Laguna Seca — May 2015
May 2, 2015 · Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca · Monterey, California
Back of the photo: Gabe Newell posted on r/pcmasterrace that he had spare tickets to a race weekend. I replied from my phone at 7:27 on a Monday night: “Would love to go! I am a flight attendant and can fly there no problem! :) PCMR!” One minute later he wrote back two words. “You’re in.”
Then I pushed my luck, twice.
“Can I bring my fiance?” — “Sure. What’s her name for my list?” — and then, two days later, “Not to push my luck or anything, but do you have any extra tickets? My best friend is sad he didn’t get the chance to go.” His answer is still my favourite email I’ve ever received:
“OK. He’s added. No more, please.”
So three of us flew into San Jose the night before, rented a car, and drove down to Monterey on Saturday morning. Tickets were waiting in the lobby of an Embassy Suites in Seaside, on a folding table under a banner, handed out to a few dozen strangers from the internet. Lunch at noon. Then the Continental Tire Monterey Grand Prix at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca — Gabe’s Heart of Racing team on track, the corkscrew doing what the corkscrew does, and the man himself wandering the paddock with a group of Redditors like it was the most normal Saturday in the world.
Somewhere in the middle of it I made a group chat so everyone could find each other, and a shared album so we’d all get the photos. Nobody asked me to. That’s just what I do in a room full of people who don’t know each other yet — which, ten years later, is more or less the whole job.
The thing I actually took home wasn’t the race. It was how fast the door opened. One honest sentence about who I was and what I could do, sent to somebody with no reason to answer, and a one-minute reply that changed the weekend. I’ve been a fan ever since, and I’ve been sending that kind of email ever since too.
