The Kwisatz Haderach

Well, this is it. I am officially obsolete. Clearance bin. Last year's model. Overstock.com.

Thursday night, John drove on a real racetrack for forty-five minutes. His lines weren't perfect, but we didn't discuss line theory or anything like it prior to him setting off. I just asked him to be careful, and not to go too quickly. Here's the thing: Every first-day trackday student, every male first-day trackday student anyway, secretly thinks they are going to be awesome. I know, because my students have admitted as such to me, and because I secretly felt the same way on my first trackday. We all think we're going to immediately be respectably fast, that we're going to have no trouble driving at the limit. None of us is ever prepared for the cold reality of being thirty seconds a lap off pace.

Well, I have no idea what expectations my son had for himself. He didn't share them with me. But he was absolutely brilliant.

We showed up at Circleville Raceway Park for a private practice session around 6:30. At 6:55, I dragged the kart out to get it started... and the fucking recoil starter lost tension. I was incandescently furious. Luckily, the track owner knows more about recoil starters than I do. We got it fixed around 7:30.

I'd told John to walk the course while I was fixing the kart. He came back and said, "Dad, there are a few different ways to drive the course but I know what the real one is." Then, while I got him seated and put his helmet on, he explained that he had come up with "an easy way to remember which pedal is the gas and which is the brake." Why did he think he needed a system? Well, our kart dealer had sold a new TopKart to another seven-year-old whose parents had put a green band around the right leg of his suit and a red band around his left leg. Makes sense, right? The kid can look down and see which leg he needs to use. I'd shown John the picture of the suit that the dealer had sent me and he told me he'd think of something similar to help his own memory.

"Okay, Dad, listen," he said. "This is my system. This leg here presses this pedal," and he pointed to his right leg. "This pedal is connected to this cable, which as you see goes back to the engine. So that makes it go. Now this leg," pointing to his left, "presses this pedal. And see how that pedal goes to this cable, which goes to the brake? So that's my system, so I won't forget."

"Well," I replied, "that system is comprehensive, and it saves me the cost of having colored bands sewn to your suit." We're doing this on a budget, because that's how I race nowadays in my diminished-financial-expectations life and there's no sense in bankrupting ourselves for a kid-kart season. For us to do a new TopKart, a new Comer C50, and a full outfit from the major kart stores would have run about $5750. Instead, we have this imperfect older kart and some very opportunistic eBay shopping for closeout karting suits and helmets, giving us a total cost of $1600.

I started by having him run the front oval near the stands, but after five laps he waved me over. "I want to drive the whole track." I walked over and moved the cones to open up the full course.

"Go ahead, then," I said, with a little more confidence, than I felt, and I let him go. This was the worst part. If something happened to him out on the back straight, I was looking at maybe a thirty-second limping run to get there. Maybe longer. I'm just not moving very quickly at the moment. He exited Turn 1 at full throttle and headed towards oblivion.

He didn't exactly hold back on his first lap, but to me it felt like half an hour before he was once again in front of me, heading for the final hairpin onto the front straight. He came to a halt at start/finish and I waved him for another lap. And he just kept getting quicker, taking some turns flat and others with just a light lift. He came out of the right-hand Turn Six in a full slide, catching it without lifting. In just about every turn he had motion in the kart, often correcting in the midcorner with a fast shuffle. I took Danger Girl's camera from her because my hands were starting to flutter uncontrollably His neck brace kept slipping back, which completely freaked me out. He has the smallest one available. We'll have to go to the neck collar, which I don't like as much. It's not scientific.

Finally, he ran out of gas. Thank God, I thought, we're done.

"Dad, there's more in the truck, I saw you bring it, it's the red container." Fuck me.

"Alright, I'll fill you back up. Just be careful." And off he went again, raising his entry speeds, taking the last turn with his throttle foot planted to the stop. After about ten nerve-wracking laps, he stopped and got out.

"Dad, I'm slowing down for Turn Six at the place where the pavement is a different color. I don't know if I need to." Jesus. I struggle night and day to get my students to remember the turn numbers, to look for physical markers, to be aware of corner stations, to look through the turn, to stop tunnel-visioning at their own steering wheel. And the kid does all of the right stuff as if by instinct. "He shall know your ways as if born to them." Hmm. Every Frank Herbert reader knows what that means. My son is the Kwisatz Haderach. Obviously.

"Well, if the kart spins, just stop and I'll run out to you, okay?" And he was off again.

He never spun. Part of it was certainly that our Comer C50 motor is old and tired, and that I have a little bit of extra throttle stop dialed in. But most of it was him just being attuned to what the kart was doing. We had new tires on, which seemed like the safest approach for this first time, but some of his corner speeds had me anxiously squeezing my right hand in my left. I'm going to have to talk to him about line theory sooner rather than later. He likes to dive into some of the turns early and then fix his problems on the way out.

At 8:17, my agitation got the better of me and I called him to a halt. He slid to a stop across the start/finish line in a manner that was calculated to express his annoyance at having to stop. "We, uh, have to get you home," I said, ignoring the fact that his mother had given us carte blanche to be late.

"I'm not out of gas," he said.

"We'll come back." Danger Girl and I loaded the kart in the Tahoe and he put his street clothes back on. There was an odd transformation. In his LICO suit, with his utter confidence, he seemed very adult. Like I was seeing a brief glimpse of the racer he would one day be. Impossibly slim and tall, the way I was at fourteen. Composed and confident in the way that I only really was when I was sitting on my Patterson BMX bike.

Once he was back in his shorts and Crocs, he was just a little boy. I was reminded that he cannot carry my hopes or fulfill my dreams for me. My job is twofold; to do that for myself, but also for him. Just for a while. He is already halfway to the age where he'll consider me more of a nuisance than anything else.

He settled into the back seat of the Tahoe and started playing Geometry Dash on his tablet. Then he thought better of it, and looked up.

"Dad, I want to talk about some trouble I'm having." My stomach fell. They're beating him at school. He's being molested. Possibly tortured.

"Sure, John, what's going on?"

"It's Turn Three. I think I'm turning the wheel too hard. And I know I can go faster. There's a weird plant that I see when I'm going by. I don't have to slow down until after the plant."

"We have time to make everything okay," I replied, "even, maybe especially, the problem in Turn Three."