Once Around the Track Read online

  This man looked as if he didn’t care what anyone thought about him as long as he could do whatever it was he was determined to do. Win races, she supposed.

  She wondered what it would feel like to be so unencumbered of the feelings of others. Certainly she had never known such self-possession. As far back as she could remember, the pressure had been there to be pretty, to be smart, to be pleasing to others. First Mummy had instilled in her the message that people only liked pretty girls, slender girls, smiling girls. And if she had doubted the truth of those early lessons, then half a dozen years of adolescence would have shown her the light, because to be an ugly duckling in the world of private schools and debutante parties was to experience hell on earth. The poor, chubby, frizzy-haired beast on her hall had swallowed a bottle of aspirin, had her stomach pumped, and then went away forever, giggling with relief and joy.

  What would it feel like to exercise just because you enjoyed it, rather than in social self-defense? To befriend people because they were interesting, and not because they were useful? To live without second-guessing yourself every waking moment?

  One might as well ask a thoroughbred. Certainly this pretty boy was not up to philosophical discussions. But that was all right. She would do the thinking for the team, and she would see that he was treated well and kept happy. Just as she would have looked after a thoroughbred had the other form of racing appealed to her instead.

  “But why would you want to invest in a stock car?” Tate had asked her, in mild bewilderment, as if she’d ordered oysters in May.

  She had given him a vague smile and a little shrug, trying to formulate a polite response. It wasn’t as if he actually cared. It was, after all, her money. “I don’t know,” she said. “Horses are so passé, I suppose.”

  He nodded, not really interested in anything she did, but as unfailingly polite as six generations of inbreeding could possibly make him. “Yes, one does feel that the sport is somewhat quaint in this age of lasers and space shuttles.”

  She nodded. They vaguely knew of people in northern Virginia who kept polo teams, and certainly Indy racing was fashionably daring in their social circle, but she rather fancied the idea of cars that looked like actual street vehicles and the reverse snob appeal of stock car racing. NASCAR was indeed a millionaire’s sport, even if few people realized that fact. It was different. Christine liked being different, as long as she did not incur any social punishment for it. Stock car racing promised not to be boring. The other women with whom she had formed this venture all sounded so idealistic, talking about opportunities for women and automotive safety research, and she had murmured agreement with all these lofty goals, but really her motives were much more basic than that.

  And it was her money.

  Tate, making a noble effort to keep the conversational ball rolling, said, “Well, I suppose cars are easier to repair than horses.”

  She nodded, as if this had been a consideration. Then, amusing herself by coming as close to the truth as she dared, Christine had said, “And after all, darling, what is the point of owning a horse if you can’t ride it?”

  Badger Jenkins. Oh, yes.

  Christine Berenson looked at the stack of reports on her desk and sighed. Who knew that starting a sports venture could be so…well…corporate?

  She supposed that it made sense, really. Everyone knew that NASCAR was a multibillion-dollar business. The only family-owned sport in the world. But somehow the idea of investing in a form of entertainment obscured the fact that it was simply a business like anything else. With a grimace, she pictured the operators of the Roman Colosseum toting up their expenses for lion upkeep and arena personnel against the projected gate receipts of the games.

  First, they’d had to line up sponsors, because you couldn’t even play the game without twenty million dollars or so to bankroll the operation. It was amazing how many months of planning and meeting and schmoozing had to take place before the gentleman could start his engine. The race may go at 180 mph, but the preliminary phase went at a snail’s pace. So much to plan and negotiate.

  Find a suitable property to use as a race shop. They had decided to rent one in the vicinity of Mooresville rather than go to the extra expense of new construction, because, after all, one never knew whether the venture would turn out to be successful or not. Most of the race shops were within hailing distance of Mooresville anyhow, which meant that finding some suitable but vacant garage space was a feasible plan, and the personnel to run the operation would also be available locally.

  She sighed, looking at the morass of papers on her desk. Stacks of job applications and résumés and letters of recommendation. Who knew how many people were required to run even a one-car racing team? She marveled at the figures before her. Anyone who thought that stock car racing was one man driving one car was decades out of the loop. The venture was beginning to remind her of the space program: a few people going up in high-tech machines, backed by a small army of engineers and technicians on the ground. Same with racing, apparently. The race shop, once established and outfitted, would house dozens of support personnel who would never even go to the speedways themselves. These “shop dogs” built the cars, refurbished old or damaged ones, engineered the motors, tinkered with body design to gain the best advantage for a given track, and did a dozen other things to ensure that the driver had the best car the team could afford to field. Engineers…fabricators…mechanics…secretaries…janitors…publicists…It added up to a lot of salaries. Who knew?

  She had been vaguely aware of the need for a pit crew for the race itself-people to change tires and put fuel in the car-but this behind-the-scenes infrastructure of personnel had taken her by surprise, although she didn’t know why it should have. Everything was complex these days. How naive they had been back when they had thought that securing the services of Badger Jenkins was the answer to all their problems. Now, she sometimes found herself thinking that he hardly mattered at all. Certainly his talent could not compensate for poor engineering, bad equipment, or a lack of research and development. That face would sell a lot of tee shirts, though. And it ought to lure in a fair number of sponsors that wanted a good-looking athlete to personify their products.

  Every day she was finding out that she needed answers to questions that had never even occurred to her when the project began. Fortunately, she had seasoned advisors on board to answer those questions, but still it gave her pause to think of how little they had known about the logistics of it all when they began. There were questions that had never even occurred to them at the outset.

  How does the pit crew get to far-flung race tracks like Sonoma or Phoenix or New Hampshire? And most of the races these days were well beyond driving distance from the greater Charlotte area, home of the majority of race teams. Where do you house them for race weekends, and who feeds them?

  None of these minor problems of logistics had occurred to them when they began the team, but little by little, practicality had intruded upon the daydream of owning a human racehorse, and one by one, questions were asked and answered, often by courtly old gentlemen who seemed within a syllable of using the term “little lady” in their discourse. But however antiquated the men’s world views, their advice had been eminently practical, and little by little, the answers fell into place, so that now, many months later, they could actually say that the team existed; that it was housed in adequate, if not luxurious, quarters, in Cabarrus County; and that it was staffed by competent professional engineers, mechanics, and other support persons necessary to the running of a race team.

  This behind-the-scenes crew was, necessarily, predominantly male. This gender bias was unfortunate but essential, Christine thought with a sigh. Fielding an all-female team sounded charming and democratic on the face of it, but the truth was: one simply could not fill all the behind-the-scenes technical positions with women. Racing had for too long been an all-male domain, so that most of the current expertise, the hands-on experience of stock car racing, resided
in male brains, and the fact was that one simply could not do without them. After a brief meeting and a careful examination of the cold, hard facts, the investors agreed that there was no choice in the matter. The behind-the-scenes personnel would have to be mostly male, and that’s all there was to it. But the pit crew was the most visible part of the operation, anyhow, aside from the driver, and in that area they did have an element of choice.

  She had called a meeting of her fellow investors to, the cliché made her smile, bring them up to speed. Technically, they were owners, too, but she was really the one in charge. Some of them just chipped in their money for a lark, believing that her venture was a good investment, and certainly were able to afford the loss if it wasn’t. It was fun. A couple of the others were interested in the sport as fans, but they had promised to give her a free hand in the running of the team. But they enjoyed getting together, hearing about her adventures in this brave new world. Sometimes she felt like the star of a private reality show for millionaires: Survivor: NASCAR. But she didn’t mind entertaining them, considering how much money they’d entrusted her with. And if she learned the sport well, and if luck was on her side, then in a little while nobody would be laughing at her. That was the important part of the enterprise. Badger was just a side bet with herself. The icing on the cake.

  “I’m working on assembling a pit crew,” Christine told the assembled gathering. “How hard can that be? Change the tires, put gas in the car, clean the windshield-”

  One of the younger women raised her hand. “Actually, Christine, I read that race car windshields are tear-off sheets of-”

  “I know,” said Christine through clenched teeth. After all these months and all this work, how could they think she wouldn’t know that? She forced a smile. “I was simply making a point. Thank you, Faye. But the premise is sound. Anyone of reasonable strength and agility can be trained to perform those tasks in a relatively short time-unlike the intricacies of engineering and mechanics, which take years of study and experience. Fortunately, people at the race and television viewers will see the pit crew and not the shop personnel, so in accordance with our intended goal, to the casual observer, the team will still look all female.”

  “Well, except for Badger,” said Diane Hodges, the former Miss Texas who had married into Oil. “He could make my toes curl through a locked door.”

  A large framed poster of Badger Jenkins in his firesuit hung on the wall of the office. With one accord, the investors turned to study it. One or two smiled approvingly, and one of them said, “He reminds me of my grandson.”

  “Perhaps we should have tried harder to find a female race car driver,” said the investor from Winnetka. “There’s that girl at Indy-”

  “We can’t afford her,” Christine replied with the assurance of one who has had this argument so many times that her response was a sound bite. “There are half a dozen women in the lower echelons of stock car racing as well, but either they are under contract to one of the big teams in development programs or they are out of our price range. Or both.”

  “I like Badger just fine,” said Miss Texas.

  “I’m sure that a lot of women will agree with you,” said Christine. “That bodes well for our recruiting of new secondary sponsors. Companies who sell primarily to women will want an image that appeals to them.”

  “Oh, honey, he does.”

  “And remember that souvenir merchandising is a significant source of income in motorsports. Pretty faces sell tee shirts…hats…coffee mugs. The potential is huge. Even if he loses, we’ll still win. But, of course, we want to win.”

  CHAPTER III

  Hail to the Chief

  Grace Buell Hoskins Tuggle hoped that the job interview wasn’t going to include lunch, not that she minded a free meal, but from the looks of the ladies on the interview committee, every one of ’em about two ribs short of a shadow, she figured their idea of a noonday meal would be a lettuce leaf and an Ex-Lax pill. They were skinny enough to be drivers’ wives for sure, but they looked a little too steely-eyed and Old Money for that.

  Now back in the old days, when Daddy had been racing, the wives were whoever the racers had happened to marry back when they started out working in the factory or wherever, and their lined faces and plump bodies testified to a lifetime of hard work, starchy food, and infinite patience with race-crazed husbands. Grace, who was pleased that her initials also stood for Grievous Bodily Harm, but who preferred simply to be known as Tuggle, did not hold with fad diets and plastic surgery. In her opinion, if being a willowy size two got you a race car driver for a husband, then they ought to put warning labels on Slim-Fast.

  Wheel men! Lawn jockeys with 800-horsepower egos. Fortunately, she was past the age to confuse foolhardy with sexy, which was just as well, because no driver worth his salt would listen to a pretty girl giving him orders over the head set anyhow. They’d listen to her, though. If they had any sense they would.

  Her daddy had been a force to be reckoned with on the racing circuit, back in the days when North Carolina was the hub of the world-Hickory, Asheville, Wilkesboro, Winston-Salem. She often said that her blood type was Hi-Test. And then there were her two husbands-the driving one from her wild younger days, who had put her heart so far into the wall that she thought she’d never get over him. Well, she hadn’t really, that was the truth of it. But at least she had learned from that experience that restrictor plates were not a bad thing for the human heart. Her second husband, Doyle, was a mechanic, and she claimed that she’d married him “for entertainment.” He didn’t take your breath away like the first one did, but he didn’t make you want to put a hose to the exhaust pipe, either, so she reckoned it evened out-less joy, less sorrow. That’s what getting older mostly meant anyhow.

  Drivers. Like tigers. A lot of fun to look at, maybe even okay for a brief, wary encounter, but try to hold on to one and he will rip you to shreds. Well, maybe times had changed with all these West Coast pretty boys coming into the sport, but Tuggle didn’t think so, and she rejoiced in the fact that she was too old to care.

  She wondered if she ought to offer the benefit of her wisdom to this charmed circle of designer-clad ladies, but she decided against it. They were too old to care, too, whether they knew it or not. And maybe they were into the sport for philosophical reasons. An all-woman team. Well, whatever kept the sponsors happy.

  She assumed an expression of polite interest, which on her bulldog features looked like a double-dog-dare, as she waited for the questioning to commence.

  The regal one they called Christine began by saying, “Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself, Grace.”

  Tuggle winced at the sound of her given name, sounding like a sermon title in the precise diction of this high-maintenance woman. “It’s Tuggle, if it’s all the same to you,” she corrected her. “As for my qualifications, my daddy ran dirt track and Late Model Stocks around the region-wherever he could afford to go and still keep his day job. Back then family was about the only pit crew you could afford, so he trained me and my brothers early on.” As if in answer to an unspoken question, she added, “They’re dead now.” She kept her voice steady-well, mostly steady-willing herself not to think about little Gary, dead in a rice paddy in Vietnam, and Cole, the daredevil, hitting the wall at Hickory in those days before fuel cells, when the word fire stuck in your throat.

  “And I believe you raced yourself at one time.”

  She nodded. “They used to have Powderpuff Derbies, as they called ’em. Good for attracting a crowd to the track on off nights. Daddy said I was almost as good as Cole, but, of course, I quit that foolishness once I grew up. Keeping a marriage going is a dern sight harder than winning an old stock car race.”

  “Times have changed since those days,” said one of the younger women in a not-from-around-here accent. “NASCAR is rocket science now. What makes you think you could manage a team in a sport dominated by engineers?”

  “Well, I reckon you will have engine
ers,” said Tuggle. “Strategy hasn’t changed. Maybe the cars are better now, and NASCAR keeps adding rules as fast as folks can think up ways around ’em, but it’s still the same old sport it used to be.”

  “Now, we realize that our aim of having an all-women team is a bit unusual.”

  Tuggle shrugged. “Well, it’s not traditional, of course. Back in my day, the old-time drivers had a saying: No tits in the pits. But times do change, don’t they?” She flashed a wolfish smile at the circle of frozen faces.

  “Times do indeed change,” murmured Christine. “We consulted various experts, you know-fitness instructors, physicians, engineers-and they seem to think that there’s no reason a female pit crew couldn’t do the job, providing that they were carefully chosen and properly trained.”

  “Likely as not,” Tuggle agreed. Women came in all shapes and sizes, especially in these exercise-crazed days. She’d known a few gals who could bench-press tractors. Find some of them and there wouldn’t be a problem.

  “Of course, we will need someone to oversee the operation. I understand that is a customary to have a team manager and a crew chief, but we see no reason why a competent person couldn’t do both those things as one job. What do you think?”

  Tuggle thought she’d have to have had more than one Bloody Mary for breakfast to tell this group of wine and cheese ladies what she thought about anything. She needed the job, and if that meant agreeing to use St. Christopher’s medals for hubcaps, she’d go along with it to keep the team owners happy.

  “And we are already in negotiations with a driver. This one.” With a proprietary smirk, Christine Berenson slid an eight-by-ten photo out of a folder and passed it across the desk.

  Tuggle contemplated the picture of Badger Jenkins, who was looking smolderingly at the camera, his legs spread far enough apart for a prostate exam. She snorted, unimpressed.