I found something that cheered me up recently. In the process of cleaning out my room, throwing away all but my memories to finally move on, I came across an old drawing of mine. It was in a folder of primary school stuff, so I was 10 or 11 years old.

It's a shit drawing. Perspective is only something I'm kinda grasping, even now, but by any standard it's horrendous. I suppose it was in the transition how I drew cars, transitioning from 2D side profiles to a three-quarters perspective. Sort of my equivalent of the early days of 3D graphics, which was artistically far inferior to 2D stuff, but the extra depth made it a must have. I can hardly criticise, 2D racing games are awful (even though driving is a fundamentally 2D experience, the depth is key).

Perhaps being blind to its terribleness is why it's a complete drawing that gave me a chance to smile all these years later. It seems I've lost some discipline over the years. The linework is odd. These days I struggle to move an inch without taking short, scratchy sweeps with my instrument. Here there's a lot of long, continuous lines, often wavey (like, what is the base of the windscreen doing?), which reminds me of the most recent piece of art that I've done and liked.

In other ways it's typical me. A fictional car, although I want to say me from a decade ago was channeling some 7th Gen Celica in the headlight shape, albeit not directly. The low front also reminds me of the early GT500 GT-R. The window nets befuddle me, since NASCAR was very much not a thing I was aware of (as you can tell by the nets being on both sides) despite having a Matt Kenseth PEZ dispenser and being a huge fan of Cars (the movie).

But so far this has just been knocks at myself, right? I mean, I wouldn't consider them knocks, it doesn't upset me, I don't feel down about it. This is all just observation, but I suppose I can see why I tend to get a lot of feedback calling me down on myself.

So let's talk about why this cheered me up. I was 10. I didn't appreciate the purpose of wings, I didn't know that F1 cars were all different. About the only thing I was sure of regarding the exterior of a car was that Need for Speed Underground 2 was a lot of fun and no other game allowed tuning like it did. So there's a high mount, (debatably) two element rear wing and a large wraparound front splitter, all scribbled grey for that bare carbon fibre effect. There's vents on every inch of the bodywork, including quite a lot of nonsensical ones, but the front arches being wide and square to vent out pressure is at least something I still believe in today.

On the other side of the paper is what I presume to be an idea of the powertrain. Which at least explains the massive intakes ahead of the rear wheels (built out of infinitely narrow planes, from the looks of it).

I'm a little fascinated by the idea of linking both engines through a common gearbox. It sort of relates to my current disappointment in EVs having to limit instead of redistributing torque for torque vectoring fun. It's a silly complaint really, but my brain fixates on, "Output power is limited to 99% of the maximum possible," instead of, "If you're torque vectoring, you're probably limited from using all your power."

There's no direction indicated, but I assume diff 2 is at the rear (and the tyres agree with that). Which means "Big Engine" is at the back, meaning I recognised the value of rear bias (weight almost certainly, although potentially power?) even then. And no, I definitely didn't understand what a differential was. I figured that out only last year. It's a shame 10 year old me didn't appreciate tyre widths, seeing as the tyre sizes seem to match contact patch sizes (rear are far taller and narrowered) instead of letting the rears be larger.

For someone who's life revolves around cars like I'm orbiting a black hole, inescapably drawn to them, I haven't had the best relationship with real ones. I feel airheaded talking to other people about them, or I overcompensate and try to aggressively prove I know what I'm talking about. Four years after turning 17, and I still can't drive because I just don't get it.

But it's nice to know that who I am was always there. That this freakish obsession with performance and function over form wasn't something I grew into.