I would like to Forrest Wang for the best passenger experience I have ever had, tandem drifting around Virginia International Raceway in his Formula D race car. Dave Hendrickson kindly offered me a co-driver seat in his desert racer for the Caliente 250, and this opened doors to interesting conversations with racers Journee Richardson and Victoria Hazelwood, whom I also thank. Barron Wright introduced me to the hare scramble scene in central Virginia, and once showed up at my house late at night after a heavy snowfall, on a dirt bike, towing his young son behind him on a sled. I thank Matt Linkous and Darryl Allen for stopping and waiting for me to catch up on many trail rides through the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Thanks to Charles “Chas” Martin for initiating me, as a teenager, into the rich world of the mechanic. In doing so, he showed me an order of value that was more appealing to me than the prevailing one. The members of Shop Talk Forums on the internet have taught me most of what I know about air-cooled Volkswagens; thanks to everyone for sharing their hard-won knowledge.
The Specialty Equipment Manufacturer’s Association (SEMA) was the first institution to give me a platform for exploring “the psychology of vehicle customization.” Thanks to Zane Clark for the invitation to speak at SEMA 2017. At the opposite end of the spectrum, as far from Las Vegas as one can get, Mathieu Flonneau invited me to give a talk at the Sorbonne, “Managing Traffic: Three Rival Versions of Rationality.” I would like to thank Flonneau, Jean-Pierre Dupuy and the other attendees for their comments in the resulting seminar, held under the auspices of LabEx EHNE at the International Social Science Council in Paris in April, 2018. I presented the same material in Montreal, at a conference of the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport and Mobility, and thank the participants for their criticisms. The Center for the Humanities and Social Change at the University of California, Santa Barbara, hosted a lecture and two seminars in which the ideas in this book were subject to scrutiny from a variety of disciplines. Thanks to Tom Carlson for arranging that, and for his own thoughtful engagement with the book.
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia has been an unflagging source of support and intellectual fellowship, a rare space for truly open inquiry. They hosted a workshop to discuss this project at an early stage of its development. I would like to thank Ann Brach, Director of Technical Activities for the Transportation Research Board of The National Academies of Sciences for driving down from Washington to participate, and for her invaluable comments. At this workshop, Jackson Lears alerted me to the “vitalist tradition” as a useful point of orientation for thinking about the value of risk. I also got very helpful comments from Joe Davis, Peter Norton, Jay Tolson, Ari Schulman, and Garnette Cadogan.
Matt Feeney and Matt Frost, my companions in text message samizdat, have helped keep the pleasure of thinking alive for me. Thanks to Beth Crawford for teaching rats to drive, for countless fascinating conversations about the role of the body in cognition, and for accompanying me on the long road of writing this and previous books. Thanks to Mario and Luigi for persevering when the Fruit Loop was so close, and yet so far.
I want to thank the man who filled my jugs with water when I was broken down in rural California in the dead of night, and the man who gave me fifty dollars (in exchange for a cursed Jeepster) the next day, to cover the train ride home. Thanks to Troy, the gangster who terrorized my childhood neighborhood, for trying to jump over ten garbage cans on his BMX bike. In doing so, he recalibrated my sense of what human beings are capable of, and what they might be willing to risk in the attempt. Thanks to my father, Frank S. Crawford, for chasing down the lowland bicycle thieves in an excellent episode of vigilante justice, conducted in style from behind the wheel of a Ford Fairlane convertible with his freak flag flying in the wind. Thanks to the taxi drivers of London, for their erudition and gentlemanliness. To whoever laid out Route 9 through the Santa Cruz mountains. To my daughters, G and J, for insisting that I take the twisty road on the way home from their preschool, squealing “go faster!”