A couple of months ago, Texas Motor Speedway asked me to come out for some drag racing one Friday night. The track lets everything from mild daily drivers to all-out dragsters race to see who’s fastest down pit road, and my car’s 145 horses just wouldn’t do. So, I roped my mom into it.
And thus begins the story of how my mom spent an entire night contemplating the best and most thorough way to disown me.
(Full disclosure: Texas Motor Speedway invited mom and I to drive four hours up to the track, and didn’t make us pay for a night of drag racing. They probably got a kick out of us losing.)
My first mistake was in telling her that you could bring your everyday, drive-to-work car out there and not be embarrassed, but I was desperate. I needed her 420-horsepower 2015 Hyundai Genesis to even have the slightest chance at not embarrassing myself. I had to get her to go with me somehow, and that wasn’t by saying we were going to get destroyed. I also had a small bit of hope in us.
I should not have had that much hope, because we did not win. We lost, badly. Every person we drove up to asked us if we were “really drag racing” a slate-gray sedan that looks like the kind of car your divorce lawyer would drive to court, and mom said during one of my runs, people in the crowd turned to look at each other.
“That’s one of them Hyundai Genesises!” she told me they said. “A four-door!”
She spent the entire night, in between our losses, shaking her head at me and attempting to grip her hands around my neck. She wasn’t mad that we went, but mad that I put us on a stage, in front of a crowd, where we lost. She doesn’t like to lose.
But we had fun, and that’s what matters. We just need a faster car next time—or perhaps faster drivers.
(You may notice that there’s no GoPro footage of my mother drag racing in the video above, and that’s because we are not very smart and did not realize the GoPro wasn’t on for the majority of our four runs down pit road. The small bit of footage we did get, unfortunately, was of me—losing.)