Loving the Slipstream

Loving the Slipstream

I lay in the hospital bed sipping water through a straw after an ‘incident’ while motor racing, and ponder, what is it; what’s the rush I get from racing cars?

This insatiable desire started in 1959. I was at ten years of age. I wanted to build super-fast bogeys. I used the rear wheels from the Silver Cross pram. In its day the best baby carriage ever made, but on this day found on a rubbish tip near the common. The Silver Cross was an elegant piece of machinery, made with two large rear wheels, smaller ones at the front, all of which were intact on the discarded carriage.

I had a natural talent for taking apart anything mechanical and then assembling it in a different format. The baby carriage wheels were removed and attached to a half inch thick axle rod and assembled onto a foot-wide, four-foot-long plank of wood. I hammered in nails, screwed in screws, tightened up bolts, greased rods, oiled bearings, drilled holes, and conjured up shims for the steering pinion. A rope was attached to either side of the front axle as a steering aid but guided mostly by my feet, and lastly a wooden box, sanded and painted, was my cockpit. I always had this desire to light up my hair.

There was no jigging, no reinforced gussets, no brakes, and the only power that governed its speed downhill was daring. It was the morning Charlie ‘the sweep’ had just got off his bike to walk up the hill, his brushes jutting from a sack over his shoulder, whistling cheerily as he made his way to the Harrison household at number 48; who earlier that morning suffered a small chimney fire. Well, that’s when it happened.

The kids on the street stopped playing their games: some with whip and top, others with marbles played in the gutter, two girls played hopscotch, and two skipped over a rope on the side of the street. The street was not heavily used by traffic and quite safe; safe, that is, until I came round the corner at great speed in the opposite direction. Even though Charlie used all the rubber on the soles of his shoes, he was quite unable to get himself and his bike out of the way before an almighty crunch. Charlie, along with his brushes, went flying. His bike lay on the pavement, the rear wheel buckled, front wheel spinning freely. Charlie got up, rubbing his elbow, looking at his mangled bike. I sat on my bogey, legs straddled, looking at the front broken front axle.

‘Young Hogg,’ Charlie yelled, in a thick Scottish accent, ‘You’re a menace, always racing them damn carts. Why can’t you take your love of speed and find yourself a racetrack? Leave everyone else safe!’

That was it, that was the day I knew I wanted to race cars. I was in love with the slipstream. That feeling never left me, never dimmed, never will.

After coming out of surgery the surgeon told my wife I’d been lucky. He knew very little about my life, for he might have said, your husband continues to be lucky.

In scorching steel, cocooned inside a roll cage, I live to experience the limits of hot rubber adhesion while in my mind I make unsought decisions on chance, and with lips of clay pass through Beau Rivage, turning into corners where Bandini’s ghost applauds, Albert Ascari telling me I’m not dead; that the thirst in my throat, the force against my body, the suffocating heat within the hideous heart of factory built precision is no more than an endurance examination while the Kiss of Caiaphas hangs in my slipstream.

There’s no time to think about love; I think about rain, three-second wheel change in a stone valley called pit lane; I think about the crystals of information, fuel, tire heat, angle of aero foil, thousandth of a second. Not love. Not compassion. Not life itself.

I’m sunk deep into my beastliness, looking for the grandeur of a podium finish, feeling almost human, feeling attractive when flushed from modesty than from anger. To the camera, modest and reticent if I win, a violet prince, but the baroness of defeat cannot leave my heart untouched because then, after Garibaldi’ s glories, well then there is nothing more to say about me.

Today, lying prone, swollen, broken, before this woman who owns my heart standing at my bedside, what she says is profound.

“I know you and have loved you since you first appeared in my life. You can’t know how much you’ve guided my love, inspired my spirit, and calmed my soul — you are my safe place. So please, I beg you. It’s time. Enough, now. Enough.”

And I looked at her a long time before I answered.