I Got a Fast Car

By Joel Stein

If I were a brave man, a man of integrity, I would have exited the car, walked home and never talked to her again. That is the only appropriate way to deal with crashing your girlfriend's parents' car. But I am not a brave man. I am a man who realizes how hard it is to find someone willing to sleep with me on a regular basis. So I accepted a lifetime of spending holidays being referred to as "Mario."

It turns out the Mario in question (Andretti, of course) had his sons hone their driving skills with Skip Barber, a retired racer who owns a chain of 20 driving schools where he gives corporate executives a chance to pretend they are real men. I wanted to pretend to be an executive.

I showed up for my $500, three-hour Intro to Racing course at 9 in the morning at the Laguna Seca motor speedway in Monterey, Calif. Before the classroom lesson, the instructor, Andrew Shoen, sent me into a room to put on a red racing suit, a helmet, some driving gloves and a fake mustache. The mustache was my idea--it seems to be part of the NASCAR uniform. Much of what Andrew said made sense to me until he got to the double-clutch, heel-toe downshifting maneuver, which is the heart of racing technique. It was at this point that I had to raise my hand and inform Andrew that I didn't know how to drive a stick shift. He asked if I was kidding. I said no.

Out on the famed track, I slid down into a steel cage that had a motor attached to it and some wheels sticking out the sides. The car was kind of like a convertible without sides or a bottom. They called it a Formula Four. Formula Three, I guessed, was the one Fred Flintstone had.

When the instructor gave me the signal to start, I slammed into what was probably first or third gear--and immediately stalled. This is not, I gathered from the instructor's reaction, a common racing move. My classmates were whipping down the track, worrying about correcting skids, and the instructor was leaning into my car, telling me to "let up easy on the clutch." I wasn't proud.

It was really just the stalling, I think, that landed me in the slow group. I didn't like being a member of the slow group. It brought back bad memories of having a gym teacher yell that skipping is "a jump and a hop." Which, I still argue, it isn't. Either way, it's not what you want to be thinking about when you're going 70 m.p.h. through a hairpin and you're 5 in. from the ground.

It was after Andrew gave me my diploma, in what had to be the lamest, most awkward ceremony since I got my last diploma, that I found out Skip Barber offers a free course at high schools called "Crashing Is a Bummer." It certainly would cover the bummer of crashing your girlfriend's parents' car. Unfortunately, Andrew couldn't help me with that part, but he did tell me Jerry Seinfeld, who took the course a couple of times, totaled two Formula Four cars. Feeling sorry, Seinfeld slapped a Skip Barber magnet on his TV show's refrigerator. It is in that spirit of reconciliation that I now mention Hope and Ken, my girlfriend's parents, in this column. Now, stop calling me Mario.