The Hinge Point You Don't See Coming

In my hands is a white helmet and, next to it or inside it, I haven’t decided, a pair of gloves. Empty, because gloves are always empty until the exact moment they aren’t.

There is a couple beside me. Younger than me, probably, though the man is missing a lot of his teeth, which makes it hard to guess anything about him with confidence, and his wife is holding their baby with pride. He hugs her. He puts on his helmet. He leaves. She smiles at me, and I understand the smile, or I think I do, which might be its own kind of arrogance.

People stare. It’s the hair; it has to be the hair, it is my unintentional beacon to the world, the thing that gives me away before I’ve done anything to be given away for. They stare because there is a woman alone at a go-kart track on a Thursday night, and a woman alone anywhere on a Thursday night is apparently a puzzle that needs solving. They wonder where my boyfriend is. They wonder who I am waiting for. I am waiting for myself to figure out what it is I’m doing here, which is a different kind of waiting, the kind that doesn’t have an arrival time.

I think of Paul Newman. If you know me… and I mean really know me, you know that for the last several years I have thought about Paul Newman an unreasonable amount. I think of the photograph of him middle aged, alone on a kart track somewhere in the 1960s, not yet the man who would almost win Le Mans, not yet the man who would hold world records, not yet, in other words, the outlier he was about to become. I wonder if he knew. I wonder what it is like to be photographed at the exact hinge point of a life and not know it’s a hinge.

I love a dark horse. An outlier. The unusual. I have built a whole personality, possibly a whole life, out of loving those things, and here I am, apparently, trying to become one.

I get into the kart and I go. I work on my racing lines. My lap times. Small, correctable, quantifiable things, which is a relief, because so little else is.

When I am driving, my head goes clear. My chin tilts down and everything else, all of it, the whole apparatus of being a person who has a phone and a job and cities she keeps swinging between… just falls away, and I get to be present, briefly, unglamorously, in the world and in my own body, which is not something I get to do very often living the way I live, mostly online, mostly elsewhere.

Sometimes I run a great race. Other times I tell myself there’s always next time, which is either wisdom or the thing people say instead of having wisdom. I race teenagers. I race guys in their twenties. I race couples on dates who did not expect to be racing me. Occasionally I crash a birthday party, uninvited, in the friendliest possible sense of crash. The staff all know me by now. They are, every one of them, exceedingly kind. They give me pointers. They review my races with me afterward like coaches, like this is a thing that matters, which, increasingly, it does.

I do private lessons. The first time I show up, I am alone on the track, and I am terrified, because a small cluster of dads is taking turns stepping outside for cigarettes and watching me between drags. One of them points out that my boots are too heavy, that they’re slowing me down. My lap times are terrible. Genuinely, embarrassingly terrible.

I leave feeling a little bit lighter. Because I like being terrible at things. It means I am growing, or at least it means I have found something new to be inadequate at, which at a certain point in life is its own kind of gift. Outside, I turn, and I see the guy who just interviewed Toto Wolff on his podcast, holding his daughter’s hand, and I freeze, completely, a deer in headlights, some part of me reaching for hello and another part of me remembering he is a stranger, just a stranger, and yet it felt like a sign anyway, the way things do when you are already primed to be looking for one.

There are many more nights like that cold January night. Tucking my terminally ill dog into bed before heading back out for a late drive, which is a sentence I did not expect my life to contain. Realizing, with real and lasting amusement, that Formula 1 is, at its root, just glorified karting, dressed up in nine-figure sponsorships.

There are no women on the track. The monthly Grand Prix is all men, who look at me sideways, who seem, some of them, genuinely unhappy that I am there, though sometimes there are fun exchanges, real ones, and real improvement shown, mine and theirs. But it bothers me. The absence bothers me. So I build my own league.

Thirty women show up. I show every one of them the ropes. After two small events, I start getting emails — from F1 drivers, from engineers, from executives — all carrying some version of the same message: keep going, we need this.

So I am. I’ve put together an association now, with events in multiple cities, built for women, because someone had to build it. And it turned out that on a cold January night, alone in a corner, holding a helmet I didn’t know what to do with yet, that someone was me. My own hinge moment.

Months later, I sat at a racetrack in Canada watching IMSA, thinking about how Paul Newman had once raced on that very track. I remembered the photograph of him at middle aged, alone with a kart, not yet knowing what he was about to become.

I am middle aged now, too.

I don’t know what I’m about to become.

But I think I’ve already started.