Tomorrow morning, there will be another headline. “Driver loses control on winding road.”
The police report will be painfully clinical. Excessive speed. Loss of control. Impact. Fatal injuries. Case closed. Facebook, meanwhile, will transform into the world’s largest panel of armchair driving instructors.
“Serves him right.”
“Another wannabe racer.”
“If you want to race, go to Sepang.”
Thank you, Captain Hindsight, very helpful. Perhaps they are right. Speed kills. We all know that. Physics has never been known to negotiate, but sometimes, I wonder if everyone is looking at the wrong corner. Because perhaps the most dangerous corner wasn’t the one he failed to make. Perhaps it was the one life had been pushing him towards for months… maybe even years.
People often think petrolheads are obsessed with machines. We’re not ! We’re obsessed with what those machines do for us. A steering wheel never asks why you’ve been quiet lately, the engine doesn’t ask why you’re suddenly drinking one coffee after another just to get through the day and the gearbox couldn’t care less that work has become unbearable, your marriage is hanging by a thread, your bank account looks like it survived a spate of bad decisions, or you’ve spent months convincing everyone that you’re “okay.”
Cars don’t ask questions. They simply start and sometimes, that’s exactly what a broken mind needs. You climb in, turn the key, the engine fires into life and somehow, the noise outside the car becomes quieter than the noise inside your head. To people who aren’t enthusiasts, a Sunday morning drive up Genting looks like an excuse to burn expensive petrol.
To us, it’s something else entirely, every gear change demands your attention, every braking point requires commitment and every apex forces your brain to focus on the next few metres instead of the next few years.
For thirty minutes, your mind finally stops replaying every mistake you’ve ever made.
The bills disappear.
The office disappears.
The arguments disappear.
Even your phone can’t find you because you’re somewhere in Ulu Yam where the only thing with decent reception is the exhaust note. That isn’t stupidity. That isn’t addiction and for many men, that’s therapy. Perhaps not the sort your doctor would prescribe, but therapy nonetheless.
The problem begins when the drive stops being somewhere you go…. and becomes somewhere you need. Stress is a funny thing as it rarely announces itself. It doesn’t always arrive with panic attacks or tears. Sometimes it arrives quietly. You laugh a little less. You stop replying to messages.
The project car in the garage gathers dust because even cleaning out the mats feels exhausting. You tell your friends you’ll join the next drive, then cancel at the last minute. You sleep eight hours but wake up feeling like you haven’t slept in eight days.
You still smile.
You still go to work.
You still tell everyone you’re “good.”
Because that’s what men do. We’ve become experts at wearing masks. The funny bloke, the reliable one, the joker, the strong one. The all in one. Sometimes we wear those masks for so long that even we forget what’s underneath them. There comes a point where some drivers stop chasing speed. They’re chasing silence. The acceleration isn’t always about going faster. Sometimes it’s about outrunning the thoughts that have been following you all week.
The roar of the engine drowns out the voice telling you you’re not good enough and the pull of acceleration replaces emotional pain with physical sensation. For a few glorious seconds, life finally makes sense again, until it doesn’t. Now picture that final bend. It’s a road he’s driven a hundred times before. He knows every bump, Every camber challenging corner, Every braking marker, The tyres are warm, The car is well maintained, The weather is perfect.
So what changed ? Maybe nothing outside the windscreen. Maybe everything behind it. Was he replaying that conversation with his boss ?, Wondering how he was going to pay next month’s bills ?, Thinking about how he already has let his family down, although he has not ? The relationships with people that had quietly fallen apart ? or… The parent he had buried, the diagnosis he hadn’t told anyone about, the loneliness he had become frighteningly good at hiding. Or perhaps… He wasn’t thinking about the bend at all.
Depression has a cruel way of stealing your attention. It narrows your world until every thought points inward. Your hands are still on the wheel, but your mind is somewhere else entirely.
Sometimes, one second is all it takes. Let’s be absolutely clear, not every crash is caused by poor mental health. Not every enthusiast who enjoys a spirited drive is trying to escape something. Sometimes an accident is simply an accident, but perhaps we should ask one question before rushing to judge. What burden was sitting in that driver’s seat long before he reached that corner ?
Petrolheads are obsessive creatures. They will argue for three hours over which engine oil is best, replace brake pads before they’re half worn, spend RM2,000 on tyres without blinking because “safety first kan ?” They will hear a tiny rattle that nobody else can detect and convince themselves the gearbox is about to explode. Funny, isn’t It ? We’ll service everything made of steel….but almost nothing made of flesh. We ignore stress, we postpone rest, we dismiss anxiety and we tell ourselves we’ll deal with it after the next deadline.
The irony is that while a dashboard warning light usually gives you plenty of notice before something goes wrong, the human mind rarely extends the same courtesy. Cars have probably saved more lives than they’ll ever be given credit for. They give people purpose, teach patience, reward persistence and create lifelong friendships between complete strangers who somehow become brothers simply because they both believe naturally aspirated engines sound better.
They remind us that almost anything mechanical can be repaired. But there comes a point where even the best machine cannot carry the weight of the person behind the wheel. No engine is powerful enough to pull someone out of despair, no suspension can absorb every blow life delivers, and no amount of horsepower can outrun hopelessness.
So the next time you hear that another driver didn’t make it home, resist the temptation to become another expert in the Facebook comments. Instead, remember that you only saw the final corner. You didn’t see the hundreds of invisible corners he may already have been negotiating long before he turned the ignition key that morning. Perhaps the most dangerous road isn’t Genting Highlands, it isn’t Ulu Yam, it isn’t Karak Highway. Perhaps the most dangerous road is the one inside a man’s mind when he believes he has to drive it alone.
So if your mate suddenly goes quiet… If he stops turning up to drives… If he sells the project car he once loved… Or if he simply says, “I’m fine,” a little too quickly… ask him again. Not because you’re curious, but because you care.
Sometimes the conversation that saves a life doesn’t begin with, “Are you okay?” Sometimes it begins with something every petrolhead understands. “Eh bro… let’s go for a drive.”
