Evan Darling: The First Out and Proud National Racecar Driver - InsideOut Interview by Greg Howell

NASCAR’s Evan Darling is pretty much what you’d expect: He drives fast cars, played with Matchbox die casts and raced BMX bikes as a kid, and dreams of owning a Ferrari F550 Maranello. He is athletic, courageous, and ruggedly handsome. Darling was the Sports Car Club of America 2005 SE Division ITA Champion and has won numerous Divisional titles. As labels go, he is the all-American guy. Oh, and he’s gay. We spoke with Darling about the challenge of being the first out-and-proud national racecar driver, and about his work with The Trevor Project, a 24/7, nationwide LGBT suicide- and crisis-prevention hotline for teens. Greg Howell: The stress levels involved in getting ready for a race must be high. How do you prepare? Evan Darling: Well, racing is the easy part, for me, anyways. Getting prepared for a race, and making sure everything’s in order, that’s the hard part: getting the car to the track, dealing with crews, going through tech inspection, making sure that everything is ready to go, that’s the stressful part. And the next most stressful part—during endurance races—is doing the pit stops: getting into the pits and getting the person changed over, and the car serviced, and the car out as quickly as possible. GH: It’s the beginning of a race. You’re prepared, and you’re sitting in your car. It’s very loud on the track, and you’re waiting for the flag to drop. What are you thinking about? ED: A lot of it’s mechanical. You’re looking around you and you’re judging the speed of the cars on the start, ’cause you want to get a good start, which means you have to be going just slightly quicker than the cars around you. But you don’t want to be going so quick that you get noticed by the officials for jumping the start. You’re looking at the flag man. You’re waiting for him to just twitch, and as soon as that green flag comes out you’re in it. And you almost try to anticipate when he’s gonna throw the flag, and have your foot to the floor when he does. Then you get the start, and that’s the scariest part of the whole race, generally, because you have everybody going through the first turn all at once, trying to win the race in the first corner. Now, it’s very important to do well on the first turn, but you don’t want to risk it all and throw it all away for a first-corner pass. If you crash in the first corner of a three-hour race, it’s kind of embarrassing, No. 1; and No. 2, you didn’t gain enough of an advantage to offset that risk. So a lot of calculating is going on in your head. GH: Since Dale Earnhardt passed away there’s been a lot of concern about crashes, and safety. What are your thoughts about the safety in the sport, and how it’s improving? ED: Well, personally I think they go a little overboard on the safety, mandating all kinds of different things. The cars are very safe, and regardless of all the extra safety stuff that they put in the car, the potential is still there to get injured. I came from racing motorcycles, and the first time I got into a race car I looked around me—I’m wearing a fireproof suit, I’ve got a helmet, padding, roll cages. Before, I was racing motorcycles; you crash, you know— GH: You have a helmet and that’s it. ED: So I don’t even think about the safety aspect of it when [I’m] racing. You shouldn’t. If you are, then other sports beckon. When you’re in the car racing you’re not even remotely thinking about safety stuff; you’re just thinking about how you can get to the next corner quicker. GH: What are the fastest speeds that you’ve achieved? ED: It depends on the track. Our car will push on 160 miles an hour at Daytona [International Speedway], when we get up on the banking. I’ve driven some pretty quick cars in the past. But the cars that I’m racing in this particular series do between 150 and 160 [mph], top speed. Now the Ferraris that I’ve run in the past, they go over 200, which is quite interesting, not so much for actually doing that speed, but slowing down from that speed—it’s scary.


# # #

InsideOut Magazine is the premiere Hudson Valley, New York source for articles and interviews. The magazine, both online and print, is for the progressive and GLBT community. Blog is updated daily with events, people, GLBT /profiles, & gay/lesbian news. http://www.insideouthv.com

Name*:
E-mail*:
Captcha*:
Text*: