Richard Gabrielle: Taking Baby for
a Drive
He called it his "Baby P," a 1999 black Volkswagen
Passat. It was kept in a garage in West Haven, Conn., and
brought out only when the weather was fine -- or when it
was time for Richard Gabrielle's racing lessons.
Mr. Gabrielle's wife, Monica, who was not allowed to
drive the Passat, said she had little doubt that her
husband's fairly recent passion for driving a souped-up
little car around a racetrack at Lime Rock Park in
Lakeville, Conn., was the result of a midlife crisis.
Mr. Gabrielle, a 50-year-old insurance broker at the
Aon Corporation, was an extraordinarily gentle man in
most ways. Even moths, when they got in the house, would
be carefully ushered out, uninjured. But he would also
never tell his wife how fast he went during his driving
lessons, and he recently bought a radar detector, so that
he could, as he put it, "practice" on the highways.
"He'd tell me, `Better that than women, don't you
think?' " she said.
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