Yellow, Green, Red

Chain hoist balancing act—working without a net to fit five hundred pounds into a one pound bag—stretching the envelope to get the message inside. Sleight of hand trickery somehow fits eight header tubes into no available space. Metal snake messengers deliver the news to the world: Listen! This is an emergency! Pull over now, or grab your ankles! Here it comes!

Even on sandpaper coated with Gorilla Snot, no way there's going to be any traction today.

Surrender to driving through life in one endless burnout—like an ice skater juggling control and reckless abandon to achieve an end result of grace that can turn ugly in a thousandth of a second or less. Gang way! Make some room or deal with the consequences. After a prayer of thanks for arriving at the track without catastrophe, bolt on the slicks (been practicing all day for this burnout!). Aaahhhh...

Stage in the groove—you know where the Rs should be—see the filiment begin to glow in the last yellow and release the 'brake. Release the hounds! Good wheel speed. Then, with the rubber band pulled all the way back, the launch. No way to make your eyes big enough to take it all in, but you try! Hanging onto the steering wheel like life itself, while the brain disregards the trauma of the 2G sky/strip dance to focus on the SHIFT. Shifting from the blurred violence of acceleration into the pastoral beauty of speed, where the faster events come to you, the slower they go away—time and space become your private taffy to manipulate with your right toe—you know it's a double-edged sword that can slice you right out of the picture, but the god-like giddyness is too seductive. Such an ordeal to lift at the finish and hear the quitting song—almost all percussion—rimshots to the funniest joke ever told, but now the laughter is drowned out by the sorrow of crashing down off your jones with the cold reality slap of the last turn-off.

Now the anticipation of a child on Christmas eve, driving the longest return road on earth (aren't they all?) to the E.T. shack to Read All About It! Gobble up the news with an adrenaline appetite and digest some of it on the way to the pits, where the switch is thrown, and you've just turned on a deafening silence. It's over. For now.

Drag zen and the real world. Inside the car, you're a cyborg—just another cog in the machine, intuitively in touch with the groove, the powerband, and your place in the world and on the track. You're rewarded afterward with a moment of silence, then as the belts are unbuckled, they slide to the floor with a meek TINK that signals reality again. Reach for the E.T. slip and just begin to study it, and here they come: everyone you've ever met in your life is waiting outside the door with comments, questions, critiques, lists of tools they need to borrow, and some just feel the need to be there for no apparent reason at all. Each one must be dealt with before you can take the next step in your journey toward enlightenment—which is usually something along the lines of "did that last valve adjustment do the trick?".

Welcome to the single most perplexing paradox in all of motorsports: before you can achieve a single second of the nirvana you've worked so hard for, you need to reach out for some help. Nobody can do it alone; it wouldn't be much fun building this thing in total solitude anyway. So you made some friends getting to this point, and now they want to share the reward with you, and it's good. Very, very good. You've all sacrificed some knuckle skin and plenty of sleep and money to finally get it on down the track, and now seems like the appropriate time to savor the fruits of your labors. You all celebrate the moment together. So sweet and pure. Love is the strongest medicine and all of you are definitely feeling it and are so grateful for it. While the party was in session, nobody heard the call to the lanes, and you missed the next round. Sucked into the vortex of reality and spit out the other end, onto your old spot beside the guardrail. You've come full circle now, and reclaimed your place as a railbird again. But it's different this time. And your grin feels like it launched from the starting line of your very soul and all of those giving souls that pushed you this far. Your journey is now complete. And it's just begun…

—Scotty Gosson