The Driver by Alexander Roy Page B

mechanics, spare parts, and medical support one lap and minutes away—which meant that virtually everything race cars were designed for was irrelevant.
    Success on the Gumball had to be based on endurance, reliability, fuel economy, police evasion, and, despite the highly conspicuous stickers required by Gumball, stealth.
    By this measure, there was only one possible car more appropriate than mine: a dirty-brown 1980s Mercedes turbo diesel station wagon.
    Any other cars, whether psychological crutches, rolling jewelry, or priceless works of automotive art, couldn’t be as well suited to the task.
    I was utterly confident in my technical preparedness.
    But my heart still sank when the rumbles and wails of Gumball cars began echoing in the surrounding streets.
    â€œHoly shit!” said one of the high-schoolers surreptitiously smoking out of sight of his teachers inside. “Guys! You gotta come see this!”
    A lemon-yellow Ferrari 360 with custom body-color-matched Sparco racing seats, five-point race harnesses, and nineteen-inch chrome aftermarket wheels pulled into the Fairmont’s driveway. Immediately an all-male teenage crowd gathered to snap pictures, point, lecture, and debate the car’s every facet. They were soon joined by a small group of passersby, bellhops, and a passing cabdriver who each recited loud, overlapping, sometimes contradictory, and often obscure details of the 360’s performance. It was as if all but their involuntary organs had been overwhelmed by a hypnotic invisible gas secretly developed in Italy—99.9 percent effective within ten feet of any Ferrari’s prancing horse badge.
    I knew from reading Car and Driver that the 360 was a highly rated track car costing approximately $200,000, but I also knew from the Ferrari chat boards that two hours on rough roads would give The Driver hemorrhoids. More importantly, I also knew that it drank 16 mpg on the highway—in tests far below Gumball speeds. Totally inappropriate.
    I watched the gawkers. I admired the car. Of course it was art. Of course it was amazing. Of course the driver could beat me on a track.
    But it’s not the car with which to win a cross-country race.
    Nor were the similarly and outrageously expensive supercars forming a line behind the yellow 360. The supercars were vastly outnumbered by a slow parade of $50,000 to $100,000 cars possessing at least 85 percent of their performance—numerous BMW M3s, Mercedes SLs, and Porsche 911 variants. Cars that may have hidden extraordinary modifications—the lone blue Ford Mustang, white Toyota Supra, and green Mini Cooper—were laughed at or completely overlooked—but not by me.
    Few of the cars had the telltale sign of a Valentine 1 radar detector—two small circles on the windshield, indicating that one had been suction-mounted, pulled down, and stashed away. What little evidence I spotted was of other detector models (which I considered no better than bricks) mounted low and/or off center—proof of ignorance at how radar detectors work.
    The drivers and copilots emerged from their cars, smiled, laughed, and shook hands with one another, dampening my hopes for public displays of competitive animosity.
    These were not the hard-core illegal underground racers I was looking for.
    All eyes fell upon a very low car as it gingerly entered the Fairmont driveway.
    I’d read every issue of Car and Driver , Road & Track , and Automobile magazine published in the United States since 1983, and I’d never even seen a picture of the steel-gray car that rolled up in front of me.
    It whirred like a taxiing airplane’s turbine, its smooth-sloped semicircular wraparound windshield and cockpit as far forward as a fighter plane’s, five clawed spokes forming each of its matte silver wheels, the engine beneath its long rear deck emitting secondary hisses and barks as the rpms fell to idle.
    Even parked, it looked like a mythological beast