Which brings me to the beginning of this story. I knew the Viper could make 140 down the back straight, but after just three laps I found myself knocking on 142, then 143, then 144. What was possible? Was a 1:45 lap out there for the taking? The lunchtime had come and gone, and the track pulsed with traffic. There was no clear lap to be had. Still the Viper pressed on, casually dispatching everything in its path. Corvettes? No problem. A Porsche GT3 made an attempt to stay ahead; I swatted him emotionlessly with the throttle, sucking him into the Viper’s cruciform intake and leaving him bobbing in the wake of my passage. Faster and faster we went, the Viper now whispering to me instead of screaming, the information coming through my hands and feet clearer and clearer, showing me the way to go, until I looked down on the entrance to Turn Six and the speedometer showed me a proud sliver of space above the one hundred and forty-five mile-per-hour mark. I tapped the brake lightly as we went in – as lightly as I could, knowing that I needed to shed nearly fifty mph by the clipping point – and the world went sideways.
I thought. I thought about being home. I thought about the talk I would have with the wonderful people at Dodge who had entrusted us with this car despite the tendency of The Press As A Whole to send press-fleet Vipers into bridge abutments and oncoming traffic. I thought about surviving the impact. MSR has plenty of runoff, but I didn’t know if it had enough runoff for this one. I thought about pride. It’s a killer, that pride, and nothing instills it quicker or in more deadly fashion than being at the wheel of a car which appears able to bend time and space with a single squeeze of the throttle. I knew the mistake I had made – I’d trail-braked too deeply, with too much steering applied, at speeds beyond what I’d seen in the corner before. Such a simple error! This is what I thought. A simple error.
While I thought, my body was doing something else. In fact, it was doing just what it’s done hundreds of times before on-track in situations like this; easing off the brake, catching the oscillations, lightly pedaling the accelerator to remove the profound engine-braking effect of eight point four liters of Viper V-10.
And while I thought, and watched, the car did just what it was supposed to do. It went straight. Before I could blink again – before another sixty feet could pass – we were accelerating out of Turn Six down towards Diamond’s Edge. And in that moment, I thought about a six-hundred-horsepower supercar that could be tossed, and caught, at one hundred and forty-five miles per hour as reliably as a Camaro-Mustang-Challenge race car could be at ninety, and I fell in love. Before I reached the carousel, I was hooked, any pretense of impartiality tossed to the winds. I’d placed my life in the Viper’s hands, and it had returned my life to me, and the timer flashed 1:47.1 as I blitzed the start-finish line and waved to the folks in the pit crew. It was time to bring it in, time to hand it over to Mr. Roboto for the real fast laps, time to say goodbye.
I didn’t hurry back in.
