Trackday Diaries: And He Shall Not Depart From It

He was delivered to me in a sealed plastic box, a wrinkled three-pound homunculus too exhausted and sick to make a single sound. Handle him with these gloves, they said. Don’t breathe on him. Eventually you can take him out of the box, out of the post-natal ICU, out of the hospital. But not soon. Everything was up for grabs. He’d arrived dangerously early. Thirty-eight states in this union would have permitted me to break his neck the moment I saw him; at just under twenty-four weeks of age, his life was legally forfeit. He wasn’t my son, wasn’t a child, wasn’t a person. He was tissue. He was a choice.

His mother and I made the choice to give him a fighting chance. The rest was up to him.

John is seven years old now. An army is always best equipped to fight its last battle so I have made painstakingly certain that the sorrows of my childhood are preemptively erased from his. I answer his questions in detail, to his satisfaction. I do not discipline him out of temper and I do not betray impatience or frustration with him. He wants for nothing, rarely has to wait to see a desire fulfilled. He’s ahead of his classmates in most respects but I sure as hell am not going to address this by skipping him forward a few grades so he can be a twelve-year-old high-school freshman.

I am also reasonably aware that children who grow up insulated from difficulty or struggle tend to become feckless jerkoffs who still live off their parents at the age of thirty, so I’ve tried to give John some challenges to overcome. Our shared motto is that we do not quit, whether it’s a frustrating mechanical task or riding a 186-pound 90cc Yamaha dirt bike at the age of six. A while ago, we built a monstrous Lego Technic cargo plane with a multiple-clutch gearbox. I made him do the whole thing himself. At first he refused to do it. Then he complained. Then one morning I woke up late and found that he’d finished a wing on his own.

We’ve gotten a slow start with this karting thing. Not his fault — the noise of the Comer C50 engine really upset him when we started practicing, and he didn’t like the feeling of wearing a full-face helmet with the visor down, but he got over that pretty quickly. No, the issue has been my own race schedule. This is a tough balance for me to strike. I don’t want to selfishly keep having fun at the expense of my son’s driving career, but neither do I want to be one of those karting dads whose unrealized ambitions become a mortar and pestle with which to grind their children’s joy into dust.

We also had a bit of a conflict this year when his mother signed him up for football games that conflicted directly with the first six races of the season. He loves football and he scored three of his team’s four touchdowns in their last game. No way I’d make him stop doing that to race a kart. So when all was said and done, there were just two races left in the year for him. Sunday was the first of those.

We’d been to the kart track several times to practice, but this was his first time sharing a practice session with the 11-year-olds in their Sportsman karts. I spent ninety minutes fidgeting and hopping up and down every time some hot-shot kid in his Birel came up on John’s plodding TopKart, twenty seconds a lap faster, like me in a McLaren 675 running down yellow-groupers in their Bimmers, or like every media trackday in which I have ever participated. But the kids were good to John and John was courteous in response.

There were no other 50cc karts at the race. The initial plan was to put John at the back of the Sportsmen and run a mixed-class race but the organizer had some concerns about that. “He’ll have to race by himself,” I was told.

“If that’s the case,” John snarled, “then I can just go home, because a race against nobody is not a race, Dad, just in case you didn’t know.”

“Easy there, killer,” I laughed. “You can run against the clock. Some grownups just race against the clock. They call it time trial, or rally.”

“That can’t be true,” John griped. “It’s not real racing if there’s nobody on the track with you.” I ruffled his hair. Then we put on his Armadillo rib padding. This was my mistake. We’d never used it in practice. It didn’t occur to me that it would be a problem to try it the first time on the day of the race. Stupid fucking me. He couldn’t breathe with it. He got claustrophobic. It interfered with the steering wheel. At one point during the laborious fitting process he he threw his neck brace and stomped away from the kart, trying not to cry. But he came back and after thirty minutes’ worth of adjustment we got him settled into it.

His final practice session was with the adults in their 206cc monsters, running 51-second laps against John’s 1:20. It was all I could do not to run out on the track and call a halt to it, but John kept track of the karts behind him and yielded the racing line without difficulty.

Finally it was time for his race. He ran three times; two six-lap heats and an eight-lap final. He got faster every time.

His last lap was within striking distance of the “Predator” karts driven by some of the older kids. We could have run him in the mixed class. Next time we probably will. Then we’ll start looking for a bigger field in which he can compete.

His final race attracted an unusual spectator: the fellow who would go on to muscle his way to the win in the adult 206cc final. “I like his lines… he’s not pinching the kart on exit. This is a learning process for both of you, I bet.” At the end of John’s eight-lap final, the man waited at pit out to shake his hand and congratulate him on finishing. Then John and I went up to the stands and watched that dude bully and bump his way to a decisive win over some much more expensive machinery. “His kart is totally epic,” John said. “It’s all black and looks really mean.”

“That’s because he’s rattle-canned it,” I said. I did not tell John that the reason the guy’s kart was rattle-canned was that he’d clearly knocked all the paint off all sides of it abusing the wealthy suburbanites in their TonyKarts.

“Rattle-canning sounds cool. I want to rattle-can my kart.” I guess its okay, if he wants to do that. I’m slightly annoyed that his new racing hero is a guy from Circleville instead of his own father who has, you know, dozens of wins plus a podium at Sepang, but we’ll take our heroes where we can find them.

We went to lunch at Dairy Queen afterwards. John brought his trophy into the restaurant with him. He met the goal I set out for him; he continually improved and made no major mistakes. The rest is up to me. I need to get his motor rebuilt, find him some competitors. I’ve been looking at karts online. Next year he can choose between the 50cc kart or the 100cc Junior Sportsman class. I think I’m going to buy a Margay 100cc kart and secretly assemble it over the winter. I’m devoting a lot more thought to this than he is.

I’m a late arrival to fatherhood. I didn’t know if it would be for me. I didn’t even know if John would survive long enough to make our combined story anything but a tragedy. It’s alright now. The past is gone. He’s no longer just tissue, no longer just a terrified animal wincing with each shallow breath. The future can only get better. The rest of the choices are up to us.