My 3-year-old son Laszlo loves four things: me, my wife, arguing with me and my wife, and cars. While I am an expert on the first three things, I know nothing about cars. So when Laszlo was 1, to keep up with him, I asked to work on the pit crew of the team that Patrón Tequila sponsors at the American Le Mans GT race in Long Beach, Calif., the sport's biggest race of the year. I figured it would hold me until Laszlo could read the correct answers to his mechanical questions and realize that his dad is so unmasculine that if Manhattan didn't exist, neither would he.
I arrived the day before the race, making my way through a crowd of nearly 100,000 people, a surprising number of whom were hot women. I'm always confused about where hot women hang out. I know they like clubs and expensive stores, but I once spent a day at a Renaissance fair, and there they were, dressed as medieval princesses who magically had access to 21st century push-up-bra technology. It's as though wherever I'm not interested in going, hot chicks are there.
In American Le Mans races, which are more cosmopolitan than NASCAR--with several-hundred-thousand-dollar sports cars, European drivers and food that is often served sans stick--each car had two drivers who swap out for races, which can last up to 12 hours. The top driver on this team was second-generation racer Scott Sharp, while one of the drivers of the other car was Ed Brown, the CEO of Patrn, which sponsors both this team and the entire sport. Which made me question how much of a sport this is. It's a little as if the Yankees let the guy who runs Utz potato chips play third base.
I walked up to Tony Leith, a thin, handsome British man who is the team's crew chief. Leith was inspecting the engine of one of the team's two Ferrari F430 GTCs. The Ferrari, I learned through a series of insightful questions I posed to Leith, is not automatic, systematic or hydromatic. When I asked what the radiator is, he said, "I don't think I've ever met someone who doesn't know that." When I asked why a car needs a radiator, he said, "It's very hard to explain something to someone who doesn't know anything about it." He wasn't angry as much as confused, as if he were trying to explain how e-mail works to a lost African tribe. Or to me.
Tony put on his Patrn-branded fire suit and helped me Velcro up the back of a matching one. As we walked to the car, Stephany Rose, a brunette in an outfit she was being paid to wear and which would probably go over fine at a Renaissance fair despite being made of Lycra, asked if she could take a photo with Tony. Not a photo of all three of us. Just a photo with Tony. Who was dressed in the exact same fire suit I was. When I asked her how she knew Tony was an actual race-car person and I wasn't, she said, "It was his composure. He has a really good presence about him." I hope one day I am walking by Stephany Rose while she is wearing the exact same outfit as Christina Hendricks.