Racing

`4:32:17`

— The funny thing about getting into racing is I did not get my driver's license until I was 25. I grew up in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the tax on cars is basically over 200%. So you pay for three cars and you get one. And I didn't even have the money for one car, let alone three. So I could not afford a car growing up. We did not have a car growing up, but Copenhagen is a nice city to be able to get around on a bike or with a bus, or as I did for a long period of time, on roller blades. But when I was 25, I realized I wanted to spend more time in the US. I wasn't sure yet that I was gonna move there. That turned out later to be true. But I knew that if I wanted to spend time in the US, I needed to have a driver's license. I was not gonna get around very well if I didn't know how to drive a car. So I got a driver's license at 25. Then ended up moving to the US later that year and I'd always been into video games, racing video games,

`4:33:21`

"Metropolitan Street Racer" on the Dreamcast was one of those games that really sucked me into. It was the precursor to Project Gotham, which was the precursor to essentially, Forza Horizon, I think. — Oh, okay, interesting. — I think that's how the lineage goes. Just a great game. I actually just fired it up on an emulator a few weeks ago. And it still sort of kind of holds up because it has enough real car dynamics that it smells a little bit like driving a real car. It's not just like an arcade racer like Sega Rally or something like that. But I'd always been into that. Then I got my driver's license at 25 and moved to the US, and then two years later, a friend that I'd met in Chicago took me to the Chicago Autobahn Country Club, which is this great track, about 45 minutes from Chicago. And I sat in a race car and I drove a race car for the first time. And I had the same kind of pseudo religious experience I did as when I started working on Ruby,

`4:34:24`

where I did maybe 20 laps in this basically a Mazda race car from, I think, it was like the '90s or something, like a pretty cheap race car, but a real race car. Single seat, manual gearbox, but exposed slick wheels, all the stuff. And after having had that experience, first of all it was just the most amazing thing ever. Like the physical sensation of driving a race car is really unique. And I think if you've driven a car fast, you have a maybe a 2% taste of it. The exposure to the elements that you get in a single seat race car, especially one like that where your head is actually out in the elements, you can see the individual wheels and you sensation of speed is just so much higher is at a completely different level. — So can you actually speak to that? So even at that Mazda, so you can feel, what can you feel like the track reverberating you see? You feel the grip? — Oh yeah, not only can you see the bumps

`4:35:26`

because you're literally looking straight at the wheel, you can feel all the bumps because you're running a slick tire. It's a really stiff setup. It's nothing like taking a fast street car out on a racetrack and try to driving a little bit around. — So can you feel like the slipping, the traction? — Yeah, you feel the slipping. hat's a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car is driving in at the edge of adhesion as we call it. Where the car's actually sliding a little bit. A couple of percent of slip angle is the fastest way to drive a race car. You don't wanna slide too much that looks great, lots of smoke, but it's not fast. How you want to drive it is just at the limit of adhesion where you're rotating the car as much as your tires can manage. And then slightly more than that and playing at it, keeping it just at that level. Because when you're at the level or at the limit of adhesion, you're essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. I mean, it doesn't take much. Then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you're going for the wall.

`4:36:27`

That balance of danger and skill is what's so intoxicating. And it's so much better than racing video games too, because the criticality is taking up two notches. I often think about people who really like gambling, where I think like, aren't you just playing poker? Like no, the point is not poker. Pokers may be part of it, but the point is that I could lose my house, right? Like that's the addiction that some people get to gambling, that there's something real on the line. When you're in a race car, there's something very real on the line. If you get it wrong, at the very least, you're gonna spin out and properly hit a wall and it's gonna be expensive. At the very worst, you're not getting out alive. And even if modern race cars have gotten way safer than they used to be. There is that element of danger that's real. That there are people who still get seriously hurt or even killed in a race car. It's mercifully rare compared to what it used to be