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"You can measure life in years, but there are other ways. It showed up in a small, single-car box trailer, the kind usually towed by club racers or the local lawn service. When we walked up to it in that empty garage, I was stunned by the silence. Five or six people stood there, hands in their pockets, dead quiet. My feet suddenly took on this airy, buoyant feeling, as if someone had filled my sneakers with helium. We had a Lotus 49. I went to the brand-new Circuit of the Americas, outside Austin, Texas, for our story on Alexander Rossi and the progress of speed (page 44). To make the piece happen, we had to source a 1967 Lotus 49 Formula 1 car. We had to go to Texas and watch said car get flung across the landscape, Rossi flicking and slicing through the corners in a fluid, violent dance. And I had to stand in that garage and come to grips with the one machine that weakens my knees the most. Isaac Newton believed that time moves like an arrow, undivergent. Albert Einstein thought it works like a winding river, speeding up and slowing down, each person at one point in its path. At that moment, on that polished Texas concrete, both of those guys were wrong. It was 1989 and I was eight years old, stumbling onto a picture of Jim Clark drifting a 49 at Zandvoort, all bent shoulders and wrists and grace. It was 1987 and I was six, watching my dad scowl at his Alfa Romeo GTV. It was 2001 and I was 20, having my first Oh My God I Better Save This moment at a track day. College, taking the flag in my first club race. Seven years ago, teaching my future wife how to heel-and-toe. Buying and selling and building and crashing and all the time just needing keys, more keys, more gas, more keys, or I lie awake on the pillow at night, unable to sleep. I could go on, but you get the point. Every so often, your button is pushed, and you get to stand there and watch as your gray matter spills onto the sidewalk. For me, the Lotus 49\u2014and that 49 in particular, the one Clark drove in &amp;#039;67, the year Lotus changed racing forever\u2014is Cars. All of them. Everything. Everyone has their Lotus. The actual car isn&amp;#039;t as important as what it represents, and it might not even be a car\u2014it could be a person, a trinket, a building. It applies to airplanes, music, art, girls, boys, anything you love. And it goes by a bunch of names: totem, seed pearl, epiphanic moment. It&amp;#039;s the first time you zero in on something new and wonderful and think, I love that completely. Standing in Texas, my brain locked into a greasy feedback loop, I couldn&amp;#039;t help but wonder: How do you get to the point where you attach such huge meaning to \u2026 stuff?  I later posed this question to Road &amp;amp;amp; Track&amp;#039;s Senior Editor John Krewson, a man who could wax philosophic about pencil shavings. He thought for a minute and said, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s easier with objects. It&amp;#039;s easier to get attached to an object than it is to a person.&amp;quot; In a lot of ways, he&amp;#039;s right. Say what you want about materialism, but we love the things we create because they don&amp;#039;t argue with us about their meaning. There&amp;#039;s an old saying about a dog being the same person when your back is turned; cars are similar. The only way to get through life with people is to acknowledge that human relationships follow a confusing, mutable set of rules. How you get through life with cars is pretty much up to you. It took a few weeks after the Austin trip until I stopped thinking about the Lotus every day. But now, sitting at my desk in Michigan, it makes sense. In one swoop, that car embodies what R&amp;amp;amp;T meant to me as a kid. It&amp;#039;s Paul Fr\u00E8re and Phil Hill at Volkswagen&amp;#039;s Ehra-Lessien loop with the Ruf Yellow Bird. It&amp;#039;s John and Elaine Bond, the magazine&amp;#039;s early patrons, in that pencil sketch from John&amp;#039;s column in back issues, or that weathered old archive shot of Peter Egan and Allan Girdler by the fence at Willow Springs. It&amp;#039;s a picture I found last week in the magazine&amp;#039;s library, the one where Lotus founder Colin Chapman is driving Clark&amp;#039;s 49 in a suit and tie at the company&amp;#039;s airport test track, grinning like an idiot. It&amp;#039;s engine and wheels and man, and if the man can&amp;#039;t put it together, then things just fall apart. If you own the Lotus 49 that Jim Clark used to win the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix, you also own the mustard-yellow plexi windscreen that has lived on it for decades. That screen wears a race-entry sticker from 1969, when Mario Andretti drove the car and DNF&amp;#039;d at Kyalami. Mario Freakin&amp;#039; Andretti.  The sticker has yellowed with age, but it&amp;#039;s under a hardened, decades-old piece of clear plastic tape. The tape has also gone yellow. I stared at it a lot. Shortly before Rossi arrived at the track, I asked Neil Brown, the Lotus&amp;#039;s mechanic, if I could wedge myself inside the 49. I&amp;#039;m bigger than Clark was, and I didn&amp;#039;t really fit, my shoulders bunching up around my chin. Someone took a picture, and I stuck the printout on the bulletin board in my office. There&amp;#039;s a dumb, calm smile on my face. I look at that picture, and it&amp;#039;s 1989. It&amp;#039;s 2001. It&amp;#039;s most of my life. And suddenly, for a lot of reasons, I feel very, very lucky. Sam Smith is R&amp;amp;amp;T&amp;#039;s executive editor. His head spins to 9000 rpm and is a fully stressed member. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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