Silicon Valley Nation: The hairy edge of engineering at 150 mph

SONOMA, Calif.--It's one thing to get all fire-suited up, chat with folks, pose for pictures and video and strap the helmet on. It's quite another to sit still, two feet behind Mario Andretti in a two-seat, open-wheel Indy car in the  seconds before the racing legend blasts you off around the road course.

At first, I was surprised that there wasn't a lot of thumpa-thumpa-thumpa coming from my chest. I thought about how snug I was in the back of that rig, strapped in and sitting in a crouch sort of like a baseball catcher. Not a lot of room for movement. It felt safe. The smell of methanol enveloped us. I wished the fog would lift and the sun would come out. That's Mario Andretti in front of me. I think he's a grandfather.  

But then my mind paddle-shifted to the moments ahead: In a second, we'd scream out of the pits into the easy left-hand Turn 1 of the Sonoma Raceway course and then charge uphill into the tight right-hand turn. Zero-to-whatever in 50 yards. Would I barf? 

[Learn more about the Indy 500 at the Littelfuse Speed2Design site.]

Then, the pit crewman's answer to my question ("How fast on the straight-away?") echoed in my head: "About 150." I've driven a car over 100 mph several times and sat in a bullet train in France (200mph+), but never in my life have sat in such a confined space, so intimate with the road and gone so fast and had zero control over my fate. There was no way out at this point. I was trapped.

Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa!

And suddenly we were off, and there was no going back.