My love for cars was first ignited by my mom. When I was 1, I used to ask my mom the names of cars and remembered what they looked like to eventually regurgitate my latest addition to my vocabulary a few minutes later when the same car passed by.
My mom bought me the usual set of toys for a toddler but for some reason the cars really captivated me. Every time we passed by a new Hot Wheels car in a store I would almost always cry my way into getting it. Slowly, but surely my collections of Hot-wheels went from a handful to a couple of boxes worth. While I didn't do very nice things to my toy cars and eventually ended up destroying some of them, the spark was ignited(no pun intended). One car that I never did destroy was a green 1:40 scale Lamborghini Murcielago which I still have to this day which was the reason for the genesis of my love for Lamborghini.
I was luckily born in the era of Top Gear and spent most of my time watching that legendary trio travel the world, drive cars, and fool around. Doing what they did was my dream job for the most part of my life. I used to read and collect way too many car magazines from Top Gear to Autocar to Overdrive. I spent most of my learning years reading those articles about Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche. Most of my vocabulary was developed around the words written in the articles. I used to spend hours looking at pictures of cars and trying to mug up all the prices of all the cars in the last few pages of the magazines and spewing them out to my mom whenever I remembered. Whenever my dad asked me the cost of a cool car, I remember being able to tell him with a decent accuracy.
I used to have a PS2 and used to pretty much exclusively used to play racing games. From
Burnout Revenge to Need for Speed: Underground to Gran Turismo 4, I used to be attached to those games and still vividly remember driving the Nissan Skyline GT-R around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.
When I was around 5, my dad used to let me sit on his lap and steer the car around while he used to control the brakes and accelerator.
While this is possibly incriminating and sounds quite dangerous, it was always done on a private road with no cars around (*wink wink*). When I turned 12, my dad let me drive the car fully on my own, yet again on a private road. For some reason the sensation of being able to control and be responsible for an object that could possibly cause a lot of damage was super appealing. All of this eventually led me to become fully engrossed in Formula 1, and while it’s been stopped indefinitely right now, it's really engaging to be involved in a series in which such intense competition, cutting-edge tech, and talented people are involved too.
So where does all this leave us now? It leaves us with a slightly petrol-crazed 16 year-old who spends most of his waking hours either watching car videos on youtube, playing car games, or gushing to people about what drives him. Literally.
- Rohan Santhosh
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