A good sunday
I went to a rally event today. A privately held function in memory of a respectable figure in the local motorsport scene that has passed away. Although I didn’t know who, it has to be well known figure because I met a lot of people whom I have only heard of their names from blogs, newspapers, articles. People like multiple times Asia Pacific Rally Championship winner Karamjit Singh, current Proton R3 engineer and local racer Faidzil Alang, and lots of old timers of local racing and rallying. The location is even more to shout about – A privately owned rally track located in Sungai Buloh, sharing the same compound is a horse ranch and paintball arena, all owned by local rally driver Saladin Mazlan, although he was nowhere to be found that day. It was more of a family day event. People brought their kids and wives along, had DJ spinning tracks, free flow of cendol and food, art and coloring activity and a balloon castle for the kids !
Most importantly, everyone there is present for the love of motorsport, the love of talking, discussing, tinkering, and driving cars.
Although I didn’t get to ride with the flying sikh, I managed to catch a ride with ex-Perodua works rally driver Nandakumar and had a good close look at the amazing footwork he has executed throughout the short but technical course. From now on, watching rally videos on youtube will never feel the same, and I definitely have more respect for the amount of balls these drivers have.
The bad thing is, I am having this “out of place” feeling creeping up my nerves again. Sucky feeling. Basically, I feel out of place again because, one of the cars blew some parts, as I try hard to observe the behavior of the car and the traces it leaves behind and trying to figure out what happened, the people over there have already manage to find out what went wrong, and most of them started talking about their past experiences encountering such problems. I could only listen, but it’s ok, as long as I steadily focus on building up my knowledge, I’m sure one day I will be able to stand tall amongst these people and earn the equal amount of respect. If I can do it with an uninteresting piece of software such as telco billing, I’m sure I will be able to do the same with automobiles. The drivers talked about the various behaviors of the car. Well, I know how those behaviors are SUPPOSE to happen, based on my understanding of theories, but given my limited driving experience, I had a hard time putting together how it really FEELS like.
Overall, a really great day. I have lost touch of and denied this part of me for so long, to be able to have such an opportunity to nurture and given its due time and energy investment is truly a bliss.
Managed to get a business card from Nandakumar. Full time job now? Entrepreneur running his own engineering firm designing sports suspension systems for competition use, past full time job – Chassis tuning engineer with Lotus Engineering, part time job – Rally driver. DAMN, another variation of my dream job!
Anyway, pursuit of a passion career aside. I should also invest some time to rekindle with my interest with photography. Ran through some of my past photos with some friends and we could hardly believe that I actually took those pictures.
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