Motorsport

It's mechanized Fight Club, beyond the reach of the schoolmarms

Buying a motorcycle with over 100 horsepower is kind of like buying a pound of coke. You’re basically saying to yourself, I’m just going to go ahead and be an asshole for the foreseeable future, and see what that’s like. What it is like is that the rest of the world is moving in slow motion, and it is excruciating. The lanes painted on the road appear acres wide. The enclosed, lumbering objects you share the road with are essentially standing still, and it makes no sense to abide by their rules.

Imagine you are Stephen Hawking and you wake up one day to discover that you have switched bodies with Stephen Curry. The life you have lived up to that point is no longer livable. However great the intellectual pleasures of Newton’s Laws once were, suddenly the expanding universe is something you feel in your body. It calls you forward from your present limitations: faster. Space-time dilates, and you are working in a different frame.

In 2016, after fifteen years of riding a bike with 35 horsepower every day, I bought a modern Yamaha with about 120. It was roughly like going from an Irish donkey cart to something nuclear powered, with the precision of a Swiss watch. The acceleration was nearly hallucinogenic, the cornering scalpel-like.

A few months later I rode it down to Virginia International Raceway to watch races in various motorsport disciplines that were crammed into single weekend. I was creeping along North Paddock Road, shortly past the entrance to VIR, when I spotted a plume of smoke billowing into the heavy summer sky. Not a little smoke — it was a dense, rolling cumulus. That looks bad, I thought. I pictured a driver trapped upside down in a roll cage, frantically trying to activate a fire suppression system. But then it occurred to me that this smoke wasn’t black, as you would expect from a gasoline and plastics inferno; it was white. As I got closer to the action I could see that this was tire smoke, and that it is not the sign of a mishap but rather the main point of drifting.

Drifting is a motor sport in which one goes around corners sideways, tires spinning furiously. How sideways? The most acclaimed drivers sometimes take it to point of entering a corner nearly backward, which has the visually elegant effect of pre-rotating the car, pointing it in the direction it will be headed as it exits a 180-degree turn. Picture a really excellent movie car chase and you’ll begin to get the idea. To watch two or three cars drifting in tandem, a few feet apart as they slide through a series of turns, is to learn that human beings have come up with a new form of dance. It might be the most beautiful thing that happens on four wheels.

But for the moment, I had some more pressing concerns of a personal nature. I was going to ride in one of these 1,000-horsepower beasts, and I didn’t want to soil myself. Some of the drivers appeared to be at the ragged edge; I really thought a red Nissan was going to lose it a number of times and go careening into the concrete barrier, but somehow the driver brought it back each time. The speed, the ground-shaking exhaust noise, the thick contrails of tire smoke, and above all the intensity of purpose that was evident in the driving made me wonder if I might have gotten in over my head.

Surely my driver would take it down a notch or two, having a civilian in the car? As I stood there sweating in jeans and boots and a bad case of helmet hair after the three-hour ride from Richmond, I signed a waiver that was too long to read—though my eyes did pick out the phrase “extremely dangerous.”

My driver, Forrest Wang, looked about twenty-five years old. He wasn’t wearing a fire suit, a Hans device (the standard neck restraint), or any such markers of prudence. He was wearing a T-shirt that mimicked the eponymous RUN-DMC album cover, but instead read “RUN 2JZ.” (2JZ is a Toyota engine code.) This wasn’t Formula One. There were no Fly Emirates or Rolex banners draped across the track, and no Medevac helicopter idling nearby. I asked: Forrest built his own roll cage. “That’s awesome!” I said, with less than perfect sincerity.