Race Car Quotes & Sayings

I can spend the hour before the race cracking up with all my friends and joking around, but as soon as I get around that race car, I completely change. The focus changes. The competitive juices get flowing. — Denny Hamlin

In 1964, when Lee Iacocca said, 'Shelby, I want you to make a sports car out of the Mustang,' the first thing I said was, 'Lee, you can't make a race horse out of a mule. I don't want to do it.' He said, 'I didn't ask you to make it; you work for me.' — Carroll Shelby

Driving a race car is like dancing with a chain saw. — Cale Yarborough

A fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy - but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits — Neal Stephenson

I race to win. If I am on the bike or in a car it will always be the same. — Valentino Rossi

When you're in a car which can win every race, or fight for a win every race, that is pressure. — Jenson Button

When I think of the pace that I drove my first race, everything was happening a million miles an hour. Now when I get in the car everything happens so much slower. — Dan Wheldon

Religion can hardly revive, because it cannot decay. To put the matter bluntly on the lowest level, it is not to anybody's interest that religion should disappear. If it did, many compositors would be thrown out of work; the audiences of our best-selling scientists would shrink to almost nothing; and the typewriters of the Huxley Brothers would cease from tapping. Without religion the whole human race would die, as according to W. H. R. Rivers, some Melanesian tribes have died, solely of boredom. Every one would be affected: the man who regularly has a run in his car and a round of golf on Sunday, quite as much as the punctilious churchgoer. — T. S. Eliot

I remember, as a young man, wanting to experience a car going at those speeds and being visually nourished by something which I loved so much. And I wanted to race fast cars and have a good time. — Dominic Cooper

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving ... — John Updike

My dad was very successful running midgets in Texas. Then, his two drivers ran into some bad luck. People started saying that Daddy had lost his touch. That it was the cars and not the drivers. I wanted to race just to prove all those people wrong. — A. J. Foyt

Every time my cameras go out on a movie, we learn something new and then we take what we learn and we put it into the next generation of the cameras so we're constantly improving. It's kind of like building a race car, racing it, then running back to the shop and working on the engine some more and tinkering with it to improve it. — James Cameron

I love Death Race, it's one of my favorite films. I thought, "You know what? All that two years worth of work is now gong to be wasted because I'm highly unlikely to direct another car movie straight away," and I felt at that point there was no one who was kind of better at shooting cars, so I thought rather than let it go to waste I would explore the idea of doing commercials, and that's what I did. — Paul W. S. Anderson

I will always enter a race car from the left side. Always. Why? I have no idea. — Mario Andretti

Running on different types of racetracks is challenging - not only for the drivers, but even more for the team members who have to make adjustments to the cars before each race. — Michael Andretti

I've got a great team of engineers behind this race car. I've got a great bunch of mechanics that make it reliable. This car is developed to go out there and be better than the Reynard, and I feel that it is. — Al Unser

Coltrane had a sax, Dale Earnhardt drives a race car and everybody has their tools. — Talib Kweli

I enrolled in a race car driving school, where you go for three days, and they wanted to rent me a video camera and charge me $100 for every half-hour. — Nick Woodman

Every day in life there are challenges; whether you're an accountant, a race car driver or whatever you do. — Justin Allgaier

The symbolic evidence of women's invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for "I am who am." So much for "Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them." What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important. — Joan D. Chittister

The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all. — Alfred Noyes

You know, I was pretty comfortable where I was at. We had cars that could win races (at Roush). I know (Joe Gibbs Racing is) expecting me to perform and do my job. Before this year, I can't remember the last time I've ever been nervous at all inside of a race car. — Matt Kenseth

I wanted to race cars. I didn't like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college. — George Lucas

The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances. — E.B. White

Any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy. — Colin Chapman

It was a bit of a surprise for us that we had problems in Hungary. But in reality, I think the car could have been pretty competitive with a trouble-free race. — Fernando Alonso

The only healing I've ever known is getting back in that race car - for all us racers. — Clint Bowyer

I have a real passion for driving. Earlier on in my life I wanted to be a race car driver. But I don't pay an extortionate amount of money for cars. I'm pretty frugal. — John Barrowman

If there's one great thing I think that's happened over the years, it's that women are being accepted into a man's world in all different areas, whether it's flying an airplane or driving a race car. — Danica Patrick

People, like dogs, love repetition. Chasing a ball, lapping a course in a race car, sliding down a slide. Because as much as each incident is similar, so it is different. — Garth Stein

Get in the race car do what I do then go home. We don't have freedom to do anything anymore. — Tony Stewart

The great 'New York Times' columnist Dave Anderson famously slept one year in a child's race-car bed. There he was, Pulitzer Prize and all, snoring as his feet dangled over the rear tires of Lightning McQueen. — Willie Geist

We ran well there in the November 2012, my first race with (Tony) Gibson (as crew chief). Unfortunately, we haven't left there without a torn up race car. We got caught up in accidents in November of 2012 and then again in November 2013. We cut a tire and crashed last spring, so it'd be nice to have a good clean run with the GoDaddy car. I like Phoenix and Gibson has won there a few times. Hopefully our luck will turn around and we can have a good smooth run and get back on track. — Danica Patrick

We should make politicians dress like race car drivers
when they get money, make them wear the company logos on their suit. — Jay Leno

We started on the pole but by Lap 150 we were ninth or 10th and we were struggling. The car was sliding around a lot, but I did not get upset. I just said, 'Let's just keep working hard.' Last year, I would have been so upset about getting passed by those cars I would have been overly aggressive and would have worn our tires out. You can't do that in a 500-mile race if you want to be strong at the end. — Kasey Kahne

The format of the race weekend is also very well thought out. We have enough practice time to get the cars well set-up and have a proper qualifying session where we can do as many laps as we like, which is great for the drivers and spectators. — Nigel Mansell

To be a driver that can cross off one of those marquee events as a winner, that cements your legacy in motorsports, to be able to win the Daytona 500 is the ultimate dream of a race car driver. — Tony Stewart

Guys are so predictable. They can't seem to separate fantasy from reality, so I get a lot of bikers and race car drivers hitting on me. They're all just playboys, so they don't interest me. — Michelle Rodriguez

Driving race cars was an avenue for me to learn how to build my own car, and that was my ambition all along. — Carroll Shelby

Well, everybody does something, some people race cars, others collect stamps, I find tai chi to be philosophically, aesthetically, physically and spiritually fascinating. — Lou Reed

A Race car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samotracia — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The race car is harder to drive. If there was an in-car camera that could have watched me saw on that wheel for 500 laps, there wasn't one time I could relax. — Greg Biffle

Zeb grinned. "You were the only person I know who's done it on an occupied police car."
I glared at him. "If you want to start trading stories, we can start trading stories. As a former member of the Richard Marx Fan Club, you don't want to start this arms race."
Zeb smiled meekly around a rib. Agreed."
"Richard Marx?" Jolene asked.
"He went through an obnoxiously cheerful pop phase. Don't ask. — Molly Harper

You ask me about tragic accidents? If I am on my tractor at my farm and it rolls over on me and kills me, that's a tragic accident. If I die in a race car, that's life. I died doing what I love. — Dale Earnhardt

People ask how hard it can be sitting down for work during a 500-mile race? Well, without power steering or power brakes, holding onto 650 horses in a car that has nearly 3,000 pounds of downforce and can produce up to 4Gs vertically and laterally can be extremely tough - even sitting down. — Charlie Kimball

I realize this is blasphemy, but a few weeks ago I tried to watch a NASCAR race being run at Talladega. I lasted about five minutes before terminal boredom overtook me. It appeared to be nothing more than a high-speed freeway commute
a mob of luridly painted, identical lumps of metal loping at 180 mph around the banking, fender to fender, nose to tail. Knowing the scenario would surely devolve into a multicar demolition derby that would thrill the goobers in the grandstands, I turned off the set to later learn that this time it was Jimmie Johnson who triggered the eight-car melee. — Brock Yates

A tightrope walker uncertain if he could make it to the other side probably would not. A race car driver wondering if he was taking a turn too fast was likely to lose control. If a man feared death, whether his own or the taking of another's, death would surely come calling. — Roy L. Pickering Jr.

To be a champion, you must have no ego at all. You must not exist as a separate entity. You must give yourself over to the race. You are nothing if not for your team, your car, your shoes, your tires. Do not mistake confidence and self-awareness for egotism. — Garth Stein

Well, good afternoon, sunshine. How are you feeling?"
"Like something the cat dragged in, then dragged back outside to leave in the rain, and mud, then the lightning hit it, and burned it, and the cat came back to tear it into pieces, before burying it. — Kimberly Montague

I went to the store to buy a race car for my son's birthday, and the next thing I know I was working part time for the holidays. Then in February 2002, I started working on a plan to purchase the store. — Bob Rice

I just loved the driving part. If I didn't race anybody, it didn't make any difference as long as I could drive. It's just the physical part of getting in the car and being able to go run fast and being able to drive. — Kyle Petty

Let me ask you. If someone called you and offered you a ride in the Indianapolis 500 and you were a male race car driver, would you turn the ride down? — Janet Guthrie

I grew up in the industry, so this whole entertainment thing is my world. If I had to leave it, maybe I'd be a race-car driver. That'd be awesome. — Mitchel Musso

I've never been to a race car race before. — Christina Ricci

The first time I fired up a car, felt the engine shudder and the wheel come to life in my hands, I was hooked. It was a feeling I can't describe. I still get it every time I get into a race car. — Mario Andretti

I have always tried to drive a car that was better than me, and race against people who were better than me. If you are surrounded by people who are as good as you, or not as good, how are you going to learn? — Joey Logano

I love race car drivers, I love gymnastics, I love UFC, I love police officers, I love firefighters. I just try to give them the same enjoyment they give me. — Shaquille O'Neal

I mean, you've kind of got the track down, especially with ovals. The only thing that improves is that when race conditions come, you know what to expect slightly more from the track and from your car. — Danica Patrick

One glance at the way he looked at her, and Sam knew exactly what he was. A lethal habit, she thought. The accelerator on a race car. A halo jump on a crystal clear day. The best possible rush with the worst possible consequences. — Alexi Lawless

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. — Laurie Colwin

The better you get, the less you run around showing off as a muscle guy. You know, you wear regular shirts-not always trying to show off what you have. You talk less about it. It's like you have a little BMW - you want to race the hell out of this car, because you know it's just going 110. But if you see guys driving a ferrari or a lamborghini, they slide around at 60 on the freeway because they know if they press on that accelerator they are going to go 170. These things are the same in every field. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Janet's a serious racer with some good race-car stuff. She can get the job done. I respect her as a racer. — Neil Bonnett

I am training at such a high level that I actually could eat anything and get by. But as my coach always says, your body is like a car, and food is like your fuel. I am a race car, so I can't just put unleaded fuel in my car. I need that good premium fuel. — Lolo Jones

In the build-up to a race I begin practising two days beforehand with two other team members. We have an hour and a half practise run together. Then on the next day we have another practise in two separate hour long sessions. On the actual day of competition we do a warm-up run in the car before the race. — Liz Halliday

Racing is what I live for, and it makes my world go around. Having said that, without the support of the diabetes community, I may not have gotten back into the race car after my diagnosis in October 2007. — Charlie Kimball

It seems that these phenomenal feats that race car drivers are performing are instinctive. They [require] very little mental workload. — Chris Gerdes

As a kid, I loved my Matchbox cars, my Big Wheels, and the race cars on TV. When I laid eyes on my first go-kart when I was just five, it gave my desire for making things with wheels go fast a focus. This combined with the fact that I've been incredibly competitive since a young age made for the proper mix of passion and aggression to become a race car driver. — Andy Lally

Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races — Carroll Shelby

In the race of life, don't be like a horse or car that can stop anytime; rather be like Earth and Time: unstoppable. — Vinita Kinra

When I get in the car I love my wife and kids more than anything, but I'm not thinking about that side of things. I'm thinking about the car, I'm thinking about the race and I'm thinking about how to make the car faster. — Scott Dixon

If there's anyone in space, what they'll learn about the human race will be listening to us talking on the car phone. — Roger McGuinn

The problem is Twitter is designing the metaphorical equivalent of a Toyota Prius. A car for the masses. While I want a Formula One race car. — Robert Scoble

We begin to understand that to coparent is to one day look up and notice that you are on a roller coaster with another human being. You are in the same car, strapped down side by side and you can never, ever get off. There will never be another moment in your lives when your hearts don't rise and fall together, when your minds don't race and panic together, when your stomachs don't churn in tandem, when you stop seeing huge hills emerge in the distance and simultaneously grab the side of the car and hold on tight. No one except for the one strapped down beside you will ever understand the particular thrills and terrors of your ride. — Glennon Doyle Melton

Every little kid has always wanted to be a race car driver. This gets some of that out. — David Alan Grier

I remember my father's last race very clearly when he drove at Hockenheim in front of 100,000 people and I was sitting next to him on the roof of his car and waving to the fans. That was the moment when I thought: 'One day I want to do the same.' — Nico Rosberg

A race car driver must be very selfish. It is a cold truth: even his family must came second to the race. — Garth Stein

This is like my dad's race team where we had one Legend car. If we wrecked it, we couldn't race the next week unless we had enough parts to put it back together again. — Kurt Busch

It's not important how we play. If you have a Ferrari and I have a small car, to beat you in a race I have to break your wheel or put sugar in your tank. — Jose Mourinho

I keep my weight low, although you need to be able to move your weight around the race car to change the balance. I'm 6ft and I'm 70kg so I haven't much fat on me. — Jenson Button

I am very puzzled by the fact that young people are getting infected again. They don't take precautions despite an enormous amount of information. It's like riding a race car at 200 kilometers an hour. Some people like the risk. — Luc Montagnier

I'm like a fine-tuned race car. You've got to make frequent pit stops when you drink as much tea as I do. — Si Robertson

With tennis, you can go pick up a racket, take a lesson, and understand how much talent and skill it takes to be as good as the top pros. Same with golf: pick up a club. But not many can go out and get in a race car and experience a drive at over 200 miles an hour. — Mario Andretti

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed. — Jonathan Safran Foer

As a race car driver, driving is the easy part. The hard part is containing the emotions on the race track. — Kevin Harvick

If you're not a race driver, stay the hell home. Don't come here and grumble about going too fast. Get the hell out of the race car if you've got feathers on your legs or butt. Put a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat that candy ass. — Dale Earnhardt

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way. — Paul Schrader

I had a '56 Ford, and my first car was a '49 Chevy. I converted it to a stick and used to race with the other high school kids down along the river. — Craig T. Nelson

A great race car driver in a bad car doesn't make great results. A great car and a bad race car driver doesn't make great results. You have to have both. It's the combination of driver and car. — Jeff Burton

The great social, moral, and spiritual battles of the ages boiled down to Sandy McDougall slamming her snot-nosed kid in the corner and the kid would grow up and slam his own kid in the corner, world without end, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race. — Stephen King

When runners win a big race these days, they get a car. When I won a big race, I got a ride. — Ron Delany

I can't tell the difference between the best and the worst 'cause I realize not everybody wants to have sex in the middle of a demolition derby race in the car. — John Waters

Dale Earnhardt was the best race car driver there will ever be in NASCAR. I would hope you don't expect me to replace him because nobody ever will. — Kevin Harvick

I have one quote I very often read to myself, from a very good friend: 'Forget the people around you now; remember the little boy who was racing in go-karts, what you were dreaming of and what he wanted to achieve one day and what was his goal. Race for him.'. I fell in love with the sport, I love racing. The amount of satisfaction I get just going around in a Formula 1 car makes me smile. So if it is a bad day then you tend to come out and say it's horrible and you don't enjoy. But if you had to pick between that and doing nothing, you would always pick that. — Sebastian Vettel

We couldn't get the car back until well after the end of the race and we had very little time for repairs. — John Surtees

To drive an F1 car you have to be a little mad. On the morning of a race there's a mix of excitement and fear. If it's a wet track, then it's worse as you're not in control most of the time, which is the thing all drivers fear the most. — Jenson Button

This is so dumb - once time I spray-tanned before a race, and I didn't shower, and I sweated the whole thing off on my car. It was so bad, I told a fan I would never do it again. — Amber Cope

I assure you that the training that you get in a midget, in a sprint car and perhaps in a Silver Crown car is really the kind of experience that makes you into a damn good race driver. — Rodger Ward

One of my biggest problems this season was with the clutch at the start of the race. I hate to risk the car. — Alain Prost

As a driver, you want to race every lap possible, especially when you've got a good car. — Romain Grosjean

All I think about now is her amazing body wrapped around mine and broken furniture. And race car hoods and bearing alignment, assembly lubes and aligns boring. God honey, the affect you have on me is ... unbelievable. — Shey Stahl