We Could Get Some Real Driving In

It took all my willpower to drive straight home after picking up my car from Costco. The mechanic said it ran surprisingly well for its age, and asked what kind of transmission I had on there because “it couldn’t be stock.” I didn’t remember—last time I got the transmission worked on was probably eight years ago. It was really the cleaned-up engine and new turbo that we did while replacing the timing belt that made it feel so good. Now with a fresh set of boots on the front axle, I could finally drive it again. I mean really drive it, the way manufacturers build for but state and local laws tell you not to. Although that day I had a deadline and a train to catch, no time to go gunning around Maryland backwaters and old-money side roads. That would have to wait for the weekend. When a Saturday afternoon presented itself, I jumped on the gas like the timing lights were going out.

The usual suspect for a city slicker Baltimorean this side of the Washington Monument is running halfway to Pennsylvania up Falls Rd. You can catch the standard suburban drive in Hampden and once you pass Mt. Washington it starts to get real rural fast. Once you pass 83, all bets are off, and you best hope that you’re the first to the last light before the four-lane becomes two lest you get stuck behind a commuter in a new-ish SUV. If there’s a 30-year-old truck with historic plates, a souped-up Civic, or genuine sports car ahead of you, then it's fine—they’re here for the same thing.

In drivers ed I had two teachers: one was the in-classroom guy, who used to joke about the Midwest nowhere town he was from being a “bustling metropolis,” and the other the in-car teacher, who, it so happened, was also a stunt driver. His favorite day out was always the country roads lesson where “we could get some real driving in.” Only thing he lamented about it was that it took most of the one-hour session to get to and from the good roads. But once we were there me and the other student—I don’t remember his name, but think he was a year ahead of me and got hooked on cigs as a pre-teen—traded off 10-minute stints running up and down Oregon backroads learning about breaking points and how to keep your awareness up for blind corners.

I took these lessons and the advice my dad gave me while playing some impromptu Gran Turismo speed trial that had popped up in our grocery store parking lot one day to “always brake going into the corner, and accelerate going out.” I’d practice this in the middle of the night running back and forth on Humphrey Blvd. in the twisting hills behind the Catholic middle school I spent so much of my childhood cooped up in. At night you could always tell if there was another car coming because of the way headlights would wrap around the pine trees. If no one was coming around the bend, you could use all the road, not having to stick to the yellow and white dividing the lanes. It’d take me another decade and a late-20s obsession with motor racing (and it’s no wonder that I developed one) to figure out that I’d been apparently teaching myself racing lines while bopping about as a bored teenager.

Running up Falls I can see Maryland’s winter turn to summer. It’s easy to forget how green this state can be, that kind of Fujifilm sun-soaked, humid green. In Oregon you’ve got the deep greens year-round, underneath the bright and diffuse cloud-cover of light rain. Here, half the year is a dull brown, but there’s a beautiful few weeks where the flowers come out and the air is still crisp before it gets swampy and languid. I do as my mechanic advised when I picked up the GTI after a month of engine work in the shop: roll down the windows and turn off the radio, listen to the engine sing. The turbo whistles while the four cylinders gurgle, the front almost lifting up as it propels the wheels forwards going from gear to gear at 5000 rpm. In the city I’d usually shift around 3000, but out here we can have some fun. An inline-4 is somewhat unbalanced in its 1-3-4-2 firing order, giving rumbling vibrations that don’t make for as smooth a ride as a boxer configuration, but it sure makes it feel alive.

I practice my braking as I pull into a roadside favorite and grab some ribs and an Arnold Palmer. It’s the kind of place where they give you the pulled pork and sandwich bread separate because the meat is so juicy. I wasn’t in much of a hurry, and stopped to pick up cigars and Scotch on my way back into town, although maybe I would’ve rushed a little more had I known the correct start time for the IMSA race. Either way, I was able to catch an hour of sports car racing on a Chromebook on my back steps with some tobacco and coffee in hand. I always think of myself as a winter person, but not today.