The older I get the better I was…

I am a legend – In my own mind… 

I guess that my love affair with cars, especially small cars, started pretty early in life. Now that I think about it, my relationship with Christ paralleled my car hobby experience.

I began to race slot cars in the early 1960’s and was actually quite good at it. All the many trophies I won in my slot car career hit the trash can a few years back in a giant garage cleanup. This was a time when that sport hit a high point and there were tracks all over in Phoenix where I grew up.

Eventually, I happened into a hobby shop where I befriended one of the co-owners of the shop. Rich had been a test driver for General Motors at their Mesa proving ground. Rich, his wife, and his parents ran the hobby shop and it was not long before I discovered they were Christians. This was about the same time that I came to embrace Christ in faith through the witness of some students where I went to college in Arizona. These things converged in my life at the same time. With Rich’s coaching I began to run small timed parking lot and race course slalom events and, eventually, I decided to try to get my SCCA competition license to compete in road racing.

Now there were several ways to accomplish obtaining your license back then but I decided to go to a new driving school that had just been introduced: Bob Bondurant’s School of High Performance Driving. For those of you that follow NASCAR you may recognize that name as it has become the school that even experienced NASCAR racers rely on to hone their road racing skills. In recent years Bondurant has become famous for training drivers of political leaders and corporate executives to give them the driving skills to prevent ambushes, assassinations, and terrorist attacks on limousines or other transportation vehicles of high profile persons.

So off I went to Bondurant’s School which was then located at the Orange County Raceway. Bob Bondurant and his lead instructor Ron LaPeer (Datsun Factory Team) taught all the classes. Most of the classes were in racing prepared Datsun 1600 or 2000 Roadsters and a 510 sedan the school furnished. I can remember flying into corners using what I thought was the best line and having Bondurant himself sitting beside me in the passenger seat reach over and pull the wheel over to where the really fast line was.

I was living the dream and thought I was the next Mario Andretti but at the end of the first two of five days I was failing miserably. It wasn’t the driving that was the problem because I could drive OK. I had the worst case of inner ear problems I have ever experienced. I was nauseous and vomiting throughout the day.

Driving or riding in a race car all day long sounds like a dream but the constant cornering and braking G-forces are like driving on a twisty mountain road all day long. I had never been subjected to that constant assault on my inner ear before. Bondurant called me into his office and told me that I was going to fail the course and I would never be able to get my competition license if this problem persisted. He suggested that he would just give me a refund for the course and send me home.

I went back to the motel that night and prayed and asked God what He wanted me to do. I did not hear an audible voice but I recall the impression that I should stay and stick it out. It was almost like God told me, “I’ve been waiting for you to come to the end of yourself. Put aside your pride and rely on Me in this and all the other areas of your life”. The next day I got to the track and felt better. I never threw up again and graduated with the rest of the class. I raced the car you see pictured all over the Western U.S.

How many times in a lifetime have I heard that same familiar message from God, “I’ve been waiting for you to come to the end of yourself. Put aside your pride and rely on Me in this and all the other areas of your life.” You would think I would get the message by now but I am still growing, too.

Today, we take for granted a lot of the safety innovations on cars, tracks, and drivers’ equipment but in the 1960’s racing was a lot more dangerous, even for us amateurs. I went to a track out of state and had to talk to the chief steward to get his signature on some paperwork. He asked me if I had heard about the last event held there and went on to explain the chain reaction accident that had happened that resulted in several deaths.

The only details I recall of his chilling explanation was that a car hit the end of pit entrance wall. There were barrels that had been used to divide the track from the pits and these had been filled with rocks to weigh them down and make the wall solid. The car hit the barrels so hard they broke open and the force hurled the boulders they contained into the pits killing a number of pit crew members. Five or six people perished and many more were injured.      

One weekend I arrived at an out of town race track and someone I knew came up and told me that the chief Bondurant instructor, Ron LaPeer, was dead. Ron died from a broken neck when his Datsun Roadster rolled over in a freak racing accident in Kansas. He was survived by his wife and a child.

I realized that this would never be a career for me – always a hobby. I recognized I was not a pro like Ron – I was good but not great. I recall after contemplating Ron’s passing that I wanted to make my life to count for something and it was not too long later that I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ.

It would have been hard for me to store a race car back in my single days with Campus Crusade and hard for me to maintain my competition license. To keep your SCCA racing credentials back then you had to race twice a year.  I had seen other drivers try to race twice a year and they were indeed dangerous because they lost their racing coordination with the long gaps between races. Soon, Sue and I met and were married and then our first child Christy came along and the race car was sold. Yes, I wish I had it now, but it would have been kicking around in the garage all these years with us tripping over it.

My original link to car racing, my friend Rich, passed away a few years ago. At his funeral I met other young men he had mentored in cars and in life, by his example. That has given me a burden to try to be an example to others during their tough teenage years.

It seems as though many young men in that time and today are just like I was. We got the idea that our parents were idiots and went out seeking advice from others. Unfortunately, sometimes we got poor advice from friends (the blind leading the blind) or from others who were not the best examples. I feel very fortunate that God directed me into the little hobby shop that resulted in my friendship with Rich and eventually used that in guiding me towards Jesus.

Along the way I have raced sprint go karts, enduro go karts, mini off-road cars and even radio controlled cars with my son, when he was young. These days I have a few small Microcars and they are not nearly as fast as the Mini was. They are cute and they make people laugh and smile - especially children. This is a great source of joy for me. Perhaps I can be used of God to bring joy to people and to bring a love of God to their lives in a unique way.

Roaring down the straightaway at Riverside International Raceway, Phoenix International Raceway, or Willow Springs Raceway and throwing the Mini into a 4 wheel drift through the wide sweeping turns at 110MPH, while passing other cars on the inside all while with the spectators going wild with cheering and applause, only happens in an occasional dream after having pizza for dinner…  

^{PS 71:18&19} Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come. Your righteousness reaches to the skies, O God, you who have done great things. Who, O God, is like you?

Richard Lewis
Pathway Christian Church
Riverside, California