Being a race car driver can be very difficult at times. Especially when dealing with meeting people socially. You would probably think that this wasn't the case, but you would be wrong, and I will now tell you why.
The problem with being a racing driver is that everyone with a penis between their legs, no matter how small that penis might be, is also a racing driver.
"Well," I hear you say, "that simply cannot be true because their are millions of men in the world and only a few thousand are qualified to drive race cars!"
That is correct, however, if you show me a human being with a willy and a driving licence, I will show you the greatest driver ever to get behind the wheel. And when it dawns on you that I am right and that this pretentious prick actually believes that he knows anything and everything about the sport on which he is brandishing his opinion with an accompaniment of wild hand gestures, you will turn to him and say; "So, if you so good, why aren't you doing it?" And he will tell you that, even though he earns three or four times what I do and drives a brand new SubaruEvo9GTRSTIWRXSkyline with 41" wheels with 900 bhp, he can't afford to go racing. Otherwise he would have been the best in the world.
You look at both him and me with amazement and I will just nod. There are three reasons for this nod.
(1) He is right, I cannot prove that he is not the best in the world. I can't even prove he is better than I am. Because he doesn't race.
(2) You now understand what I am talking about and why I don't talk about cars much.
(3) Because that was the part of the conversation that I like. Because that part of the conversation happened to you.
You see, the fat, sawn off, egotistical dickwad hasn't finished yet. And you don't get to join in the next bit because only "real" drivers can know what he is talking about.
So I will have to listen to how his car out-handles and out- drags everything on the road, how he had a near miss with the rozzers at 110 mph, how he got the back out at Lottbridge Drove roundabout and a million other shitty anecdotes that I am supposed to be impressed with.
If I am in one of my lesser spotted "bad" moods, they will hear something like; "Buddy, you don't race because your scared. I don't know if that's scared of being beat or scared of being hurt. And I don't f***ng care. If any of my friends are hurt for something you did on the road, I will hunt you down and kill you."
However, in my more common and infinitely more popular "good" moods, I will try to humour them. I can usually do this until they flat out ask me my opinion on a car that I think is shit but they have just spent £30,000 on.
You see, I then have to explain the problems I find with the handling of a car that they don't recognise. They think it is because I don't know what I am talking about but it is, in fact, because when I am testing a cars dynamics, I am driving it at a point in the cars performance envelope that they have never reached. They probably never will. And if they did, how many different cars have they driven like that to compare it to?
The fact is that I am a racing driver. I may not act it, but I am enthusiastic about cars. People find different joys in cars whether it be racing, drifting, showing, cruising and just because there enthusiasm is different to mine doesn't make it any less worthy of my time.
To this end, I am dumbing down today's blog about the Subaru Impreza.
Once upon a time there were two farmers, Mr Subaru and Mr Mitsubishi. They were farming out in Japan when they got into an argument about who had the fastest tractor. Mr Mitsubishi said "I know how to settle this! We will enter the World Rally Championship!" Mr Subaru agreed. Mr Mitsubishi went and found the best technical minds in rallying and the best computer wizz kids in Japan together to form the team that would build his ultimate tractor, the Evo! Meanwhile Mr Subaru was working hard too! He found some five year old children with crayons and made them design the outside of what would become his ultimate tractor, the Impreza! He found an engine out of an old hovercraft that some monkeys from the local zoo fitted to his new tractor design. Mr Mitsubishi used top of the range computer software to select the best roll center location and suspension geometry for his Evo, while Mr Subaru packed up all the suspension parts into a box and threw it at his Impreza, hoping some would stick in roughly the right places.
When the day of the Rally came, Mr Mitsubishi's Evo was awesome but Mr Subaru's Impreza was somewhat lacking so he gave it to Prodrive to see if they could fix it. When Mr Prodrive finally stopped laughing and picked himself up of the floor, he turned some of Mr Subaru's tractors in to pretty decent rally cars. They were given to famous rally drivers to try to win the WRC, but the rest of the shit ones got called WRX's and put in Mr Subaru's showrooms so he could sell them to poor, unsuspecting members of the public, who thought they were buying a super car but, really they were getting a tractor with a nice badge.
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