The Sims is a famous computer game that was later ported to many consoles. It was created by a gaming company known as Maxis. What does this game have to do with autos and racing however? The game’s creator Will Wright was once a street racer himself and participated in one of the largest organized illegal street racing events of all time, The U.S. Express.
The U.S. Express is the successor to the great Cannonball Run, a race across the US continent that took place in the 1970’s. The Cannonball Run later had a movie created in its name, as most know, that was put together by Brock Yates; an early participant who then dropped out upon making the film. Rick Doherty, who had done the Cannonball Run with Yates, decided to get the race back together under a different name.
Will Wright ended up partnering with Doherty for the race, which they later won, placing in first with a time of 33 hours and 9 minutes. They ran the race with a small Mazda RX-7 coupe that they in turn modified in order to participate. They added a larger fuel cell canister that would disperse fuel into the original fuel tank when they were low and also added a couple radar detectors, a CB radio, a police scanner, night vision devices and a driver/co-driver communication system.
Wright claimed they tried out the night vision goggles once during the whole run and quickly discarded the idea.
“We tried driving with the lights off in the Mojave Desert, but … driving with the wheel in one hand, goggles in the other scared the crap out of me,” he says.
Wright also claims that during that long period of time while racing a driver and their car become one.
“The thing about driving and racing is the fact that you have this incredible interface between the person and machine. A lot of times there is a boundary that is put up between a person and their tools, technologies and machines. But when you’re driving, or racing especially, that boundary starts to blur and you become one. You start thinking about your body entirely and you think about the car as your body. For instance if you have an accident you don’t say oh my car got in an accident or my car hit something, you say I hit something or I got in an accident because the car in some sense becomes your body.”
