In the spirit of nostalgia and an old karting friend of ours being in town, Kimi and I headed back to where it all began. I hadn’t been to Torrance in a very long time. I was interested to see how Kimi and I would stack up against each other.
We walk in and immediately hear the insufferable grating noise of those plastic tires for drift night. Fuck. Drift night turns perfectly good K1 Speed tracks into slip n slides that turn karts into victims of excessive blunt trauma.
There was nothing to be done, this was the night we had, so we got in the karts and did what we could.
I found myself not completely miserable in the first few laps. Sure I was running slow as hell, but all things considered, I was doing good. Even in packs I could maintain my clean style and avoid bumping anyone. Then something even more fun happened: I realized I was running faster than Kimi. I started grinning and applied myself to really push. When it came to this slippery mess, I was crushing it.
I stepped out of our first race and suddenly had a flashback to when I was young at the ice rink. When I was a kid, I took up figure skating. I was definitely not going to be an Olympian, but I took it seriously. I’ve known this slippy feeling and how to control it for a long time—not to mention growing up in Chicago will teach you something about driving on ice.
Meanwhile, Kimi hails from San Francisco; rain, sure, ice, not so much. However, as a driver, I think it was something a bit deeper. Kimi prefers that nothing and no one come between him and his line. A massive factor for this calculus is his tires. He is obsessive, downright finicky about tires, as I guess every driver should be. I meanwhile am an absolute brute to my tires. I can feel him wincing on the rare occasion he’s behind me as I grind them down to nothing.
Before our second race he looked at my tires and cautioned they looked a bit over-inflated. I rolled my eyes assuming he was just screwing with me. However, by the third lap I couldn’t deny he was absolutely right. Tires are king to him, so on this night he was particularly bothered.
It was interesting to have the upper hand in this roundabout way. If I can solve the problem of a slippery track, I should be able to solve the problems of normal conditions.
I slept on it thinking about what my brain was doing differently. It was more awake, aware of the obstacle ahead. I knew how the kart would respond on the surface because I did that with my body while figure skating all the time. I mastered the nature of the ice’s surface and used it to my advantage. That’s what I needed to do on the track.
I’m too passive when it comes to regular conditions. I’m not really attacking corners. It’s more so finding a smooth or incident-free way through them. But I can’t just get through them; I have to master them, make them work to my advantage—which of course does include being kinder to my tires and sticking to a line that is beneficial. I’m happy my ice skating days weren’t for nothing.
This night was a gift in disguise and I’m going to do my best not to waste it.