Somewhere between exhilaration and alliteration lies the truth about my feelings on driving the car I’d always wanted to drive – the Ariel Atom, which I drove courtesy of Lone Star Exotics, a dip into my savings and the nice people at Harris Hill Road.

The Ariel Atom accelerates from corners like a cattle prod deals with protestors

If you’re not familiar with the Ariel Atom, it’s like the Desert Eagle of cars – a fast way to get to supercharged hell in an exoskeletal hand-basket. It’s like an $80,000 go kart built with one aim in mind – to help collect 100mph June Bugs as you roar in and out of corners. To say the car has a wind shield is a bit of an exaggeration – I’m around six feet tall and my helmeted head was being dragged all over by the wind, while the spectacle-lens-sized “wind shields” collected maybe 50% of the bugs.

And don’t think I use go kart in a derogatory way – I just mean it’s not got cruise control, body work or any of that nonsense that slows you down and gets in your way. I say this, as I was fortunate enough to drive a Z06 on the same track – more on that later.

I arrived at the track, averaging over 41mpg in my Prius to meet the Atom at the gate. The track manager duly arrived in his RX8 and let us in, and asked what I normally drove. I pointed to the Prius. No-one else probably brought a hybrid to a race track I figured from his look of bemusement.

There were a few waivers to be signed and a bit of insurance to purchase, and then it was onto class room instruction. I had no idea about corners and braking and such, and Justin patiently explained some basics, before letting me take a marker out for a spin on the white board track. Keeping that sucker in large radius turns smoothly wasn’t easy, but I eventually got a racing line drawn.

My guess at the Harris Hill Road racing line

Then it was off to the track, and with Justin as my pilot (I still don’t feel that you drive the Atom, more that you pilot it), we took in a few laps of the course. Could I remember it. Not really, I was just surprised at exactly how much grip the thing had as we went around bends. And that there were no “oh sh!t” handles to hang onto. I’m a nervous passenger at best.

The track was a little bumpy in places, and the suspension set up unforgiving, which made for some hairy moments, and ultimately, in part of the suspension snapping. Yes, snapping.

Justin noticed immediately, and as we pulled to a stop, I noticed the front right wheel was in the air. We returned to the pit lane on three wheels, and Justin said, “Welcome to the world of race cars.” as he went off to get it fixed.

During the process, and to give me some track time, I was put in a Z06 – some sort of Corvette for which I had little respect or desire. I think of Corvette’s as firmly American cars, and thus imagine that they go in straight lines between Gulp ‘n’ Guzzles on the Interstate at 75 mph as if that’s fast. Oh, and Smokey’s bandit drove one once.

The Corvette was surprisingly nippy

The z06 was for me everything that the Atom wasn’t. Comfortable, having a seat belt rather than a harness, and a roof rather than a deluge of June Bugs. It also had a little heads up display thingy projected on the inside of the windshield, where the Atom had no speedo connected. It was also shockingly easy to drive, and was more fun than I thought. I realize now that it has a 7.0l 505HP V8, which probably explains why it was quite nippy.

Remember, I can’t drive fast cars, and this car was undoubtedly much faster than I could drive, but also rather civilized. All in all, a great car to learn the track on, and something I’m really glad that I got to drive.

A little later, the Atom was back with all four wheels touching the ground (pilot permitting), and Justin got into the passenger seat and let me do a lap. He pointed me where I should go – there were orange plastic cones at the salient turn-in points – and waved his arms to indicate “faster”, though rarely slower.

Atomized June Bugs

He spotted a plume of dust emerging from the fast bend at the end of the pit lane and urged me to slow down as it meant another driver had spun off. I didn’t really think about it and slowed down, and I guess there could have been a car in the middle of the track around the corner from one of my fastest parts of the course. No-one was hurt. We carried on.

I think he may have planned more practice laps, but pretty soon after the 4th turn on third lap as my confidence was growing, I span off the track and into the grass. I had simply hit the throttle too hard after an apex, something that’s never really a problem in an underpowered hybrid, but causes a bit of a stink in a 300 horsepower rocket sled. Of course I forgot to push on the brake and push in the clutch, which led to more spinning than was absolutely necessary, but the car survived, and Justin seemed fine. Remarkably relaxed about it and didn’t take me out, ground me, or give me a sound thrashing. What a nice chap.

Harris Hill Road courtesy of Trackipedia

We went back to the pit lane to have the car checked over, and then it was my turn to go out alone. With my shaken confidence, I trundled around the track at a leisurely pace, forgetting where to turn, and to use all of the width of the track. Over five laps I decreased my lap time by 19 seconds as I go the hang of it, but it was really quite terrifying.

Terrifying as there’s no power steering, no power brakes, and I was always trying to figure out if my foot was actually on the brake pedal or not as I hoped to lose enough speed to make the hairpin. Terrifying as you can feel every bump and I was gripping the steering wheel to stop it from shimmying too much, and trying not to let my head get too buffeted about to see as I pulled away on the straights.

Terrifying as there were other cars on the track, some driven by professional race drivers. Now in truth, these were all perfect gentlemen, so they didn’t seem to mind waiting in line behind me until I noticed them in the egg sized mirrors and pulled over and waved to let them pass. I guess they felt safer that way too.

I pulled in for my recap from Justin, who told me I could pick up a time in the bends by trusting the car more. I was tense and alert and on edge – exciting and I would later realize exhausting, and Justin asked me about my favorite parts.

“I like accelerating in straight lines,” I said, “and the really fast bend at the end of the pit lane.”

Out I went again, getting a little faster each time, singing to myself to ease my way through the fear, looking forward to my favorite fast bend.

Predictably enough, my GoPro Hero2 flew off my helmet and onto the track. As one driver later described it, it landed “close to the racing line.” Annoying at the time, but quite a compliment I suppose. Which meant I didn’t get any footage of my fastest laps. In fact, most of the footage I got was barely usable, as my helmet was being pushed up and down by the accelerating stillness of the unwitting air through which it sliced.

I got back out on the track and picked up the camera and got back to piloting. I got my lap time down to  1:41 before I hit turn one faster still. Later in the club room, a Porsche driving instructor explained that the camber was odd at the bend, and that you had to get the nose of your car to dive if you were going to make it round. Not knowing this at the time, I hit it with my nose presumably in the air. I don’t remember too much for a short instant, but this time I did jam on the brakes as I span off the track.

Again, Justin was calm after he walked over to inspect the damage to the $80k car. There was nothing too wrong with the car, but that was my last lap for the day, and told me to come in on the next lap.

It wasn’t until then that I realized that I’d been doing the whole track in 4th gear. There was plenty of power in 4th gear to pull away from any turn. And I really wasn’t ready to learn gear changing (at which I am generally proficient in a road car) while also learning about racing lines and piloting brutal race machines.

My time was decidedly slow, but I’m okay with that. I think some people get around in the 1:25 range, and quite possibly with slower cars. I doubt I got up to 100mph at any point – maybe not even above 70mph. But when I was accelerating in straight lines, I was golden.

I walked away having learned a great deal, and I met my objective of having a lot of fun. In the club house, I spoke to other drivers who encouraged me to get a Mazda MX5 (Miata) to practice in. I saw a dazzling bevvy of cars described by three letters – GTR, NSX and so on. I met Justin who has a love of fast cars and sharing that with the world. And I realized that I quite enjoy driving cars around tracks.

In retrospect, I may have chosen to learn more about driving before I got in the Atom. Unlike the Desert Eagle, it requires a bit of skill to shoot around a track. But you can still have fun in an Atom. Even if you don’t even remember that you’re not changing gears.

If you want to get your own footage as a souvenir – I’d recommend  you go for the suction cup mounted GoPro Hero2, not the helmet mount that I used.

So here’s a video of the Ariel Atom pootling about on Harris Hill Road in San Marcos – just south of Austin, Texas. This is my first time driving a somewhat fast car on a racetrack (aside from the Z06 I had just driven, which was the first car I’d ever driven on the track). So I’m pretty new to all this. And so I’m pleased that I managed to stay on the track for so long.

The footage is a little wonky, as the GoPro Hero2 was strapped to my helmet (bad idea – see this GoPro Hero2 driving Fail video from later in the day), and my helmet was strapped to my head which was on my body and in a car with girders for suspension on a bumpy track. The funny thing is that the footage is perhaps hard to watch if I’m going above, say, 50mph. And that’s exactly the feeling you get driving the car. That your vertical hold is going, and that you’re skidding across the tarmac like a stone being skimmed. See the part where I spin off into the grass when the car concurs that I have all the control of a rotating stone.

The View from the helmet. Grassy

Thanks to Justin from Lone Star Exotic Rentals for his eternal patience, and for being quite calm when I span his $80,000 car off the track. I didn’t suggest that he add a mulch bag to the side of his beautiful car, though I did collect more grass in it than I anticipated.

I really like the movie Snatch, in which Vinnie Jones carries a large hand gun, which he describes as quite the opposite of the replica blank firing pistols which his would-be assailants are pointing at him.

His is the Desert Eagle 50 caliber. A hand gun that can blow a cow’s head clean off. That can stop dead the hammering piston of a fire truck‘s Detroit diesel from ten paces. That would surely give you a bit of a sore wrist if you actually shot it at someone.

Dessert Eagle - one who hovers near firing ranges looking for flan - courtesy Bobbfwed

Before I had seen the movie, I had taken it upon myself while working in Chicago, to feel the power of the beast. To hold the gorilla in my hand, and to fire some melon sized lead at a piece of innocent paper. I had carped my diem when a colleague had left me with a rental car after leaving Hooters drunk (as an English person, the notion of Hooters amused me at the time – now there’s one in Nottingham) to while some time before getting to the O’Hariest of Hairies.

I happened upon a firing range, and walked up to the counter. I surveyed the array of firearms before me, swaying slightly from the pitchers of college kid delivered beer, and said in true kid in a candy shop certainty,

“I want that one.”

Some small discussion later, I was walking to the range, with the advice of the shop keeper ringing in my ears. Of course I was familiar with firing guns, I had declared, now if you could just show me the safety catch…

I went to my stall amidst the pitter patter of tiny bullets, and loosed a few Cuban missiles at the target with a hefty ker-blam from the Eagle. Louder than the other guns on the range, I realized that I was drawing attention.

Shooters (and presumably they had shot guns before) peered around the lane walls to see what the calamity was all about. The inebriate foreigner was neither taking names or kicking ass, but was certainly hitting the target 10 feet in front of him while summoning the essence of  thunder storm claps to herald in the spinning slugs. They stopped to talk to me. I grinned. I was that guy with the biggest gun, and it felt good.

The shopkeeper’s advice, in case you wondered was simply this: “don’t limp wrist it.”

Something to live your life by.

It’s been a long while now since I’ve always wanted to drive an Ariel Atom (sic). Probably since I saw it first on Top Gear.Watching the clip again, I can see exactly why it appealed – I did indeed enjoy driving motorbikes and had the odd sports bike of my dreams. And now it isn’t really appropriate for me to take life and limb into my own tank-slapping hands. The idea of something that accelerates like a bike but doesn’t require a whole heap of skill to keep my legs attached to my body appeals very much.

And it’s supercharged. I’ve never driven a supercharged anything. The closest I got was when my good pal Andy got married and had to drive me from Hoton to Leicester to pick up some disco lights I’d promised to get for his wedding. Unfortunately I was without transport, so he had to drive me and the lights himself. On the morning of his wedding. On the plus side, it was in a supercharged Jaguar XK8. Which was pretty swift for dispatching of such best man tasks.

So I decided to one day drive an Ariel Atom. I had toyed with owning one, but some things it just doesn’t make sense to own. (Not so a fire truck – who wants to rent a fire engine when you could own one?) When I get maudlin and morose, I tend to stay up late at night watching youtube videos of cars driving fast – and drag racing. The antidote to this is to actually make a plan, so I duly did so, and learned that there was a school in Virginia where you can race them around a track under close supervision. It was going to be a pain to get there, and expensive to boot.

A few weeks back, I was gob-smacked to learn that you could drive them here in Austin – well San Marcos to be precise – at Harris Hill Road track. And that’s what I’m going to do at 8:30am tomorrow morning. It’s exciting, and it will leave me I’m sure with some good Hero2 footage, as well as a sense of emptiness that one of my decade long ambitions has been fulfilled.

They didn't waste any time in the body shop

Harris Hill is nuts. Granted, if you’ve seen my footage of Austin go-kart driving, I know nothing about racing lines, brake dragging around corners, or grip and such. But I’ve watched footage of people racing around the track and it looks bananas. What you can’t see from the aerial view below:

Harris Hill Raceway Track From Above

is that there’s a huge elevation change. The top right part – the s-shaped bend hides a dirty secret. There’s a huge rise as you go into the tight bend, followed by a huge drop. I don’t really know too much about corners – there’s something called an apex, which is defined in mathematical terms, and also in terms of where you want to be turning hardest, and presumably slowest as you go around a bend in any given car. I know that sometimes you can’t see the apex when you go into a bend – it might be further round than you can see as you approach. But to have an apex at a different elevation while trying to manage the limits of grip in a corner while you’re also trying to race gravity towards the tarmac is surely a challenge.

Well it would be if I were anywhere near the limits of the car. I’ll probably drive really slowly around the bends. I like accelerating in straight lines, and that’s really why I’m driving the Ariel Atom at the Harris Hill Road track. That and the supercharger. Footage to follow, assuming I remember to turn the camera on.

So no sooner have I emptied my garage of the London Taxi than I suddenly have an inkling to own a fire truck. Don’t ask why. I mean, I used to like “The Big Red Machine” when I used to watch WWE wrestling, and I am a terrible show off, so between the two things, it’s only natural to want a vast vehicle that takes up a huge amount of space and is impractical to own (e.g. a London cab with no AC in Texas).

Used Fire Trucks abound at govdeals.com

As my investigations into fire engine ownership expand, here are some pitfalls I’ve already pit fallen into. If you’re in the same boat of fire truck desire, please learn from my mistakes.

1. Don’t use craigslist. There are many things that the list of Craig is useful for – hooking up with felching sailors in bathrooms, selling Subaru Brats, complaining about women and so forth. Buying fire trucks isn’t one of them. Instead, head over to govdeals.com. All you need is a cell phone and an email address and you can register to buy all manner of used hoopla from Uncle Sam’s regional cousins.
2. Don’t do it without a fireman. There are many of them, and they work odd shifts which means they’re often free for days at a time. And they know all about their trucks. They know that you need a special CDL to drive them. They know what pump duty means. And they probably know that tires are $500 a pop, so don’t pop them. Also, they’ll remind you of the price of diesel, and the distance to the auction location, and might even help you with the math for figuring out that half the cost of the truck might be driving it home.

3. Get storage lined up before you start bidding. Sounds kind of obvious, but you might not be able to park it in your garage, unless you’re John Travolta and your jumbo is overseas.

4. Go for pumps over ladders. Me, I’m excited by ladders that would allow me to shoot photos from unusual vantage points. Everyone else wants water squirted all over. I still haven’t figured out where you get the water from – I guess you could suck it up from a river when no-one is looking. I doubt people would look kindly on you if you filled up at the nearest hydrant, and you probably need a funny spanner to do so.

So I’m into the process now, and on the hunt for a good truck. Many seem to be used once a year in parades, and I doubt would make it the 1000 miles back to my house from the auctions. They seem to have incredibly low mileage (10,000 miles in 30 years seems like perhaps it was owned by an old lady who only took it to the shops to buy catfood once a month), and I believe it’s hours more than miles that are important. When I get one, you’ll be the first to know.

Today was opening day at Austin’s indoor electric Go Karting track – K1 Speed. I went along to have a go. They have a bunch of packages, and I just got five races which I think came out at just over $15 per race, and gave me free membership to the K1 club and everything that goes with it.

the older I get, the faster I was

I didn’t have to wait for a race, and got straight into the car and was prepped with helmet and helmet sock, while someone explained what the flags that the multiple overseers might wave at me. I promptly forgot everything they told me as I fiddled to mount my new helmet mounted camera on top of the skull saver while keeping my visor down, and sneaking my glasses onto my hooter.

After a few minutes of sitting, our cars were energized. There’s some kind of skynet deal where they arrest your progress remotely – sometimes limiting your car to a snail’s pace (at the beginning and end for example), but they didn’t tell me that, so I just thought the karts were exceedingly sluggish. After the warm up lap, the restraint nodules were remotely cut, and the cut and thrust on the track began in earnest, all captured by the HD camera atop my noggin.

I was pretty awful, but in the 14 laps I picked up a few things, and they gave me a pretty print out of my lap times (and everyone else’s) at the end. Realizing that I really don’t know the first thing about driving, I coupled the race data, a website about racing lines, and the footage to figure out what I was doing wrong. Pretty much everything.

The course is all turning and trying not to get hit the person in front – there were only four people in my race, and no-one caught me as I started at the back and kept up with the #13 kart all through the race. It seems eminently safe, which I don’t hold against it – it was a good mix of skill (or lack thereof) and competition. The experience was a complete blast though, and I look forward to racing friends, enemies and anonymous strangers there again. And getting more footage. And plotting out what I think the racing line might be on a course map.

So tomorrow is the day that one can first ride the electric go-karts of K1Speed in Austin. From 11am to 11pm, the North Austin track will be witness to the emission-free racing that the city has been so sorely lacking. It’s a soft opening mind you, so the big press releases are still to come. Nevertheless, I am ready to race my tiny cart around the track as fast as possible between my day job and kickboxing class. All electric. All the time.

You can join a league, or join a club it seems. If you join the club, you get free helmet and helmet sock rentals for the year, in addition to being able to laud it over your like-minded chums by comparing laps and positions online. My plan is to show up for a 14 lap “turn up and ride” race, which apparently costs $20. 14 laps sounds like a lot – surely enough to get used to the track and fellow competitors. I’m thinking of showing up in mid-afternoon on the first day of opening. Who goes karting at 2pm on a Friday? It’s not exactly corporate team building time, so I’m guessing a few unemployed people and students and me.

Luckily I just took delivery of my GoPro Hero2, which I can hopefully mount on my helmet and use to record HD video of my karting experience. Hopefully…

So I sold my black cab today to a man I will call Mr. International for the sake of his rotund modesty. He is essentially the Texan Uncle Steve – a man who has inspired me in so many ways over the years. We had spoken on the phone many times, and he called at 8am this morning to say he was in Austin, and was headed over. He arrived in a motorhome towing a trailer, apologized, and then promptly blocked the toilet in some kind of Papa Lazarou negotiating routine. It took me a while to figure out that his earring was a cutlass thrust through his lobe. It looked like a cocktail accoutrement cast in metal. It may well have been.

I felt vilified that he paid close to what I was asking after just walking around it and watching me back it out of the garage. Even I did more due diligence when I fell for it’s black curves over a year ago. He told me that he’d bought Dom Deluise’s black cab in the 1980s and had once taken seven strippers home in the back, adding that though there was seating for five, they didn’t seem to mind sitting in each others’ laps.

There was the usual car dealer sketchiness over which bits of paper to sign and who was going to do it and when – I expected nothing less from a self-professed car trader. I drove it up on the trailer, turned off the “taxi” light, and said goodbye to the man, the car, the two dogs and his friend, as they set off into the distance, presumably to foul other latrines in their search for profit.

It was quite a ride, owning a black cab. I heartily recommend it to anyone. As for mine, it’s his wife now.

I am pretty easily swayed by the ability to make time lapse sequences. Like a boy with a hammer looking for nails, I blindly charge in with my camera and laptop and think that anything that moves should be filmed. Here are a few things that I’ve learned about avoiding some of the common mistakes that lapsers make:

1. Avoid flicker – this is mainly caused by automatic mode on the camera selecting a particular ISO and white balance for an individual shot / frame. The trick is to pick an ISO and white balance setting, and use this consistently across the shots. In addition you can leave the aperture set on your automatic lens, or trick your camera into thinking you have a manual lens. This is a bit more advanced, and involves unscrewing your lens a little after setting the aperture. See “the lens twist trick” on this great video.
2. Use deflickering software on your sequence if you’ve used Aperture Priority mode to allow changes to shutter speed at a fixed aperture and ISO setting. This is useful if the lighting is going to change, for example if you have a shoot that lasts during sunrise or sunset. Free software includes LRTimeLapse.
3. Never forget that time lapse photography is essentially the key to time travel.
4. You can use fancy cameras, lots of equipment and make stunning videos – you can tilt, pan, zoom, shoot multiple exposure things for HDR time lapse (I think I just shivered at the prospect). Or you can use a little device that does a basic video for you. Looking at the Amazon reviews of the Brinno, that might be the kiddo for me. It looks like the TLC100 has no viewfinder so was getting poor reviews, but the TLC200 is well thought of. I just ordered mine, so time, as they say, will tell.

Black Cabbing in the USA

Very dangerous over short distances, the Austin FX4. I took it to Contigo – a cocktails and bistro bar food kind of place, courtesy of HGTV this evening. The bar is a stone’s throw from my house, and just beyond the borders of the neighborhood. The furthest my London cab has been in the USA without a trailer in over a year.

Thrilled by the experience, and bouyed by some Pimms and nuts, I decided to treat the old girl to some fuel oil, and trundled to the nearest petrol station for fifteen dollars of diesel. I say trundled. I got up to a giddying 45 miles per hour on Airport Boulevard, before veering off to refuel.

For some reason, I’ve never really used the beast on the open road, but tonight, after stopping to climb up to the balcony of a million dollar home to take a photo of her, I let rip and went running errands. Cherrywood Coffeehouse. In a taxi. Fiesta. In a taxi. Everything is so much more interesting. In a taxi.

So if you’re interested in adding interest to your life, consider buying a London Cab in the USA. Mine, is for sale. And I’ll probably regret selling it later, but they say it’s better to regret something you’ve done, than something you haven’t. And besides, I need room for a fire truck. As my esteemed spriritual counsellor says, you’re never going to regret having had a fire truck.

USA - This is why I can't have nice things