Racing Lemons and Building Icebergs

"Season of Emergence", 2025. I've been thinking a lot about growth this month

First of all, Happy New Year!

Now, onto the good stuff. First of all, I promised I’d share the recipe for the Dragon’s Breath tea I served at my open studio event. It’s my new favorite cold remedy. These quantities are all extremely approximate and should be adjusted to taste.

Dragon's Breath Tea (serves 1)

• 2 tablespoons juiced ginger*

• 2 tablespoons honey

• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

• 1 drop liquid smoke**

• 12 oz boiling water

Combine all ingredients. Consume. Enjoy.

* If you don’t have a juicer (I don’t), use a blender or an immersion blender to grind up the ginger. You’ll want to strain the ginger pulp out somehow, maybe with a coffee filter. If juicing the ginger isn’t in the cards, chop it as finely as you can and use a tea strainer to steep it.

** If you’ve never used liquid smoke before, just know that a little goes a very long way. 

I did say I’d donate 5% of December’s gross income to the Alameda Food Bank. Thank you to everyone who made purchases. We donated $87.50 to the food bank.

Like what you see? The original Season of Emergence painting is available in my online store.

On to this month’s big thoughts, which center around the new year and racing cars. I just got back from a weekend racing 24 Hours of Lemons at Sonoma Raceway. To race Lemons, you form a team, buy a car for $500 or less, and turn as many laps as you can for anywhere from 6 to 25 hours. So we’re not racing purpose-built Formula 1 cars with huge spoilers. Teams are racing Camrys they pulled out of junkyards. A 20-year-old VW Passat (that’s my team). A 1970s Rambler pickup truck somebody found in a barn somewhere.

Do any of these cars have any business on a race track? Absolutely not. Are we going to put them there anyway? Oh hell yes. Are they going to survive hours of racing? Unlikely. Is someone going to blow up their engine in a spectacular cloud of blue smoke, dump oil all over the track, and be forced to wait for the Flatbed of Shame to come pick them up while everyone else gives them dirty looks for turning an already gnarly corner into an oil slick? You bet.

I got into racing about eight years ago, and since then, I’ve gotten to watch a lot of other people get into the sport. Our team has welcomed a few rookie drivers over the years and they all go through the same mental process, which goes something like this:

Step 1. Harbor secret dreams that you might be the next Mario Andretti/Katherine Legge/Lewis Hamilton if only you had a chance to prove it.

You like driving fast. Heck, you like driving, full stop, and that’s more than you can say for most of the other people on the road. And you’ve maybe got some buddies who got into racing and they always have the best stories like that time a driver burned through all her fuel with 30 minutes of racing still to go because she thought the race ended at 4:00 instead of 4:30 and then she had to do a half hour of very slow, white-knuckle coasting in the world’s dumbest last-ditch hypermiling effort. (It’s me, I’m buddies).

Step 2. Find a team and sign up for a race.

Your friends probably sweet-talked you into ponying up a whole bunch of cash for the race fees.

Step 3. Go out for your first driving stint and discover that you are not, in fact, secretly Mario Andretti.

Lemons is somewhat unique among race series in that it doesn’t require a race license. You need a state-issued driver's license, but that’s it. Every race, there are drivers who have never even seen a race track before. Sometimes they’re a bunch of teenagers who got their actual driver's licenses earlier that week and are now tackling a stick shift car for the first time. (Yes this happened, yes I was there, yes it was just as chaotic as you can imagine. But they did it and they keep coming back.)

This wasn’t me. By the time I started racing, my husband and I owned four cars between us, all of them manual transmission. Two were dedicated track cars, and we’d both logged many track days learning how to drive fast, and more importantly, learning how to identify and stay within the limits of both the car and the driver. This is a lot more experience than most first-time Lemons drivers have and I was all set to lay down some blistering lap times and show my team what was what, Andretti-style.

My first race was on a 2-mile loop with approximately 170 other cars. Within 30 seconds, it was clear that all my fancy track time wasn’t relevant. Track days teach you how to find the limits of your car. They don’t teach you how to drive bumper to bumper at 90 miles an hour in anywhere from one to four lanes of traffic with no passing rules.

At some point in our lives, most of us have had the experience of narrowly avoiding a serious car accident. Your adrenaline goes from zero to max in under a second, all your muscles tense, your thoughts devolve into an incomprehensible miasma of panic, and reflex takes over. If you’re lucky, it’s a useful reflex.

My first driving stint was an hour of narrowly avoiding accidents. An hour. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember if I kept the car on track. I don’t remember how I felt when I got out. I don’t remember what I said to my team, what they said to me, what my lap times were, or, most importantly, what sort of mental gymnastics I put myself through in order to go do it again the next day.

Step 4. Come back to the paddock and start rebuilding your sense of self-worth from the ground up.

So let’s recap: after my first racing stint, I learned that all my track experience meant nothing. I wasn’t secretly Mario Andretti. I’d gotten my shot, and I’d missed. I wasn’t the fastest driver on track. I wasn’t the fastest driver on my team. I came into that race with pretty high expectations for myself about what I could do and how I could contribute to the team and I was wrong about everything. And the price of being wrong was potentially destroying a car that someone else built.

I wasn’t who I thought I was, and I had to figure out what to do about it.

Step 4 is a make-or-break moment for every driver, and for the people who pull through, there are additional steps.

Step 5. Discover that driving fast doesn’t matter.

Let’s say it takes me two minutes to do a lap. 120 seconds. Let’s further imagine that I’m in second place, and the first-place car is a lap ahead of me. Obviously, I would like to be first, so I start driving faster, so I’m down to 1:55 per lap. Meanwhile, they’re still doing 2:00 laps. 5 seconds per lap is a pretty substantial gap in racing. So if things continue as they are, I’ll be able to catch that first-place car in... 24 laps?! That’s going to take almost an hour. And then I’m going to have to get gas, that’s going to take 10 minutes, so after all that work of catching them... they’re now ahead by four laps. And that’s assuming nothing breaks on the car and I don’t get penalized for doing something dumb like spinning out.

The bottom line in endurance racing is that consistency matters more than speed. A lot more. Which is why one of the teams frequently among the top ten finishers (in a field of over 100 entries, remember), drives a Prius.

Step 6. Throw all your time and energy into keeping the car on track and out of the pits by any means necessary.

Once you learn this lesson, once you really internalize how much more you will lose by making mistakes than you can ever hope to regain driving fast, your whole mindset shifts. You realize that the best way to help your team is to keep small problems from becoming big problems. It’s not about driving anymore; it’s about making sure you check the tires and brakes on every single pit stop so you catch small problems (e.g. no more brake pads) before they become big problems (car can’t stop, goes off track/into another car/into a wall). It’s about scheduling your driver changes so that when the car comes in, the next driver is ready to get in immediately and is not still running around looking for their helmet.

Step 7. Win, maybe?

And once you nail all that, once you’ve got your whole team executing like clockwork, once you’ve figured out every possible way to save time in the pits, when you’re duking it out at the top, with a bunch of other teams that have also figured out all this work, then the driving starts to matter again.

Last May, I had the privilege of competing in the longest race in North America. The Lemons 25:01. Twenty-five hours and one minute of continuous racing. And at the end of that race, at the end of over a day of driving and fuel stops and changing tires and yellow flags and trying to get any kind of sleep in hundred degree heat during rattlesnake hatching season, the gap between first and second place was.... 3 laps. 7 minutes. Out of 550 laps that the winning team turned. I saw those teams race and they’re excellent drivers. But the driving was maybe the last 10 percent of the work they did to take home a trophy. First, they had to fix all the other stuff.

I don’t do New Year's resolutions. I do themes. This year, my theme is iceberg skills: invisible, probably boring areas of expertise that aren’t flashy but comprise the bulk of time and effort required to support the impressive stuff. The artistic equivalent of staying on track and out of the pits. For art, that means communication. Figuring out what you want to say, and figuring out how you want to say it. And, as someone recently admonished me, not overthinking it.

To practice this, I’m doing a daily storytelling sketch all through January. I have a list of prompts and every morning I draw a scene based on the prompt. Here, for example, is my interpretation of the prompt for “Treasure.” I wanted to make a shark mermaid, so I spent all my time figuring out how shark fins work. That was what I wanted to say with this piece. Shark. That’s also why the treasure in the water is surrounded by a ring of shark teeth.

You’ll see some more sketches in the next newsletter.

Happy New Year, and whether you’re working on some iceberg skills or you’ve gotten to the point where you can show off the flashy hero talents, cheers to you! Keep going!

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