The McCain campaign, however, did not make the senator available for an interview. "And whatever it is, she always excels at it."Īnd what does John McCain think of his wife's passion for racing? "Oh, he loves it," Cindy McCain said. "She has a spirit that's very difficult to keep down, and she's always looking for something new to do, something new to get into," said Jack, who generally doesn't speak to the media but recently granted "E:60" an exclusive interview. She owns a small percentage of the Arizona Diamondbacks, finished a half-marathon in 2005, regularly attends NASCAR races, and participates in water sports with her husband, who is 72, and the four children they have together. In 1986, six years after marrying John McCain, she got a pilot's license and bought a small plane so she could fly him around Arizona in his first U.S. McCain's love of sports carried into adulthood. "I'm a gearhead," McCain said with a smile in an interview last month in Phoenix. That inspired her in high school, when she took a class in auto mechanics and regularly attended drag races with friends. But he also loved cars and first took McCain, raised as an only child, to the Indy 500 when she was about 12 years old. Her father, the late James Hensley, was known for founding one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the United States. Here's another fact many might find surprising: Cindy McCain, an heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune, has had a passion for racing nearly her entire life. And to find out that his missus is into drifting is, frankly, astounding." McCain, he looks like the archetypal grandfather. When told that McCain was into drifting, Gardiner was speechless for a few moments. But every method requires lots of practice, not to mention a modicum of chutzpah. Some drifters employ the emergency brake others rely more on the clutch. Then they quickly turn the steering wheel to the right." With the wheels pointing to the right, the car then slides sideways through the left turn before proceeding normally again. When they head into a left turn, they pull the wheel sharply to the left and mash the accelerator, which would get the back end of the car to slide out. "First, a drifter must have a powerful rear-wheel-drive car, something like a Corvette. "But that's not what happens in drifting," said Justin Gardiner, a British journalist who covers the auto industry from Japan and has drifted numerous times. When a car on a highway approaches a sharp left turn at, say, 75 mph, the driver slows down and turns the wheel to the left. The difference between driving and drifting through a turn is dramatic. It's known among pockets of auto-racing enthusiasts in about 15 countries, and to anyone who has seen the movie "The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift." That's what drifting is about."įor people who have never seen it, drifting occurs when a driver intentionally skids a car sideways through a turn on a road or a marked course, usually at speeds that exceed the legal limit. Everything you were taught in driver's ed, forget. You're taught to keep control of your car. "I'm probably a little too cautious with it because it is abnormal from what you're taught when you're taught to drive. "I love it," McCain said, though she described herself as a below-average drifter. Months after first seeing drifting on television, McCain traveled to Japan with Jack, now a senior at the Naval Academy and an avid fan of motorsports, to take drifting lessons with a top instructor. It turned out it was called drifting and had origins tracing back to the mountains of central Japan in the early 1990s. When Cindy McCain, 54, encounters something that intrigues her, she embraces it with the zeal of a toddler on Christmas Eve.Īnd so McCain began to learn as much as possible about this mysterious driving technique. Although a wide swath of the public views her as reserved and distant, she is actually quite the opposite in private. But McCain, the wife of the Republican nominee for president, Sen. Looks kind of cool, McCain thought to herself, but how'd they do that?įor most people, the curiosity probably would have ended there. But this much, at least, McCain recalls with perfect clarity: She was watching television with her oldest son, Jack, when footage flashed across the screen of race cars skidding sideways as though they were on ice. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserĬindy McCain takes the wheel in her own raceĬindy McCain doesn't remember all the details.
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