Racing

`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

`4:37:28`

when those maniacs in the '60s would do Formula 1 and whatever, 13% of the grid wouldn't make it to the end of the year because they'd just die in a fiery flaming fireball. But there's still some of it there. And I think that since that there's something on the line really contributes to it. But it's more than that. There's just a physical sensation. There's activation of all your forces. There's the flow. And I think that really cements like why I got addicted, 'cause I always, I love that flow I got out of programming, but getting flow out of programming is a very inconsistent process. I can't just sit down in front of a keyboard and go like, all right, let's get the flow going. It doesn't happen like that. The problem has to be just right. It has to meet my skills in just a right moment. It's a bit of a lottery. In a race car is not a lottery at all. You sit down in that car, you turn the ignition, you go out on track, and I get flow virtually guaranteed.