A while back in my pre-Ti days and still a jobbing freelance hack, I had an idea for a story. It was to produce as learned a treatise as I was capable of generating concerning the true meaning of the word ‘handling’. It is a vast subject full of detail, nuance and varied areas of investigation, but when it had been commissioned and I’d sat down to write it, it boiled down to one astonishingly simple conclusion.
So simple it could be expressed in a single sentence fewer than 10 words long. I was as surprised as you. And, yes, of course I should tell you what those words are, but the embers of the freelancer’s instinct to recycle still smoulder within. Besides if the subject was worth a full feature then, it’s worth one now. But I’m afraid to say this is not that feature, even if the idea for it sprang therefrom.
What I needed for that story was an image. Something that leapt off the page, grabbed the reader’s attention and forced them to read the first sentence, whereafter my words would hopefully do the rest. I never doubted what that image needed to be; regardless of how relevant or otherwise it might be to the story I was about to tell, it had to be a photo of an interesting car in a state known to those who talk in such terms as ‘fully lit’. By which I mean travelling at significant speed through a corner, its trajectory seemingly unrelated to its angle of attack, smoke pouring from its arches. A high speed drift, in other words.
