I’ve been a car fancier for a long time, but it took me a while to get into racing. My parents weren’t fans, and it wasn’t really a thing among the people I grew up around, so it never stuck with me. Stick-and-ball sports were way more accessible. Even if I wasn’t great, at least I could play them and gain some familiarity with the rules and concepts.
That changed when I started at Autoweek. Once I got to know the sport, got familiar with the cars, the rules and all the ingenious ways they’re made to go fast — and once I had driven on a track enough to have the barest frame of reference for how hard it would be to do what racing drivers do — I was hooked.
Because liking something is way more fun when you have like-minded people to like it with, and because I don’t think you can really understand performance cars fully until you start to understand racing, I’ve put a lot of thought into why racing people are such a small subset of car people overall.
Where do you fit in? Are you a fan, an obsessive or someone who wants to get into it but hasn’t yet? Are you totally uninterested? You, in other words, like racing?