CONSIDER THIS: How The Ballet of Down-Shifting a Race Car Points to God

Let me tell you at the outset, dear reader, that this post is about driving a race car at high speed on a race track and what that can teach us about God. Yes, this is likely the first time you’ve ever read anything that brings those two topics together in one article. Trust me, it will be worth your time, if you keep an open mind.

So here goes: My good friend Thom McKee ordered a new mid-engine Corvette more than a year ago and ever since then he’s been telling me he wants to give me the opportunity to drive it at speed on a racetrack. Being a former Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) national competition license holder for road racing a Formula Ford and a semi-professional International Motorsports Association (IMSA) competition licensee, the prospect of driving the new Corvette was, to say the least, more than exciting.

But it was also a little intimidating, a fact that puzzled me at first. In fact, it puzzled me a lot until a couple of weeks ago. Why? Well, as it happens, back in the 1980s when I was racing, I was also writing weekly reviews of new cars and trucks for various publications.

Having those test cars afforded me multiple opportunities to work out the latest high performance Corvettes, Mustangs, Porsches, Vipers and many others on race tracks across the country. It was always a special treat when the test car was the latest edition of the ‘Vette, a car I have loved since I was a kid.

So why would the prospect today of getting behind the wheel of the latest Corvette and having a go at high speed on a race track be intimidating? It took awhile but I finally figured out that it was the fact neither the Corvette, nor the vast majority of cars today, has a clutch, clutch pedal and gear shift in the center console.

No, today, the Corvette’s shifting is by paddles on either side of the steering column.

That’s a big deal and here’s why: When I was racing, there was a clutch and a gas pedal at your feet and a shift lever on the right side of the cockpit. One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of driving a race car at speed was the ballet of the braking and downshifting in what was then called “heel-and-toeing.”

As you braked for a corner, you were also “blipping” the throttle with your right foot and moving the shift lever at just the moment when the engine’s flywheel and transmission shaft were matched in rpm by your blip. That allowed a smooth transition to the lower gear, which in turn kept the car balanced as you got off the brakes and accelerated through the corner.

Do the heel-and-toe ballet correctly and it was an enthralling experience. Do it improperly and odds were good you would be in trouble.

Getting it right took a lot of practice, but once you “got it” on the track, it just became automatic, including the way you shifted on the street when driving a stick-shift vehicle with a clutch.

What made it a ballet was the fact heel-and-toe downshifting required a delicate, perfectly timed combination sequence of actions involving multiple factors with your eyes, your sense of the car’s balance (which came up from the seat of your pants in the open-wheel, single-seat Formula Ford), the timing of your ankle’s movement in blipping the throttle while also pushing the brake pedal down with just the right amount of pressure, moving the shift lever in unison with these actions, all the while steering the car with your left arm and keeping an eye on your mirrors and the track ahead for race-situational awareness.

Almost none of that ballet is now required with paddle shifting. But paddle shifting requires another sort of ballet, a retraining if you will of your brain, your eyes and your muscle memory to work a different sequence in order to obtain the same result, a smooth downshift while braking in order to enter and exit the corner at the highest speed possible, given the horsepower, rpms, available traction, suspension action, weight transfer, steering angle and the physical configuration of the turn.

Fortunately, Thom took delivery of his new Corvette a couple of weeks ago and called me over to take it for a little spin on some nearby rural curvy roads. It was awkward at first, but pretty quickly I began to “feel” the rhythm of the new shifting ballet.

Comes the Dawning:

That’s when it began to dawn on me: I was a bit intimidated because I knew from past experience that driving Thom’s paddle-shifting Corvette would be in major ways a much different experience. And the last thing I wanted to do was in-artfully dropping down too many gears, thus possibly throwing Thom’s brand new Corvette into a spin and hitting something solid beside the road.

And then earlier today, as I was sitting in the Sunday morning church service, “it” came to me: What an amazing, incredibly complicated, wonderfully designed thing is the human body. Things like hand-eye-butt coordination are, to be sure, a measurable physical process, but there’s also a non-quantifiable mental aspect to it that is equally real, equally indispensable.

Psalm 139:15 says this: “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”

Perhaps a purely physical process like Darwinian evolution can account for the characteristics, if not the origins, of all other creatures, but it cannot explain the reality of consciousness or the origins of non-physical processes that humans can learn and adapt in constantly changing environments like a race-track (trust me, the surface of the track, to cite just one factor, is constantly changing when there are race cars on it.)

Those things require God. And before you say it, no, that’s not “God in the gaps” thinking that if it can’t be explained, then, oh well, it must be God doing it. The necessity of a superintending, intelligent being is simply the most reasonable explanation of the fact the human body and mind are such wondrous creations that before anything else can happen, requires the information supplied by DNA.

Now, ask yourself this: Where did the first information required for the first DNA sequence come from? Think about it.

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