When Fast Things Happen: on the Ethos of Speed (Number 1)

by Lael Ewy

Looking past the money spent (estimates on Volkswagen’s investment vary from $12 million to $40 million), and the need to re-establish itself as a green and trustworthy brand after its diesel scandal, Romain Dumas’ record-breaking run up Pike’s Peak in the all electric VW IDR brings together a few important elements: an incredible car, an incredible driver, and a series of deeply American ironies.

Dumas and the IDR passed our viewing point near the start line of the Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb in a little less than a second. It’s hard to unpack what we experienced when this happened: a rush of wind, a whine of tires, Dumas using all of the road.

A note on that: the road up Pike’s Peak is small-shouldered, with native grasses growing up at its edge between the road and the ditch, which is dipped for erosion control.

Dumas had the IDR’s two right wheels hanging over the road’s edge as he navigated this first turn, casting a puff of grass up, the pummeled blades floating down in his wake like snow.

Dumas knows the road, well enough that he knew even this slight bend down low would need to have the life wrung out of it if he were to break Sébastien Loeb’s record. And he did. Seven minutes and fifty-seven seconds after the start line, he was at the summit, 5,000 feet higher and 156 turns safely, and quickly, behind him.

With a factory effort for a race like PPIHC, rare in that it has an “unlimited” class where no real formula except speed applies, the unseen negotiation is between the needs of the fans to see neat gear and the manufacturer to meet its ends.

VW IDR, Driver's Door

VW wants youth to be excited about the car, and, by extension, the brand. VW wants you to buy the “ID”-branded electric vehicles it puts out in the world. Both buyer and seller know full well this isn’t really the same stuff you’d get in the record-beating car, but you buy the shine, the glow off that phenomenal run up America’s Mountain.

This has always been the way with racing: there’s nothing in a NASCAR “stocker” that you can get in your local dealer; ironically, your daily driver is a good deal more sophisticated and refined. But that’s not the point. It’s the heart of the art of the win.

So even if VW spent $40 million and not $12 million, it’s cheap advertising, a small, quick step back toward the good graces of the average buyer.

The IDR is maybe the most sophisticated race car in the world, though—not that anybody exactly knows.

You see, to give up too much about the car means revealing the mystery. “How’d they do it?” is also a powerful draw, and it might signal to competitors how they can do it better next time. That said, VW wants the competition. A long-standing record is publicity they don’t need to repeat. If a record stands for long enough, it becomes a legend.

To lose the record, however, is also good, creating a revitalized effort to get it back, sustained hype around the epic battle, an increased interest in the tech they’ll need to get the job done.

Then there’s Dumas. Six years my junior and complaining about getting old, grouching about his gray hair, yet still youthful and bright-eyed. I imagine the arguments he had with the car’s engineers—Dumas was heavily involved in the process of the car’s design—happening in animated French, arms flying, voices raised, the camaraderie and respect they all have for one another deepening at every outrage. This is a particularly European thing, to love the others enough to argue with them, to delineate what one means to the other by carefully outlining the differences.

Another irony: like most things truly American, from jazz to Vegas to the constitution itself, the Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb is maybe better appreciated by the rest of the world. The drivers, the crowd, the coverage is all as international as the race’s name implies. The Europeans understand curves more than Americans do, used as we are to long stretches of straight-shot Intestate and streets laid out on Jefferson’s grid. A German tackles a turn assertively, whereas an American comes at it with caution, unsteadily, unused to this idea of a change in direction. And besides, during this complex transition, what to do with one’s latté, one’s phone?

We invented drag racing, after all: go straight and accelerate as fast as you can; fastest elapsed time wins. What do you want to turn for?

That said, and another irony still, the Hill Climb resembles a drag race in that way: the fastest time in your class wins, and the fastest time of the day wins from all the classes. 7:57 is now the time to beat.

Yet plenty of cars and bikes and such show up—open wheels and stockers, the random quad, motorcycles galore, more sport bikes than dirt bikes now that the whole road is paved. The race is invitation only now, but plenty of hard-working folks and well-heeled privateers still get the green light to go.

In that sense, at least, the Hill Climb, no matter how much Volkswagen spends, is still very much an American race, open to both the transnational aspirant and the hodge-podge of people that make this messed-up country home.

VW’s IDR is merely the icing on this rich cake, and Romain Dumas its latest public connoisseur.

The Spectacle and the Tingle Inside

by Lael Ewy

Everybody loves a spectacle.

Well, I don’t.

But it’s interesting enough to see others love them.

The artistry is undeniable, and, every year, the proprietors of the Pike’s PeakInternational Hill Climb bring a Red Bull Motocross trick motorcycle team in as part of their “Fan Fest,” which takes place in downtown Colorado Springs the Friday before the race. Every year, they show their stuff, promote Red Bull, and otherwise cause a scene.

A Red Bull Rider high above Tejon

Every year I go with a group of friends, and every year I remark that there seems to be fewer people than last year, and fewer race cars on display, until the motorcycle team begins flying through the air, from ramp to ramp, twisting their bikes 90 degrees off center, doing flips and various forms of creative dismounts—ranging from the super-hero elegant to the borderline obscene.

And sticking the landings, every single time.

It ought not to be all that surprising: you don’t take your show on the road until you get it good and good. “Good” requires precision and smoothness, fluency, a kinesthetic sense that goes way beyond a simple knowledge of physics. That’s where the artistry comes in; the felt sense of your self and the motorcycle in the air, the intimate knowledge of what a twist of the throttle at launch will translate into at landing.

But the people who crowd around me—and there seem to be more of them now than last year—clogging the sidewalks, boozily hooting from the bar balconies, with their dogs and their babies and their fragrance-funk in tow, are here for the spectacle, here for the show, the idiot announcer obliging their carnal desire with his barking play-by-play, the felt-sense of referred risk.

None of this would matter without “mirror neurons” firing off of that inner tingle that suggests we know how that feels, to find yourself upside down athwart a throbbing motorcycle, 30 feet above the raw asphalt.

Only we don’t. To really do what they do, they need to be in a state way beyond the mere thrill; they need to be in Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow state,” existing in a manner deeper than we sidewalk dwellers are even aware.

The spectacle, then, is imaginary: our projection of ourselves on their perceived peril.

And there’s value in that. Probably not the same as you’d get in a great novel or even the best of conversations, but for a matter of a few seconds, it’s there: the falling bodies drawing us together, drawing us in.

On Catastrophic Failure

The suddenness with which cars and their parts can BDFU (blow da eff up) is remarkable.

Even more remarkable is how infrequently it actually happens.

Today, it happened to me--and admittedly a bit of light drag-racing was going on. But the contenders, my buddy's 1996 Volvo 850R mysteriously down on power, and my bone stock 2004 Volvo XC70, weren't exactly top-fuel quality.

I say the XC was bone stock: it was sporting brand new front axles, properly installed and torqued to spec.

And, I thought, properly rebuilt.

Most of the more complex car parts that you'd buy at your AutoZone or, in this case, O'Reilly's are rebuilt, generally in China or Mexico, and for the most part, they work just fine.

This one lasted me a solid week.

There was a startling BANG! and the right side of the car began shaking violently, the ABS and traction control pulsing and freaking as the U-joint connecting the axle shaft to the constant velocity joint shook itself to pieces.

Being conscientious, and mildly terrified, I pulled over at the soonest possible opportunity, just south of the east gate of McConnell Airforce base, my buddy in the 850 kindly following, as he noticed the terrible sound and the right front wheel bouncing like an sugar-hyped toddler.

One quick look, and it was obvious what had happened, the inner bits unceremoniously puking through the broken boot and onto the suspension subframe.

The center, as Yeats prophesyed, could not hold; mere anarchy was loosed upon my drivetrain.

It'd be easy here to blame the poor saps who assembled the axle, but they work harder than I do for a lot less pay, as does the customer service person at the O'Reilly's who sold me the axle, and the one who'll (hopefully) give me my money back.

But that whole chain of suffering exists so that I'll be satisfied, so that my contentment as a low-level consumer in a nation of privilege will sufficiently mask the injustices that pull the profits ever upward.    



--Lael Ewy

Lessons of Work and Life I Learned from Fixing Volvos (and other Cars, but Mainly Volvos)

by Lael Ewy

The relegation of “respectable” work to that which involves siting at a desk and staring at a screen all day manifests both the rollback of organized labor and the creeping restoration of a previous, aristocratic order.

I'll let others explain the deep sociological ramifications of this, and just focus on what it means in terms of loss.

With physical labor once again shoved back to the shameful order of peasants and beasts, we're faced with a population devoid of not just common sense and health-promoting physical activity, but also unable to reason in some very practical and emotionally healthy ways. In other words, our current way of working makes us fat, stupid, lazy, and insane.

To put this in perspective, I'm going to present life lessons and integrative principles I've learned from working on a variety of old cars, most of them Swedish, and, because I am poor, most of them in questionable states of repair.

Lesson 1. While it's good to have a plan, and it's important to have a basic understanding and a decent set of tools, it's seldom necessary to have a bunch of damn meetings before you get started.

The immensely satisfying part of working on cars is that you can pretty much just jump right in. You might want to look at a Chilton's manual or watch a YouTube video from someone who has done it before, but endless machinations designed to gather input and be inclusive of all major stakeholders are entirely unnecessary. The only thing keeping you from putting a socket on a bolt-head is you and your willingness to do the work.

When we have to go out of our way to create agendas, find time on everybody's schedule, send invites, conduct meetings, and then conduct follow-up meetings to divvy up work, ensure workflow and accountability, and determine and then measure output, outcomes, and progress toward goals, we not only waste time and energy, we give the often false impression that everybody needs to be involved at all times. This makes people feel excluded when they're not involved, even if being involved would be pointless and even more wasteful of everybody's energy and time.

Lesson 2. You know when what you did works and when it doesn't work.

As we move toward more and more ambiguous job descriptions and more and more ambiguous work, we have also ginned up more and more silly measures of outputs, inputs, outcomes, through-put, progress, and so forth. Instead of freeing us from the tyranny of metrics and Tayloristic regimentation, our current work has made us obsessed with them. The mechanic needs no arbitrary metrics: the car either runs when it didn't before, or it doesn't. The leak is either fixed, or it ain't.

Now, there may be various degrees of ambiguity: does it run better than it did before, but still not great? Is the noise louder, softer, or different—and if different, how? But all of these move toward the clearly desired end state, and all of them are explainable. You don't need a theory of management, a strategic plan, a mission statement, or a logic model. You don't need to take into account internal or external politics, ambitions, or personalities. You just need to account for—and be accountable to--how the car runs and drives. Which leads us to

Lesson 3. Working on cars enhances critical thinking.

The auto mechanic is in a constant state of diagnostic analysis. This analysis has to consider the car's various systems, and, importantly, how those systems interact with each other and with their environment. This type of thinking trains the mind to think of things in those interactive terms. It also makes the often simplistic approaches of some executives and specialists seem utterly childlike.

The kind of critical thinking required of the auto mechanic also allows for cutting through crap quickly and efficiently. While it considers complex, multivariant systemic thinking, the point of that thinking is to rule out probable causes of problems. This makes the mechanic less prone to accept explanations based on biases, wild conjectures, or favored improbabilities. Properly applied, no one trained to think like a mechanic would be drawn in by management gurus and their idiotic trends.

Lesson 4. Being a mechanic teaches you to learn as you go.

Even though Haynes and Chilton's claim to be “based on a complete tear down and rebuild” of the cars they cover, they're always missing a few important pieces of information, some vital step. They also seldom cover all mid-year design changes, and can't cover previous modifications and the weird effects of time and wear.

The auto mechanic, then, must be a bricoleur, using what she's got to do the work in front of her.

Many of the more intolerable practices of the modern workplace arise from that fact of uncertainty intersecting the demands of efficiency and profitability. Reality requires experimentation, but almost everybody's job (the top tier of executives, perhaps, excepted), requires “proven success.”

The auto mechanic goes in with this knowledge of the systems at work and some basic understanding of the way things are typically manufactured and engineered. She then goes from there, observing the physical properties of the car and its parts, and she uses those observations to deal with the repair as it unfolds before her. This leads to

Lesson 5. The auto mechanic uses her senses.

This lesson may seem pointless. I mean, we all use our senses, right? You're using your sense of sight to read this right now, or your sense of hearing if you're using a screen reader. But here's the deal: almost all of the work we do these days relies on maybe one or two of our senses, particularly hearing and sight. The screen-bound world, the world full of meetings and webinars, video-conferencing and spreadsheet-filling, exercises hearing and sight at the expense of all others.

A mechanic must be tuned into the smells of leaking coolant or burning oil. She sometimes has to resort to only her sense of touch when freeing a fastener than she can't actually see or when loosening a screw that requires finesse instead of brute force. The mechanic's world is, in some ways, more full, closer to the world in which humans evolved. But perhaps the sociologically healthiest thing a mechanic learns, and perhaps the most frustrating, is

Lesson 6. Smart people and experts can sometimes be wrong.

To be sure, the contemporary automobile is a marvel of engineering: its engine and transmission will generally work flawlessly for many millions of revolutions and several hundred-thousand miles. Its sophisticated fuel delivery system creates more power per unit of gasoline than could even have been dreamt of 40 years ago.

But every mechanic still runs into piss-poor designs, maddening overcomplexity, and occasional stupidity baked into every car. All mechanics spend some part of their time re-engineering or bypassing what the experts screwed up. This takes the form of everything from eliminating useless and glitchy circuits to rerouting entire induction systems to sometimes just putting in quality fasteners in place of crappy ones.

When the media call upon “experts” whose predictions are just plain wrong or whose entire fields are paradigmatically astray, we seldom even question the blind faith it requires to call them up and waste air time on their silly bloviations.

Knowing that the experts can sometimes be wrong is psychologically satisfying, but it also ought to put us on guard: our own sense of expertise should always be in question. Our own certainty can be our own worst enemy. Through the time a mechanic spends fixing what the factory broke, he also becomes aware of relying too much on his assumptions and his experience. He's always aware of the fact that, this time, the problem might be different. This time, what acts like a blown head-gasket is actually a failing turbo. This time, the oiling-system that never fails, in fact, actually did.

The accolades our petty, human institutions bestow upon us don't mean jack in the real world--which has an annoying habit of not giving a rip about theory and the way things “ought” to work. The conventional wisdom is just that: it is based on convention, not necessarily the way things really are.

This idea leads to

Lesson 7. It's not always about you.

The extreme focus in the modern workplace on “performance” and evaluation arises from the aforementioned ambiguity of the work we do. With fairly fluid definitions of failure and success and with so much of business success due to the vicissitudes of the market and not necessarily the quality of the work, we have little to go on when it comes to promotion, hiring, and bonuses. The policies of the workplace try to impress upon us the objectivity of their assessments. But we all know better.

That's why so much of the literature of getting ahead has to do with how you present yourself, market yourself internally, and package the value of what you do. It turns us all into salesmen, and it turns the focus on what we do from the actual work to how the work looks for us. It makes our “customers” those who fill the power structures of the workplace, not the people who are on the receiving end of what we do.

The professional mechanic certainly has to serve the owner of the car. But her first order of business is the vehicle itself, and the car doesn't care about you. You can be the best salesman in the world, the most affable, the best team-player, but if you haven't properly diagnosed the problem and adequately repaired it, it won't work anyway. The car isn't being cruel; it has no ability to not like you. It doesn't care if you're ugly or fair, if you've got big boobs or a winning smile. The car doesn't care if you learned at Harvard or at the School of Busted Knuckles. It's not interested in your résumé. The car doesn't care if you're having a bad day or if you're feeling good. It just is what it is; it's broke as it's broke. No matter how frustrated you get, no matter how confident you feel, it's not about you. It's about the car.

While lesson 6 might be the most sociologically healthy thing being a mechanic teaches you, lesson 7 is the most emotionally healthy. The idea that it's not about you, it's about the work that needs to be done, lets a person practice the necessary detachment to get through a situation, and it also suggests a certain useful moral/ethical position: if we spent less time on blame, less time on sorting out who deserved what, and more time on what needs to be done, we'd all be more likely to work together, to listen to the suggestions of others, and to be quicker to recognize others' needs, abilities, and contributions. I'm not fool enough to think such a lesson would completely do away with office politics, but it may go a long way toward refocusing on what needs to be done and on what needs to happen for the work to be done well. And just maybe, such a position would let executives see that those on the front lines are not mere numbers to be outsourced and de-waged whenever possible, but real people who provide real value, and who may just know a good deal more about the work than the executives do. If we take this lesson to heart, then the amount it costs to compensate people well won't be seen as about the executive, as about his or her justification of a bonus by reducing payroll costs, but about the needs of the work if it is to be done well.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that everyone go out and become a mechanic, but rather that some of the lessons of working on old cars, Swedish or not, might help people get back in touch with what they've lost as work drifts farther and farther from the physical world.

Craigslist Update

Of all the abominations of the English language, Craigslist (itself appropriately denuded of the otherwise requisite apostrophe) supplies some of the best.

Today's horror is "two towing hicht," for which, I believe, the proper response is "gesundheit."  

Not to be outdone, the bad photographers battle back with this Baja Bug which, apparently, is too vibrant with its own badassitude to stay in focus.

Happily, though, the "Ice Scarper" is still available. In July. But, hey, it's only a dollar!

Of Error and Elevation: Introductory Remarks on the Pike's Peak Hill Climb

by Lael Ewy 

The first mistake most people make when discussing the Pike's Peak International Hill Climb is that it's a sporting event. Sure, all the trappings are volubly and annoyingly there: banners (Ducati, and Red Bull, Toyota and Mitsubishsi) and broadcasts (KRDO, 1240 AM, the Voice of the Hill Climb), a generally wretched and totally canned rendition of the national anthem for the NASCAR crowd (they still race stock cars up the mountain after all), and hype--far more than is required for anything as agreeably rare as this race. Obligatory slogans like “Race to the Clouds” are slapped on marketing materials, and sponsorships from local car dealers and banks slow the pace of the poorly-informed color commentary. (As an important side-note, it's generally a good idea for those providing radio coverage of a road race to understand something about cars, about the race in question, and about physics generally.)

But the actual racers and a good number of the cognoscenti understand: the Hill Climb is not a sporting event; it is an obsession.

Consider Rod Millen, the Kiwi rally and IMSA champion who decided to take on Pike's Peak mid-career, and whose all-wheel-drive Toyota Celica set the record on the hill in 1994, a record which stood for 13 years. He could have had a perfectly happy career not having anything to do with this race. But instead, he kept coming back, holding four more fastest times for Hill Climbs throughout the 1990s, eventually passing off his obsession with the race to his son, Rhys, after Rod's record was broken by Nobuhiro Tajima in 2007. Other families, notably the Unser dynasty and locals favorites the Donners, have risked large amounts of their genetic legacies on Colorado's most famous fourteener.

What explains all this? Well, it's a time-trial, for one thing. It's not about what happens between competitors on the track as you'd see in NASCAR or Formula 1; it's not even about the technology so much, as everything from vintage motorcycles to factory-backed “Unlimited” class cars run the mountain. Rather, it's about the driver's relationship with the road, with her machine, and with her own limits of skill and her own tolerance of fear.

I say “road” and not “mountain” for a reason. The mountain, in the case of this race, is, arguably, the excuse for the road. Pike's Peak is a lovely place: a rugged 14,115 foot massif rising precipitously off the plains and providing dizzying views of the Rockies to the north, south, and west, and giving a sense of just how vast the American Great Plains really are if you're facing east. This mountain was, purportedly, what inspired Katherine Lee Bates to pen “America the Beautiful.” So, if you're in the area of Colorado Springs, by all means, take in the Peak. But if you're really into mountaineering, there are 53 other fourteeners to climb in Colorado alone that haven't been as scarred by a road.

You see, it's the road that makes the race: 156 turns, 12.42 miles, comprising hairpins and sweepers, kinks and switchbacks. Failing to navigate these turns gives drivers sheer cliffs to fly off of above the timberline and forested cliffs to fly off of below. Increasing the challenge, road conditions constantly change, from hot and dry at the starting line through, possibly, rain or hail, cold or snow upon ascent. Along with this, the visual conditions will shift from searingly bright to the flat light of overcast to odd shadows and blinding glare. Even decisions as seemingly simple as the selection of what tire to run (made even more difficult by now having the entire way paved) become immensely complex and incredibly risky.

It would be too easy to say the men and women who drive this race are conquering a mountain—climbing this mountian can, in some ways, be more simply done on foot with a little conditioning and some decent gear.

What drives the obsession that keeps fans and racers coming back is that these women and men are conquering, really, themselves.