Racing with Andrew

Andrew was one of the friends I met through Morgan. He was a year younger than me, and a year older than Morgan. Tall and lanky, with glasses and short dark hair. He was a very quiet person, not speaking much unless he was DM’ing a game. Andrew and I hit it off fast as friends.

We would spend afternoons playing Warhammer or Battletech table top games in his room. He lived with his mother, and they had a town house in Charlottesville. He had the entire basement floor as his room, with a large table to spread out the game materials on. It would usually be Andrew, Morgan, Josh and myself playing games. We had a fairly regular Thursday afternoon game session, and oftentimes the four of us would crash at his place. The games would often go until 1-2am, and we’d all just curl up on his floor in some blankets.

We’d usually order pizza for those game nights. A friend of mine worked at the Papa Johns in that part of town, and would hook us up with extra pizzas and tons of the pepperchini peppers. We both loved spicy food.

Andrew and I would also play video games quite often together. Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed had just come out, and we both seemed to be obsessed with both Porsche and the need to go fast. Occasionally we’d try to play two player mode, but usually it was taking turns sharing pointers.

Over the course of several of the games, Andrew would talk about wanting to turn his late 90s Subaru Impreza into a rally car. I thought that was really cool, and I wanted to do some rally racing as well. I already loved driving fast, but that damn convertible of mine was far too boaty to sling around slippery corners with any precision. Fast in a straight line, but horrible for slippery corners.

Having already rebuilt a car or two, I had a ton of backyard mechanic experience, and volunteered to help. Josh and Morgan would roll their eyes, with zero interest in rally racing. So, it became a weekend project that just he and I would work on.

It started by gutting the interior. We built a roll cage in the gutted interior. I handled the welding, even though I had never done welding before. I figured 2“ steel tubing would work well, and thankfully the few times we did roll it over, that seemed to have done the job. My welds were… janky at best, again with no prior experience doing that, and no youtube at the time to go learn from.

Andrew wasn’t comfortable with the welding part, but he did help a lot on the engine and mechanical work. It took us about six months of weekends, pulling out all of the convenience features of that car. The A/C - too heavy, had to go. The seats - no five point harness, they had to go. The automatic transmission was swapped for a manual one.

Andrew paid for all the parts we needed. His mother seemed to be well off financially, and there was no father in the picture as he was deceased. Andrew had his own credit card on her account, with seemingly no limit. It was foreign to me, having grown up just above poverty, and having just gotten my own credit cards about a year or two prior.

While rebuilding the car, Andrew shared that his dad had been in the Air Force and was killed when he was around 5. I shared my own father stories, both the ok-ish ones and the rest. I’d often chide him that he was the lucky one, I wished my own father dead many times. He’d retort with a maybe.

I’d talk about my own experience of rebuilding the Buick with my dad, and the painful learning experiences that left me with. I’d make light of the fact that after learning to drive fast without spilling my father’s whisky, rally racing should be fairly easy.

We also both discovered we hated cleaning the mechanical grease from the car off our skin. The gojo orange pumice we used left us smelling and feeling a bit sick after use. Andrew suggested using medical gloves, which worked pretty well. We’d occasionally have some glove tears, but overall it made cleanup so much easier. We’d joke with the other friends that we were studying to become car surgeons.

When the car was finished enough to test, we drove it down to the track just outside of Richmond. We had bought helmets and cobbled together makeshift racing suits.

When we showed up, the track coordinator gave us an overview of the track, and drove us each around it in his little rally car. At full speed.

Andrew was first to drive the track after the intro session and signing off on the track rules. The mixed gravel asphalt track was fun to drive that little car on. Sitting in the passenger seat on that first run was a bit like a roller coaster, my stomach churned far more than when the track custodian drove. We learned very quickly that it was far harder than it looked.

The first loop I took around the track was less conservative than Andrew’s, not to say his was conservative at all. The feeling of the car sliding in the gravel, the bumps that sent my helmet plinking off the roll cage. I skidded off the track a few times, where he didn’t. I also finished just a hair faster despite that. I think the many times I had already had cars trying to swap ends on me gave me a slight edge.

That first test drive was amazing. A full-body adrenaline rush, on the edge of crashing but not, and knowing it was okay even if I did. I knew I wanted more after that.

We crashed that car so many times in the beginning. I slid off a corner while driving it, and smacked the rear end into a tree. Andrew oversteered once or twice, sending the nose into fences and road barriers. We’d hit the nearby junkyard after those practice runs, buying body panels, bumpers, whatever we needed and thought we could patch the plethora of holes we created in it.

So many repairs were needed to the car after each race or practice session. We ended up replacing the suspension, something we hadn’t done the first time around. The world of difference that made to the handling on that track couldn’t be overstated.

While we’d occasionally trade off driving, it happened less and less. I started to become the de facto driver as we honed our skills. Andrew would navigate, calling out the turns with the short hand notes we had taken on what was working. I got to where I could hold the nose of the car into corners and let the ass end of it drift and then snap behind it.

We entered a few of the time trial competitions held at the track. While we never set any track records, we did finish 2nd place in one of the category sets we competed in. That second place finish in the modified amateur category was hard earned too.

That run had ended with a bent front wheel, and I honestly didn’t know if I’d cross the finish line. I clipped this large rock in the last right hand turn bending the entire front cv joint and the struts around it. As the car came out of the turn, I barely had control of it. It was wobbly and unstable, stomach churning with the left side of the car shaking up and down violently.

Thankfully the finish line was just a mere 100m ahead with no turns. I don’t think I would have had the turning authority with that damaged wheel to make another tight corner at speed. I barely had the control to keep the thing going in a straight line. When we did cross it, braking the car caused it to spin around several times before coming to a stop.

We raced that little car for nearly two years together. The last time we raced together was right before he left for the Air Force. He had finished his associate’s degree at the community college, but shared he still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. Since his dad had been Air Force, he said in a way it was following in his footsteps.

The recruiter sold him on becoming a communications expert flying on AWACs. Those are the planes with the large radar dishes on them that act as a flying command/control center. It sounded exciting, especially since we both had often talked about trying to learn to fly.

I saw him a couple years later, when he came home on leave.

Neither he nor I were the same person anymore. He was in year 2 of his enlistment, and it wasn’t going exactly the way he had hoped. He wanted to be a radio operator, and ended up as a mechanic. Said he liked it ok, but we didn’t really have much left in common at that point. It was an awkward and brief hang out.

We lost touch after that.