I venture out and into the realm of online, generally beset with emails I should respond to, tweet replies I shouldn’t, and bits of news I wish I hadn’t seen in the first place. And then I find myself slowly ambling back to 1980s rally videos.
It’s not so much that I surf the web so much as I am carried along on its currents. My sustenance is videos such as this, a ripped TV broadcast from a British rally, the National Breakdown Rally, not a part of the World Rally Championship.
In it we are greeted with an interview from Michèle Mouton, the almost-champion of the 1982 WRC and the most successful woman driver in rallying if not racing. Here we get to see her character more than just her wins and losses, joking about how British weather sucks, how the business of being a pro driver works and how she sees challenges as things she wants to take on and overcome. It’s a good vibe.
And we also get to hear wild Audi Quattro inline-five noises, along with crazy slides by everyone in attendance. A favorite of mine is Malcolm Wilson, pictured at the top of this post, then running a private Audi Quattro. He now runs M-Sport, the non-factory Ford team that just won the WRC.
These videos replenish me, recharge me, refill me. I go to their source like a feeding ground, gulping them in like they were krill and I was a whale.