Spinning Confusion or: How to Not Experience an Indycar Race for the First Time

We arrived at the race track at 12:30. The race was already underway. Laguna Seca, nestled in the rolling hills of Monterey is a twisting and steep track, home of the famous corkscrew. A deft left-right-left as the ground drops out and the corner plummets. A short drop and–if you get it wrong–a sudden stop.

We—my mother and I—were there for the Indycar race, the last of the season, and the title decider to boot.

Scott Dixon vs Alex Powers, or Alex Paoulo? Scott Powers? I had no idea. I had already messed up the arrival time. Online: practice at 12-12:30pm. Race 3-5:30pm. Little did I know they were listed as eastern time.

We hadn’t missed much but it proved a slight source of confusion nagging at us like mosquitoes on necks. Was this practice or the start of the race? We weren’t sure. It certainly seemed like they were racing; the announcements going full blast over the speakers, barely able to hear them over the thundering drone of the cars as they flew by.

There was a feeling of awe in the chaos, though. The sheer speed at which the cars went ripping by, the forces in which they cornered, the deafening sound that was blocked, somewhat successfully, by the earplugs stuffed in ears. All of this contributed to a kind of dance that the cars did as they circled us, climbing the hill only to plunge for the umpteenth time down the cliff-like corkscrew corner.

It was a belching and screaming and flaming ballet that had enveloped us, one not without its beauty.

There’s always some confusion upon entering a movie one hasn’t seen for the first time part way through. The dark room and the bright projector blind, straining the senses initially, sapping the ability to understand anything but the material light that rests upon the screen. But once you are settled, and the show is upon you, that’s when you begin to take it all in, to fill in the gaps in your brain, the gaps in the story, and how the plot got to where it is now.

Much of that experience was alike in arriving late to the racetrack. The submersion, icing our senses in the overwhelming cacophony of new experience only to slowly grasp our way to the surface, realizing lap after lap that: no this was not practice—they were racing and it was happening and we were experiencing it and that even though we missed the opening act, there was still much more to come.

We perched ourselves on a hill and watched in a sort of daze. Low stakes for us yet not for the players.

Someone had to win and everyone else had to loose and as we watched the confetti cannons fire and the team touch the championship trophy and the drivers fling champagne, we left neither sad nor happy over who had become the victor, and, truth be told, I couldn’t tell you who the victor was. It didn’t matter to us. Sometimes the spectacle and the experience is all that is needed.

So we left, not dissuaded by our confusion or upset over gaps that we could not fill in the plot, but left content in the experience of it all.