Well I think a racing car is something very special, almost in the breed of an animal. Not only is it like an animal it’s also like a woman. It’s very sensitive, it’s very nervous, it’s very highly strung. Sometimes it responds very nicely, sometimes it responds very viciously, sometimes to get the best out of it you have to coax it and almost caress it, to get it to do the thing you want it to do and even after you done all these things and the car is doing exactly as you want it to. It will immediately and with no warning will change its mind and do something very suddenly and very abruptly.

Very often I realized that if you really were in a hurry you could sometimes take some curves a gear higher than usual. Risky, but effective. You didn't get that comforting sensation of grip, but you went in much faster and came out like a gunblast if you chose the line properly.

There was no way I was going to give up, so I started to try the next-higher-gear stunt all over the circuit. Wherever I was going through and just lifting off in 5th, now I went through flat-out. One of those places was a left-hand bend where you had a hump as you barreled out, shot under a bridge and got onto the next traightaway.

There is Armco there now, and soft shoulders, and they leveled out the hump when they rebuilt the circuit. But in those days we used to lift off a bit; for one thing, to set the car up better; for another, not to fly off into space.

Well, the first time I dared to go through flat-out, the car zoomed into the air, flew for about an hour, and landed at the very edge of the track, near the wire fencing they had then. Only God knows how the right reflex functioned to twitch the wheel, but there I was, back in business. So, that was it. From then on I took that bend flat-out. On that place alone I knew I was saving seconds that I had to have.