The Outsider

It was on the banking at Daytona that I fell in love with the American V8. Those now hoping or at least expecting a tale of derring-do at 200mph are about to be sorely disappointed. It was 1981, I was 15, a passenger in an elderly Ford pick up truck and we were probably doing 35mph. I’m not quite sure what I was doing there, other than being on holiday with my father, but I expect it was part of some organised tour he’d booked.

Anyway, there it was. That noise. Budda-budda-budda. I didn’t know engines could make a sound like that. So low, so imperfect, so intoxicating. It spoke to me.

Then there was blonde, pretty Pat, wife of a family friend who drove me around downtown Atlanta in the middle of the night in her 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible, me taking the place of the baseball bat that usually lived on her passenger seat.