Eco-Drifting

302 words. Letter to the editor.

Note: This letter was submitted to The Paducah Sun in hopes of piggy-backing on a successful letter I had published there in 2021. Sadly, it was not published.

Last year I wrote of my hope for amicable resolution of the dispute over pickleball players’ modifications to tennis courts that had been set up to USTA specifications. I am glad to note that unlike in my cautionary tale of rough handball players versus fern-bar-frequenting racquetball players in my childhood, there have been no reports of violence between adherents of the more courtly net sports.

I now address conflict in another sport: drag racing and drifting. This time the conflict is not between different people, but between warring sides of my own psyche. On the one hand I want to reduce my carbon footprint, so I drive an eco-friendly sports car with the automatic stop-start feature. On the other hand I want to impress the crowd at the local ad hoc displays of automotive machismo, which take place after hours in the parking lots of shopping centers. Don’t laugh. I am not the only retiree making the not only fast but also furious scene.

There are moments in drag racing and drifting where one’s combination of forward motion (or lack thereof) and depression of the brake pedal combine to fool the stop-start sensor in one’s vehicle. More than once have I been using both accelerator and brake to spin my tires at the starting line in order to warm up my tires and wow the assembled crowd of onlookers (especially the ladies) only to have my engine cut off, leaving me sitting there with no sound but Mantovani Strings emerging from my vehicle’s speakers. Likewise, I have achieved a similar semblance of motionlessness during a high-speed drift: off goes the motor mid-drift, leaving me with no RPMs with which to snap my whip into a doughnut at the end of the drift.

Short of owning two vehicles, I have no solution. Anyone?

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