If you’re reading this magazine, it’s safe to say that you love speed. You love to bounce off the rev limiter in all forward gears in an empty desert, or mash the gas and pin the passenger to the seatback. Maybe it’s a lower E.T. than you’ve ever recorded, maybe it’s a 200 MPH Club badge, but it’s the speed that lures us back. What is it about speed that we find so compelling?

For most performance enthusiasts, it’s not about the number. Most of us will travel three to five times faster in an airliner than we ever will in an automobile, but we’ll never have the same thrill of speed. Sure, it’s hard to have fun wedged between a sweaty fat guy and a fidgety, sticky-fingered kid, but it’s more than that. There’s no frame of reference when you’re going 600 mph over the ocean. It’s how fast you’re going relative to the scenery that matters.

My first experience with going fast came when I was seven or eight. I’d pull my Radio Flyer wagon up to the top of the hill on our dead-end street and ride it down towards the olive orchard past our house. I loved the sensation of gathering velocity, the roadway whizzing under the hard rubber tires of the wagon as I struggled to steer, the handle folded back against my chest offering little leverage against the pebbled asphalt surface. The faster I went, the closer I came to where the pavement ended in a gravel-and-dirt ramp that led to a little stream. How fast was I going? Didn’t matter; what mattered was the breathless exhilaration of motion, the rush of tarmac and parked cars as my wagon careened down toward the ramp. Most of all, it was the thrill of surviving that uncontrolled rush, of bouncing over the ruts in the gravel and climbing out of the wagon with a shout of joy: that is what I recall most vividly from those days.

Mario Andretti said, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” As a kid, I knew exactly what Mario meant. I felt out of control, at probably not much more than 10 miles an hour, but it got me hooked on velocity.

How about you? What’s your earliest memory of the thrill of going fast?