With Wings It Would Fly

A few days ago D and I make tentative plans to have lunch. When he calls and says, “today will work, how about The Mineshaft?” I hesitate. The Mineshaft is a dive tavern in Madrid, about 25 miles south of town. I like the place, but driving way out there, having lunch and then driving back will take a big chunk of time from the day, and there are comparable burgers to be found closer to home.

When he adds, “we’ll take the 911,” I do not hesitate. To heck with everything else. I’ve only seen a 911-ish shape looming under a cover in the corner of D’s garage, and there is without question something very seductive about a veil, and then… lifting it. The opportunity to ride in a Porsche 911 Turbo Carrera 4 is not to be missed.

I get to D’s at the appointed hour, just as he is rolling the car out of the garage. Oh my, what a beautiful car and what beautiful sounds. There is nothing like a 911. And so I park the GTI, eagerly hop out and get into the Porsche. Correction: you don’t so much get into a Porsche as you put it on. Contrary to the minds eye - envisioning the greatness of the 911 and thus the car must be big - the car is diminutive and so is the fit.

The day is beautiful, clear as a bell, not too hot and there’s only a light breeze. Playing hooky with a friend and experiencing one of the greatest cars of all time, well, it just don’t get better than this. We drive at a moderate pace until the engine is fully warmed and the flat spots in the tires have a chance to work themselves out. Even with things toned down, I know this piece of machinery has goods not to be taken lightly. The Porsche is tight and quick. It all takes a while to get used to, especially all those wonderful mechanical sounds coming from the engine bay in the back of the car.

And then D puts his foot in it and Holy Mother of The Gods Of Internal Combustion! My torso and head crush into the seatback, my peripheral vision blurs and I can see D has his work cut out for him just keeping his shifts up with the engine bouncing off the rev limiter. I have never felt acceleration as intensely as this in a car, and this is only the prelude to what happens in the twisties.

Between Cerrillos and Madrid among hills and canyons the road becomes a snake and the pavement is in good condition. The Traffic Gods smile upon us and clear the way, and it is play time with all wheel drive and a horsepower to weight ratio of 1:8. Oh, and the brakes, which redefine how fast and deep you go into corners before thinking about applying them. Until I get accustomed to this, with every corner coming up real fast, I think I’m going to die. And into the corners I discover a flaw in the Porsche: the fully bolstered seat does not keep me in place given the lateral forces we experience. Small potatoes, it’s more a testament to how well this car sticks to the road. Things go by mind-blowingly quick and during a second’s reprieve afforded by a short straight, D says, “You’ll drive us back. That is, if you want to.”

My mind stumbles, I take a deep breath and consider the responsibilities to life and limb and machine and as we plunge into the next corner I grin a silly grin and say, “Sure!”

Lunch? Oh yeah. We have lunch. And we talk about - can you guess? - cars and other important guy stuff, and then D hands me the keys. So with some trepidation I put on the Porsche and manage to back it out of the parking space without crunching into anything and then get underway without stalling it. So far, so good. As we putter through the village I comment (with no disrespect to all the Grandmothers of the world), “I’ll probably drive like an Old Grannie.”

“Don’t worry about it… go for it,” replies D.

And so as we make our way back through aforementioned hills and canyons I ease into the car and sample (a fraction of) what it has to offer.

With windows open and the wail of the engine, we now need to raise our voices to be heard. Shouting, D reaffirms, “you’re doing fine… go for it.”

And I smile and in-between expletives undeleted, with hands firmly grasping the steering wheel which is giving me tons of feedback on what’s going on up front, I shout back, “Thanks, but… I can tell with this car… it would be easy to get in way above my head, and way too fast and… it’s decidedly uncool to wad up your friend’s car.” From the corner of my eye I see D swallow and nod.

“Thanks for that,” he says. The landscape and corners flash by and we get behind a slowpoke and when I pull out to pass, into the spirit of things D says, and this is a direct quote, “floor it.” My right foot follows his directive and the car leaps forward as the turbos come on with their insane hit of power, and momentarily stunned, I back off; the car calms a bit and D says, “you got him…” and I get back into the gas and we positively rip. The slowpoke fades into a time zone of history and we are gonesville.  Back in our lane I say something along the lines of, “holy shit.”

D says, “I may chip the car… there’s amazing potential in these engines.”

And I reply, “yeah, it feels a bit down on power.” Uh-huh, and we laugh and fly into three big sweepers and up and over a hill and… I decide to take a break and collect my thoughts and back off before the next curvy section. For a few moments we lope along and I give D my impressions.

Aside from the flat six and all the power it makes and all the music, oh, the music, I am most taken by the precise throttle and how easy it is to work in concert with the gearbox and shifter and clutch. Again the road tightens, and coming into the corners, downshifting, blipping the throttle and getting on the gas… the Porsche simply responds and puts me in a flow and it is addictive and I want to feel that rush. So I feed it and go faster, and faster…

It’s a great privilege to drive such a car. Many thanks, D.

Gordon Bunker

Redemption In Pi

The problem started in first grade with 0. For me it was the beginning of the end in proficiency with math. If 1 represents the presence of something and -1 represents the absence of something, why have this thing in the middle called zero? Something either exists or it doesn’t, there’s no in-between. Public education however made little room to accommodate pondering and so as I considered this mysterious integer the program moved on. Not paying attention to the new mysteries presented to class, pretty quickly I was lost.

The real slap in the face came when I realized creative problem solving or being close enough were not worthy of credit. Along about fifth grade I was struggling with a test in geometry. It was all about the theorems we were supposed to memorize. To this day I dislike the word theorem. Just the way it rolls around in my mouth, I want to spit it out. So the problem was, “Using the theorem show how many degrees are within the triangle.” Not remembering the foolish thing I got out a piece of tracing paper, put it over the triangle on the test sheet, got my ruler and traced one of the angles. I moved the paper around and lined the it up with the next angle in the triangle, traced it and then the next until I had three angles together which I measured with my protractor to be 178 degrees.

When the test results came back, I learned this answer and quite a few others was wrong. Close apparently, only counted in horse shoes and hand grenades, but c’mon, I worked hard for those 178 degrees! I took a look at all the dreaded red X’s and thought, “to hell with it. This is dumb,” (public education that is, not math) and started my career as an artist by doodling my way through math class and most every other. Note to parents: Whether mathematicians are smarter than artists is up for grabs but they have been smart enough to convince society they should be paid for what they do.

The speed at which Earth orbits the Sun recently got my curiosity. It had to be a big number, but just how big? The formula to find the circumference of a circle is 2 π r. Hey look! My calculator has a π key on it, I can do this. In this case, r, or the distance between our planet and star is 93,000,000 miles. One orbit takes 8,760 hours and my calculations told me we’re traveling at approximately 66,671 mph. Which is bookin’ it. This gives a whole new perspective to the concept of “sitting still.” Good thing space is mostly vacuum, otherwise the leading surface of our little planet would have one heck of a wind blowing straight down on it.

But what about this ‘approximate’ business? Well, it has to do with π. For most purposes we think of it as 3.14, but in fact it is a number which in decimal form goes on and on forever and never repeats itself. Thus we do not and can not know what the value of π is - what we use is close enough. Even though the answer to any calculation involving π and a few other constants like it is more an opinion, it is worth some, perhaps even full, credit.

Huh. Close, in math, does count.

Gordon Bunker