Yahoo Autos How Old Is Too Old to Race?
When precocious pop star Aaliyah released her first album at 14, she chose to title it Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number. When she married her mentor, singer and producer R. Kelly, approximately a year later, the state of Illinois agreed with her parents that age was, in fact, a little more than a number, and consequently annulled the union. It may be possible to have an old soul, but that doesn’t absolve a person of their youth.
Alas, the reverse is also true. In my morning qualifying club race this past weekend, I had to drive my Plymouth Neon off-track at the start to avoid a damaged car, and consequently found myself trying to make my way through some slower traffic that had slipped by while I was mowing the lawn. One of those cars, a Spec Miata, was kind of bobbing and weaving around the end of every turn in a manner that seemed calculated to discourage me from passing. Not to worry; I had a little bit of horsepower on him and I used it to make a pass on the way into Mid-Ohio’s Turn One.
Around the time I had my doors past his front wheel, he turned in on me hard enough to-I kid you not-drop a filling out of one of my teeth. Since it was a club race and not the last lap of a Pirelli World Challenge event, I dropped back and let him by. In the Keyhole, I made an inside pass and he hit me again, this time putting his wheel into the other side of my car. By the time I finally got around him, at the end of the next lap, he’d bopped me twice more.
Needless to say, after the race I decided to have a chat with this fellow. "I was in the Neon," I said. "What happened out there?"
"You kept turning in on me!" was his response. Things went downhill from there, but in the middle of it he said something like, "I’m 60 years old, I’m not going to fight you."
"I’m 46," was my response, "and I just want you to stop running into me." He walked away and we didn’t speak any more. The more I thought about our conversation, however, the more I believed in his honesty. He seemed like a nice fellow who was genuinely confused about my actions. Maybe I was the bad guy here-caught up in the red mist of having fallen back in the pack, trying to make time against slower cars. Could I have been in the wrong?
So I went and talked to the three drivers who had seen the incidents. Two of them said that I was 100-percent in the right and that the Miata had turned into me. The third driver said he only saw the first two hits before focusing on his own battles, but that I hadn’t done anything wrong either time. To my annoyance, none of us had any video. I texted my wife, Danger Girl, and told her to bring the GoPro to the track for the afternoon race, just in case things deteriorated further.
At that point, I was faced with two things I believed to be true:
The Miata driver was responsible for the contact, not me
The Miata driver sincerely believed it was the other way around.
At that point, I started to wonder: Did the Miata driver simply hit me accidentally, because he didn't see me? After all, I know for a fact that I don't see as well as I did 20 or even just 10 years ago, particularly at night. There are many vision changes associated with aging. The one that strikes me is the narrowing of peripheral vision.
The next morning, I reported to my doctor for an emergency physical. I was feeling a little paranoid about my own age-related function. After lecturing me about my waistline, he measured me at 20/15 vision (with glasses) and "blind as a bat" without them. He said my peripheral vision was still excellent. But he also told me that the next decade would significantly reduce my ability to make quick visual identifications.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial air travel, feels the same way. The agency has raised its mandatory retirement age for jumbo-jet pilots from 60 to 65, and it plans to let Gulfstream pilots go to 70. But that’s the hard stop, and only thanks to considerable pressure from pilots' unions. It’s not that the government agency doesn't trust the old hands to make sound decisions; experienced pilots are consistently better at making choices than younger ones. It’s about vision, plain and simple.
I’ll be 60 years old in 13 years and a few months. It seems like a long way off, until I consider the fact that I can remember being 33 like it was yesterday. What if, 13 years from now, I find myself bumping into my fellow drivers? Will I have the moral courage to walk away, or will I convince myself that it’s not really that big of a problem? What if the problems start sooner? What if they start when I turn 50? What about tomorrow?
Frankly, I’m willing to accept the risk of sharing the track with older drivers. Club racing shouldn’t be like Logan's Run-and if you chuckled at that, then you’re an old hand too. It should be a place where drivers of all ages can compete according to their abilities. My crew chief is a little angry about the damage to my doors, but I’m not going to let it keep me up at night. I say we all go race, regardless of age.
But there’s a problem. My son will be eligible to race with NASA at 13 and the SCCA at 14. If I see a 60-year-old driver hit my kid for no reason, I am going to lose my mind over it. There’s a lot of risk that I’ll accept for myself, but not for a child, whether that child is mine or someone else’s. So I’m not sure my opinion about this will stay the same in the years to come.
One of the drivers who talked to me about the incident was a young guy: fit, trim, wrinkle-free, confident behind the wheel. "They need to kick these old guys out" was his opinion on the matter. I didn’t share my fear of becoming one of those "old guys" sooner rather than later, and I didn’t agree with him at the time. However, I can see where he’s coming from.
But as my son and I waited to get the official results from that afternoon’s race-I won my class, thanks for asking-I saw one of my region’s oldest drivers sitting on a trackside bench. This veteran racer is about to turn 80 years old and I wanted my boy to meet him so he could tell his fellow SCCA racers about it in the decades to come. "How’d your race go?" I asked.
"It was great," the man said. "In fact, I set a personal track record in my car. I wasn’t in a position to win the race, but I was feeling good, so I dropped out of the pack, got some clear air, and knocked three seconds off my best-ever lap." The time he set would have put him on the pole of quite a few club-race classes.
Think of actor and racer Paul Newman. In the photo at the top of this page, Newman was about to compete in the HSR Rolex Historic Enduro at Daytona International Speedway on November 5th, 1999; at the time, he was approaching his 75th birthday. A frequent and beloved competitor in SCCA events-always under the name "P.L. Newman"-the man took a class victory at the 24 Hours of Daytona at the age of 70, and continued to be a skilled and fearsome competitor for more than a decade after that, defying everything we assume about age. Much like my 80-year-old colleague in my local SCCA region.
I congratulated the gentleman on his day's achievement, and my son and I headed back to pack up for the day.
"He’s really old," my son observed, "but he’s really cool. And it sounds like he’s pretty fast."
"Age," I replied, "ain’t nothing but a number. And his number isn’t up yet."
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