From Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson
During the summer of 1977, Gates often went out at 3:00 a.m. after hours of programming and drove around for an hour with his friend Chris Larson. One of his favorite roads was a narrow, twisting two-lane ribbon of highway a few miles east of town off Interstate 40 that led to an abandoned cement plant. Here, the finely tuned engine of the green Porsche could often be heard whining into the desert night as Gates smoothly negotiated one curve after another with each high-pitched shift of gears. On one of these wild summer rides with Larson, however, Gates did not maintain control. He spun out, and the Porsche crashed into a dirt embankment. "The way Chris described it," said Steve Wood, "they were going about 120 miles an hour [forward] and then they were going 120 sideways." Neither Gates nor Larson was injured, and there was only minor damage to the car.
Larson was Gates’ partner again on late-night shenanigans at a road construction site east of Albuquerque in the Sandia foothills, where unsuspecting workers would leave the keys in the heavy equipment when they went home for the day. Gates and Larson would sneak into the site, and by trial and error they learned to operate the complex machinery and drive it around the site. Usually, it was by error. Gates once came within a few inches of backing over his Porsche with a bulldozer. After they mastered the machinery, there was the usual friendly competition. One night, Gates and Larson held a bulldozer race, engines revving, stacks belching black smoke, determined to find out whose machine was faster. Neither would claim to be the winner. The bulldozer race became part of Microsoft folklore.
