From the Car Capital of the World

That's me at the new Porsche Experience Center in Carson.

I was there for the driving experience of a lifetime compliments of my wife and two daughters who had gifted me the outting for my 44th birthday. A special present, but then again, you only turn 44 once.

I couldn't have picked a better day for the excursion. It was 81 degrees and sunny. The skies were a shade of blue that will soon be forgotten thanks to relaxed air pollution standards instituted by Precedent Shitgibbon.

I also couldn't have picked a better car, the 365 hp Porsche Carrera T. I went with the manual transmission to get the true sports car feel, though it had been many years since I worked the clutch and the gearshift.

This, it should be noted, is a skill long lost on today's kids and millennials. They can resize a three frame banner ad but I can still manhandle a stick.

Minutes after meeting my driving coach, Patrick, a professional race car driver on the drifting circuit, we were off. And when I use the word 'off' I mean it in the sense of lift off. The track starts with a 3/4 mile straightaway, enough room to tap into 4th gear and top 3 digit speeds. This was followed by a hard braking and a dive down into a 30 degree banked hairpin turn, which I later dubbed the Hurling Curve™.

Not because I did, but because I wanted to.

From there we jetted our way to the Hill of Nausea™ followed by the S-Turns of Queasiness™ and the Large Loop of "What Did I Have For Breakfast?™."

By the end of two laps, I needed a break.

I also needed a towel to wipe the schvitz from my forehead. As Patrick explained to me, driving the stick, accelerating, braking, holding a tight turn, and not hitting the gravel apron is hard work. It's a bit of a workout. I needed no further explanation.

Then he suggested taking a load off my addled 44 year old brain and put us in an automatic -- the blue Porsche Carrera PDK parked behind the white one.

This is a 400 horsepower monster, the equivalent of a Saturn 5 rocket. It was a good call. The "car" suited me better. After a few more laps around the track we hit the skids. That is, the low friction wet plate where the driver is challenged to hold a rear end drift around a tight circle.

Having spent 4 years in Syracuse and being well accustomed to driving on black ice, I found myself in my element. So much so, that my coach Patrick offered what seemed to be authentic praise, "Ah you've done this before."

Either that or he thought some encouraging words might stem the upward trajectory of that morning's sausage and egg scramble.

We finished the day in a 550hp Cayenne, designed specifically for their off road test course which included a 78 degree descent down a rocky road.

Apart from the initial stomach churning, it was hard not to come away from the experience thoroughly impressed with German engineering. There's a certain tactile nature to the precision and performance. You feel it everywhere you look. And in everything you touch.

I highly recommend it.
It is a driving experience unlike any other.

As I left Carson on my way back to Culver City (only 17 miles to the north), I fired up my Audi, got on the 405, and sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 53 minutes.