The Art of Racing in the Rain

by Garth Stein

memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

“When I was nineteen,” Denny said after a moment, “at my first driving school down at Sears Point, it was raining and they were trying to teach us how to drive in the rain. After the instructors were finished explaining all their secrets, all the students were totally confused. We had no idea what they were talking about. I looked over at the guy next to me—I remember him, he was from France and he was very fast. Gabriel Flouret. He smiled and he said: ‘That which you manifest is before you.’”

But my thoughts turned to what he had just taught me. Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.

I had always wanted to love Eve as Denny loved her, but I never had because I was afraid. She was my rain. She was my unpredictable element. She was my fear. But a racer should not be afraid of rain; a racer should embrace the rain.

It makes one realize that the physicality of our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.

I felt bad for Zoë: all she’d had to do was say that the nuggets didn’t taste right, and this incident would have been avoided. But Eve would have found a way to hurt herself anyway, I suppose. They needed this. This moment. It was important to them as a family, and I understood that.

Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.

This is a rule of racing: No race has ever been won in the first corner; many have been lost there.

Alignment, late-braking, locking up, toe-in: mere jargon. These are simply the terms we use to explain the phenomena around us. What matters is not how precisely we can explain the event, but the event itself and its consequence, which was that Denny’s car was broken.

Any problems that may occur have ultimately been caused by you, because you are responsible for where you are and what you are doing there.

People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly. It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor’s yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words “soccer” and “neighbor” in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pelé, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn’t he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Três Corações with Pelé, and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit—that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor’s dog—would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pelé. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories.

Denny stood up tall. For him. He wasn’t a tall guy. He was a Formula One guy. Well proportioned and powerful, but scaled down. A flyweight. “I am freaking out,” he said. Mike nodded thoughtfully. “You don’t look it. I guess that’s why you’re such a good driver,” he said, and I looked at him quickly. That was just what I was thinking.

The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles—preferably of his own making—in order to triumph.

To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to. When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.

For Eve, her death was the end of a painful battle. For Denny it was the beginning.

Did he understand, as those interminable minutes ticked by, that being alone is not the same as being lonely? That being alone is a neutral state; it is like a blind fish at the bottom of the ocean: without eyes, and therefore without judgment. Is it possible? That which is around me does not affect my mood; my mood affects that which is around me. Is it true? Could Denny have possibly appreciated the subjective nature of loneliness, which is something that exists only in the mind, not in the world, and, like a virus, is unable to survive without a willing host?

When you’re stuck in quicksand, the worst thing you can do is struggle.”

“No race has ever been won in the first corner,” he said. “But plenty of races have been lost there.” I looked at him. He reached out, settled his hand on the crown of my head, and scratched my ear like he has always done. “That’s right,” he said to me. “If we’re going to be a cliché, let’s be a positive cliché.” Yes: the race is long—to finish first, first you must finish.

Many of us have convinced ourselves that compromise is necessary to achieve our goals, that all of our goals are not attainable so we should eliminate the extraneous, prioritize our desires, and accept less than the moon. But Denny refused to yield to that idea. He wanted his daughter and he wanted his racing career and he refused to give up one for the other.

“Screw them,” Denny said. “I’m going to win this thing or I’m going to run out of fuel on the last lap. But I’m not going to quit. I promised Zoë. I’m not going to quit.”

“There is no dishonor in losing the race,” Don said. “There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose.”

The driver must accept his fate. He must accept the fact that mistakes have been made. Misjudgments. Poor decisions. A confluence of circumstance has landed him in this position. A driver must accept it all and be willing to pay the price for it. He must go off-track.

The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind the others than it is to drive too hard and crash.

One can never be angry at another driver for a track incident. One can only be upset at himself for being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.