Three Quick Shots: Rome, September 2007

Sant Eustachio, home of the best coffee in the world.

Colin McRae, 1968-2007

I first interviewed Scottish rally champion Colin McRae at the 13th X Games in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 5. It was a busy day for McRae and the other rally drivers. They were fine-tuning the cars, fretting over the 75-foot span of the jump on the dirt portion of the race, and fighting boredom, bad food, and occasional attacks of sweating journalists. But McRae was nice enough to me, and answered my blundering, ill-informed questions about rally racing with a light touch. He had won 25 World Rally Races and a World Rally Championship. He was among the best drivers in the world. But he humored me for an hour or so in that air-conditioned trailer, probably happy to be out of the hideous heat.

Later that afternoon, I was eating lunch with Ken Bloch, another Team Subaru driver (and the founder of DC Shoes), when McRae and his wife, Alison, joined us. Colin told us about his first pro rally race, when he was 17, and how his two young children, Johnny and Hollie, were probably tearing their house apart back in Lanark, Scotland.

McRae was a very aggressive driver even by the standards of rally racing, and had over his twenty year career earned the nickname "McCrash". On race day he lived up to his name when he rolled his Subaru WRX in the X Game semifinals. It was his second roll in two X Game attempts. It was also his birthday.

By coincidence, I bumped into Colin and Alison in the Crown Club Lounge at LAX the next day. Both of our flights were delayed. He was disappointed that he'd rolled again. "No big deal. Just means I have to come back here next year," he said, and winked.

McRae died on Saturday, September 15, 2007, when the four-seat helicopter he was piloting crashed near his home in Lanark, killing McRae, his 5-year-old son, Johnny, and two friends.