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Why do we race? Why are we driven to take up this sport? What is the impetus behind our desire to seek our own "fast times"? For many of us the idea may have been born when we first saw a Formula One car close up. A beautiful, jet black UOP Shadow, perhaps, in the Kendall Garage at Watkins Glen. Or perhaps when we watched Graham Hill or Jackie Stewart or Chris Amon going 180 mile per hour up the main straight there in their sleek machines, engines singing, making that rare and very special sound.

Ken Purdy, the great writer who offered so many keen observations about motor racing, may have said it best:
"If the game is dangerous why does anyone play it? Because it's the most compelling, delightful, sensuously rewarding game in the world." Racing is a supreme adventure, a magnificent obsession. Those of us who take it up at the amateur level, embracing it and pouring so much of ourselves into it are, in essence, joining the racing universe populated by the likes of Mario Andretti, Gilles Villeneuve, Jim Hall, Jim Clark, Briggs Cunningham, Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther, Masten Gregory and......Max Balchowsky!

"When you're racing, you go past a certain place in the world and in yourself. It's like traveling into new territory, some unexplored land, so sensational and crisp. Everything is felt more sharply, more intimately and at a smoother, more supple pace. Even when things are happening fast, there is a slowed down or timeless quality to the experience." ( a paraphrase of a quote by Rick Bass )

"It is the moment of risk that makes the rest of life bearable." Masten Gregory

As a result of physical forces, speed registers in our muscles, our eyes, and our brains, creating a generalized physical excitement as emotion and exhilaration. We have the sense that we are generating the speed, even creating it at will.

paraphrase of text by Lesley Hazelton in "Confessions of a Fast Woman"

When you are racing and everything is working properly, it's like another world. It feels like you are being guided down a corridor by some other force. I don't really see the car. I'm going very fast, there's lots of noise and I can feel the cornering and acceleration forces rising and falling. But there's no conscious effort involved, it's as if I were the car, just part of a machine. And that's the sensation in racing that is so thrilling to me.

Mark Donohue

Corners

In road racing, while pure straight-line speed has an unmistakable appeal, the corners are where a fast car, in slowing, changing direction and accelerating, exhibits its finest performance characteristics. A racing car's complex components are designed to deliver high speeds through a curve as the car is guided along an ideal arc. On that path the driver is challenged to sense and reach the car's performance limits by feeling the car's balance and reacting to the dynamic forces of movement. The approach to a corner is necessarily fast and to achieve quick laps, momentum, through the turn and onto the straight that follows, is essential. The timing - of braking, shifting gears and turning in - is the key to the smooth execution of this critical sequence. These dynamic transitions are really the essence of the racing experience and making them involves the skillful changing of speed and direction while on the very edge of adhesion, an edge that represents a fine line between control and chaos, a line the racing driver seeks to approach but not to cross. There, on that line, is found the thrill of fast, controlled movement, a feeling not unlike the excitement of downhill skiing. The resulting sensation is what makes the whole unique experience so satisfying and exhilarating.

"How many times did I hear Masten describe driving the Nurburgring, through the mountains, around hairpin turns, nothing but the sky beyond and no visual contact with the earth? The beauty, the precision of speed, the keen use of all his faculties - working together as a team - car and driver inseparable"

Masten Gregory's mother Nancy Gregory

For the sport's participant, it is an experience of the constant dialectic of restraint and release, the repeated interplay of energy and order, of improvisation and obligation, of strategy and tactic, all neatness denied and ambiguity affirmed by the power of the random, by accident or luck, by vagaries of weather, by mental lapses or physical failure, by flaw in field or equipment, by laws of physics, by error in all its multiplicity.

Bart Giamatti in "Take Time for Paradise

"What's it like, racing? Oh, god, it's the greatest! It's about guiding a fast and beautiful machine along a ribbon of road - straights, curves, hills, valleys....creating and blending movement and speed. And while doing so, running on the limit, the hairy edge, teasing the car to perform on corners at just short of its ultimate limits - all by virtue of your own feeling of forces. The whole time, the cars of your competitors are in front, beside and behind, darting and weaving, looking for an advantage. The experience is yours to make and control. The speed, the rush of the air, the noise! It's all so incredibly thrilling. But at the same time, there is a special sort of internal "quiet" and solitude. And after a while, you reach a new level. Conscious actions all but vanish and everything happens without so much as a single conscious thought. It's just glorious. It's the most exuberant experience a man can have!

George Cosgrove

The UOP Shadow Formula 1 team was masterminded by American Don Nichols and ran cars designed by Tony Southgate. The team's cars achieved modest success on the GP circuit but their elegant shape and fine level of finish were much admired. George Follmer took Championship points at the 1973 South African GP in his first F1 race ! Shadow faded from the F1 scene not long after Peter Revson died testing one.

                                                        Straights

   At Watkins Glen, after the ninety-degree Turn One and a short, quick downhill chute, the cars make their way through the Esses, flat out up the hill – engines straining - and onto the two-thousand-foot straight. Accelerating the whole time, they ultimately reach close to one hundred twenty miles an hour before slowing for the Inner Loop, a quick, challenging right-left chicane.

   Running alone or in a pack, there is a sense of unity with the car, a sense of pure speed, a magnificent feeling of freedom resulting from swift, straight movement along the road. The driver is focused on the forward motion and on a single goal - to try to gain some distance on the competition, to watch the other cars shrink in the mirror’s view.

   If other speedy cars are alongside or surging out in front, they seem to move slowly and effortlessly as if participating in synchronized motion - a ballet danced to the music of mechanical sounds accompanied by the rush of the wind. Advantages are gained and lost as places are exchanged and running positions are sorted out over the length of the straight.

   This exuberant experience is heightened by the increasing speed and by an awareness that the long straight leads to a turn where, at entry, the car must be slowed and guided through on a precise line, quickly transitioning from the ease and relative calm of the straight to the challenge and grace of prescribed movement through the curve.