The Zen of Pod Racing

The master said to his apprentices, "There is a greater challenge than riding the fastest horse."

A boy stepped forward and asked, "What is the greater challenge?"

The master answered, "Allowing the horse to run."    More Stories Amidala: The Goddess With Two Faces The Tao of Boba Fett Lies and Prophecy in the Star Wars Saga Phantom Menace: Star Wars as Ritual Theater    Related Links Star Wars -- adapted from the Zen story, "A Higher Understanding"

Like Lucas himself, both generations of Skywalker men love high-speed piloting, even crave it as a challenge to their mastery of the Force.

All four films feature high-speed vehicular chase scenes: The Death Star trench, the asteroid field, the forests of Endor, the Boonta Eve pod race. But only in The Phantom Menace is this hunger for velocity directly identified as racing for its own sake.

Concentrate on the goal

Driving experts will tell you that when your car goes into a skid, the best thing to do is to focus on where you want to go.

The natural reaction is to fixate on the nearby dangers such as other cars, barriers or the edge of the pavement. your innate hand-eye coordination has a tendency to turn you toward whatever you're looking at -- even if it's dangerous.

This can lead you directly into the telephone pole you so desperately wish to avoid.

But by focusing the center of your vision on the path around or between dangerous obstacles, you will guide the car toward safety. Your peripheral vision, operating instinctually on the edge of your consciousness, will usually give you enough warning to avoid the obstacles.

This strategy will certainly function better than if you have the center of your vision on the dangers and only your peripheral vision scouting the path to safety.

If you want control, let it go

Additionally, because of the physics of a tire's contact with the road, turning into the skid will also help stabilize the car, give it better traction, and direct it out of the spin.

It's a counter-intuitive result that doesn't seem rational when you're behind the wheel and panicking, but it is how you will naturally react if you are focused on the direction you want to go. Again, your hand-eye coordination will turn the wheels toward where you're looking, but in this case it will be the way you actually want to go.

These sorts of reactions do not come without practice, or without an understanding of how a car behaves on a gut level. Eventually, you just do the right thing without thinking about it, and it can seem like magic when you see someone narrowly weave their way through a dangerous stretch without slowing.

And it is exactly this kind of gut-level post-conscious reaction that Lucas ascribes to the Force throughout the saga. Let go your conscious self, Luke is told, and act on instinct.

But even the Jedi need constant practice to achieve that state. With enough practice, learned responses can be indistinguishable from instinct. When you enter that state of no-mind and the thinking process gets out of the way of your practiced reactions, you can wonder how you knew what to do when you weren't consciously analyzing the whole time.

Just two racing clubs

Auto racing reflects the "balance of the Force" between aggression and calm reserve, Sith and Jedi.

The Sith driver who guns his vehicle all the way into a turn will rocket past drivers who are not so reckless, and feel a self-congratulatory rush of contempt for those he has passed so easily.

But the lessons of physics and of the Force are the same: determination rewards, aggression kills.

The Sith driver will quickly run out of enough road to brake, and will curse the universe as his squealing tires lose their grip on the pavement and barely slow his slide into the wall. His near-sighted aggression brought him the short term gains of passing all others in a dramatic arc to destruction.

The Jedi driver, on the other hand, will go flat out through the straights, but will approach the turns with respect and brake hard and early, before neatly threading her way through. Throughout the turn, she will keep the cars speed just at the edge of the tires ability to hold their grip, and she will resist the aggressive urge to floor it. As she exits, she will again release her horsepower when it is safe to do so.

It seems reasonable that Lucas came to this Zen-like approach to competition behind the wheels of his own hot rods. When he had enough experience to let go his conscious self, he must have found it easier to win. And the ability to defuse his inner leadfoot at the right moments would have made him much safer to ride with.