Cindy McCain doesn’t remember all the details. It might have been six years ago. Maybe seven. 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.
Looks kind of cool, McCain thought to herself, but how’d they do that?
For most people, the curiosity probably would have ended there. But McCain, the wife of the Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, is anything but ordinary. Although a wide swath of the public views her as reserved and distant, she is actually quite the opposite in private.
And so McCain began to learn as much as possible about this mysterious driving technique. It turned out it was called drifting and had origins tracing back to the mountains of central Japan in the early 1990s. 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.
“I love it,” McCain said, though she described herself as a below-average drifter. “I’m probably a little too cautious with it because it is abnormal from what you’re taught when you’re taught to drive. You’re taught to keep control of your car. Everything you were taught in driver’s ed, forget. That’s what drifting is about.”
For 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. 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.”
Cindy McCain, an heiress to a multimillion-dollar fortune, has had a passion for racing nearly her entire life. Her father, the late James Hensley, was known for founding one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributors in the United States. 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. That inspired her in high school, when she took a class in auto mechanics and regularly attended drag races with friends.
“I’m a gearhead,” McCain said with a smile in an interview last month in Phoenix.
And what does John McCain think of his wife’s passion for racing? “Oh, he loves it,” Cindy McCain said.
In April 2004, just one day after returning home to Arizona after one of her many trips to Japan to drift with Jack, Cindy McCain’s spirit was put to the test. She collapsed while having lunch with friends and couldn’t talk or walk. At the age of 49, McCain had suffered a mild stroke and was hospitalized for four days.
Six weeks later, McCain was still limited physically and, she said, mired in depression. Jack knew exactly what type of therapy was needed. As a 50th-birthday gift, he bought her a four-day course to the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in Chandler, Ariz.
Driving? Six weeks after a stroke? McCain thought the idea was crazy.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she recalls telling Jack. “And he said, ‘Mom, yes you can.’”
In fact, McCain did so well that, a year later, in May 2005, she returned to Bondurant to hone her drifting skills. She and Jack then rebuilt a Nissan 240SX, installing a tricked-out engine and other parts conducive to drifting (the car is not street-legal). They even competed in amateur drift competitions in the U. S. as a mother-son tandem, finishing as high as second place.
But what would happen if a drifter suddenly found herself living in the White House as first lady?
“Camp David’s got a lot of space,” McCain said, laughing. “The only thing I can say is that if we are lucky enough to be able to represent the United States of America, I’ll do it the best I can. And I also want to have some fun, too.”
