The first non-emergency dual-consciousness experience I had was at Laguna Seca’s Corkscrew while running 2nd during the 1981 Russell Formula Ford Festival final. Back then, I didn’t just ‘drive’ through the Corkscrew; instead, doing my best Gilles Villeneuve impersonation, I used to really fling the car through there – ‘pinning’ the front-end and rotating the car on turn-in to throw it sideways over the top, immediately going full throttle, and then letting the springs catch the back end when it landed so that the stored energy would then fling the tail end around to the left. That technique allowed me to accelerate from turn-in through the whole corner and carry a lot of speed mid-corner, but still make the right-hander at the bottom of the hill. Anyway, as you can imagine, there was a great bustle of activity – hands flying and feat working, but it was all very controlled and repeatable, and it happened in slow motion for me.
However, on one lap I had this absolute feeling that my consciousness was split (there were two of us in the car). “I” was in one part (or in one level) of my brain, detached from the actual ‘task’ of driving; just calmly watching everything happening in slow motion. Well, everything was slow motion except for my hands snapping the wheel back and forth at exactly the right times and in exactly the right amount. I felt like I was watching some other part of me; a separate “he” in another part (or level) of my brain who was doing the actual driving; working with unbelievable speed and with amazing precision. I remember thinking “Wow, that’s amazing, how can ‘he’ do that!” And then that experience/feeling was gone; I guess the pieces of me became the whole again.
I wouldn’t say that experience freaked me out, but it sure as hell got my attention, and when combined with what I’d experienced with the ‘oil emergency’ I was beginning to wonder if I was going crazy. There was definitely a repeating pattern of duality in consciousness and in driving task separation. At the time, I knew virtually nothing about the brain or neurology (still not claiming I do), so I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening. I was curious what it all meant, but since I was focused on racing during that time, I just kind of put it on the back burner.