Most car people like to exaggerate their abilities, their knowledge, and their accomplishments. They do it because it’s easy: Buy a fairly fast car (a 300hp turbo 3000GT goes for well under 10 grand these days, and you can get an E36 M3 for 15 grand), put on an exhaust, hit the drag strip, or maybe do a track day. And just like that, you’ve “raced” your car. Now you can drive around with a smug look in your stock “race” car, telling people all about the one time you had lift-throttle understeer going into corner 6 or some other such silliness. Just don’t say anything like that to us.

Here at the Pansy Patrol, we aren’t interested in exaggerations, and we like to think that we separate ourselves from the rest of the pompous, blustery types that fill countless forums and other blogs with “racing” stories. Combined, the 5 of us have quite a bit of time on the track. We have experience with motorcycles, with high-powered cars, but mostly our expertise is in driving low-powered FWD and RWD cars. We aren’t autocrossers, and we certainly don’t know much about dragging.

Throughout the summer, people like to ask me how my “races” went. My answer is always the same: I race in the winter. In the summer I do track days. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m not going wheel-to-wheel with someone in the corners, and if there aren’t any winners, losers, and posted results, I haven’t been racing. The next time you meet someone who talks about “racing” cars, ask him where you can find his results. Ask him what sanctioning body governs his “races”. Most likely, the self-styled “race car driver” won’t have any answers for you.

I’m even reluctant to call the ice racing that I do in the winter real racing. It does have standings, points, and a sanctioning body (you can see them here), but it’s not as if all the other competitors and I are out there in fully-caged cars, driving in very close quarters. The ice racing I do is racing in the loosest sense of the word (of course, that’s part of what makes it so cheap and so much fun).

But I have never “raced” my car in the summer, even though I’ve driven at Watkins Glen several times and at NHMS more times than I can count. I’ve just done a lot of track days. And while many of the skills I’ve learned at track days—line, threshold braking, brake-turning, and spin recovery—are skills that any race car driver will have, I won’t talk about “racing” at NHMS until I’ve had the wheels of a competitor’s car leave rubber marks on my door.

Is it a minor distinction? Perhaps. But the car enthusiast community and subculture is often fraught with hubris and a sort of passive-aggressive intimidation, and I’d rather not be associated with those aspects of it. Just last week I had the misfortune of talking to a gas station attendant while he was trying (and failing) to remove my track tires from their rims. After he asked where I was “racing”—and after I explained, at length, that I was just doing a track day—he raved about his buddy’s quadruple-turbocharged VR-4 with “the turbos mounted under the car, right where the passenger seat would go.” Of course, the owner of the legendary quad-turbo VR-4 “raced” it all the time, and it was amazingly fast. And, of course, the attendant couldn’t tell me where it had been “raced,” what it had beaten, not even what it had run in the quarter-mile.

To those car guys out there at gatherings and on forums who insist on telling me about all the “racing” they’ve done: Spare me. You still have leather seats, and you probably listen to the radio while you’re in the staging lane or during your “race” up the highway.

And to our readers: I hope that we’ve helped some of you become better performance drivers. I hope our pointers and discussions have made it easier to understand how to go fast. But please don’t think of us as race car drivers. We’re too critical of the blowhards we see every day to accept credit from you that we haven’t earned.