then the other eye for 30 seconds, drowning in the delusional belief that this counted as rest. A person only gets a chance to fall asleep at the wheel once in their lives, usually right before their death. I'm banking on the drive home from Quebec being the closest I ever get.
When it comes to measuring ourselves, it's hard sometimes to know where we stand. Achievement is a spectrum. Where we land on it, and how we feel about that placement, is dependent on variables so numerous they defy scope. By the time I strapped into a race car for the third time, I knew my dream of a career in motorsports was dead on the vine. Despite my deep interest and love for the sport, I could feel the absence of the fire–the utter self-assurance that this is what I was born to do. Despite this knowledge, I still hungered to satisfy the curiosity of whether or not my dream was delusional. I had to know if my sour experience the last time I took to the track was anomalous or the true representation of my skill. The former would be the reassurance I needed to keep the status quo and continue on my way in life. If I found the latter waiting for me at Mont-Tremblant, however, and my self-assessment abilities needed recalibrating, I would have a lot more questions than answers to keep me company on the drive home.
At the end of each session, we'd receive a printout of the lap times for each car in Group A and Group B. Group A comprised seasoned drivers, former pros, and those who were long-standing members of SCCA (Sports Car Club of America). Group B, the group I was in, was full of beginners like me and my B&B mates.
As I took the first few corners of my first lap, I thought about the knowledge the instructors imparted to us.
There was a blind crest around turn 1.
"Be even with the tall tree in the distance. Don't be left, or you'll run out of track before the chicane."
I thought about the details they pointed out about the curbs.
"The curb on entry is flat so use it, but stay off the apex curb or it will unsettle the car too much."
I thought about the nuances of the car.
"Just before you're ready to shift, put some load on the gear lever and when you lift the throttle a tiny bit, the car will select the next gear. Then you're back to full throttle right away."
After a few laps, I started making notes of my own:
"After the hairpin at 14, short-shift into 4th gear before 15 so you aren't lifting mid-corner when the 3rd gear revs run out."
I felt at home. The car felt good. The pedals felt good. Besides ramming my elbow into the seat frame when I forgot to not do that, the shifter felt good. All the issues and gremlins I faced at Road America were conspicuously absent. Now all I needed to do was check the times.
On the sheets we were nameless. They used our car numbers to display the times. That's how we knew who was who and what was what. I was car #10. We all came to a rest in pit lane after our session, killed the engines, unbuckled our belts, and wormed our way up and out of the cars. After a quick drink, we talked to each of the 3 instructors who were stationed at different parts of the track, watching us while we were lapping. I was expecting some good feedback about where I could improve, and what I might be doing wrong so I could find more time. What I was not ready for, however, was "You looked good, just keep it smooth, keep doing what you're doing." This, while flattering, wasn't helpful. I did commit one error on my first lap out of the pits, I was told. I crossed over the painted pit exit line, a foul that would be a slam-dunk 5-second penalty if this had been a Formula 1 race. It was not. I assured them I wouldn't do it again, and I didn't.
Finally, a heroic figure with a small stack of papers made his way over to the group and handed us each a sheet with our times. I started at the bottom and worked my way up, not wanting to tempt fate with any assumptions. Up, and up, and up, until I reached the beginning. 1. Car No. 10.
I was 7 tenths quicker than the second time in our group. But as I said before, this group was all beginners. Someone like me who was there to settle a score would naturally be more likely to post a quicker time than the father of 3 blowing off steam after some tense quarterly board meetings during which he had to answer for low sales and missed projections. I took my time and looked over the Group A list. 7th. My time, the time of someone who'd only been in a race car twice before, cracked the top ten out of 16 far more experienced drivers.
The numbers remained there for every session. Notably, the gap to my times shrank as the day wore on and the beginners got more comfortable in their surroundings, but by then the verdict was in. I wasn't crazy.
By the time I woke up the next day, bruised, burnt, sore, and content, the involuntary eye-blink that represents my time in auto racing was over. But not before I used it as a measuring stick. If that experience taught me anything, it's that it's never a bad idea to do something uncomfortable to see how we measure up. Even if we have no business trying them. Even if we'll never do that thing ever again. Even if we don't know the difference between a hotel and a bed & breakfast. I wish I could remember its name...that was a killer omelette.