How to Fly

In 1981, Joe Zeigler wrote the text for the Penguin Roadracing School. Forty-five years later, he restored it — and left it exactly as it was.

The tire pressures are wrong now. The spark-plug chapter is an antique. He knows. He left the dated facts standing because cleaning them up would be lying about what anyone knew in 1981, and there's a kind of truth in an old book that a corrected one loses.

What hasn't expired is the part that was never about the machine. Go fast slowly. Don't follow people. Keep your concentration, because the crash happens in your head before it happens on the track. The small factory between the ears hasn't changed in forty-five years. It won't change in the next forty-five.

A postcard from a younger country, by a man who came back to read it at eighty.