October 2007 - Porsche Club of America – Northeast Region

well below 10 mph, Thomas’ engineer applied the brakes. It
was then when my boy’s magic world came crashing down for
he was completely unprepared for the horrific squeal of metal
on metal braking. It truly was deafening. Worse, the scraping
and screaming lasted a good twenty seconds. By that time the
boy had ducked behind his mother and steadfastly refused to
have anything to do with what he must have now perceived
as the his turncoat tormentor. No amount of pleading or reassurance
could persuade him to reconsider. There was no way
he was going to risk his life and limb aboard anything capable
of making that much of a racket. It didn’t end there either. For
any number of years afterward, he refused to ride in my Ferrari
or my 911. He had been spooked. And interestingly, as it turns
out, the second video tape was at least as responsible as dear
old Thomas.
A few years later when he was old enough, I began my attempts
to persuade Ian to try driving a kart, but to no avail.
He wouldn’t even go for ride with me at the local fun track
in one of the two-seater carts while we on vacation together
in Watkins Glen. What I only recently found out is that, along
with the diminutive tank engine, it was a few seconds of video
that had undone all my grand plans. For as it turns out, young
Ian also shared my admiration for the late Ayrton Senna.
Only recently he told me why up to now he refused to even
sit in a racing kart. Though utterly silent about it at the time,
the video of Senna’s accident had frightened him and in his
young mind he had no intention of experiencing a similar fate.
But luckily, unlike for most of us, this summer circumstances
changed and, for the first time, my son has begun to become
his own man. He had always claimed my fear of heights as his
own, despite never actually experiencing any known trauma
in that regard. But at our recent trip to Tremblant, he and
Joan achieved something I could never have even attempted.
They climbed straight up the side of the mountain, in the fog
crawling hand over hand the last hundred meters with Ian
pushing all the way to make the summit. He had miraculously
had the extraordinary experience of being able to confront a
pseudo-fear and completely vanquish it at the tender age of
nine years.
With that achievement, something crystallized in him that
day. At my next track event, where in Tremblant he had
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