Scarlet Thunder

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I glanced up at a television monitor that showed the network coverage being broadcast to millions of viewers. I decided to film that. I zoomed in and zoomed out.

  Twenty laps into the race, Sandy was part of a tight pack of cars. There were five of them, almost bumper to bumper. She jockeyed down on the track, trying to get beneath the third-place car as they all came out of a turn. She wasn’t able to make it though, and she had to slide back in behind again.

  “The best thing possible for her would be a yellow flag,” Tim said. “She’d be able to come in, fuel up and change tires without losing her place. Trouble is, so would all the other leaders, so she wouldn’t gain on them.”

  My eyes were still on the monitor as Tim spoke. Yellow flag. I flicked my mind through the research I had done. It’s the caution flag that comes out when an accident or something makes the track dangerous.

  I said that into my camera’s microphone. Then I shut my mouth so I could pick up more of Tim’s commentary.

  “At this part of the race,” Tim said, “a pit stop decision is not as crucial as it becomes toward the end. Everybody has to come in at least once before the end, so even if Sandy comes in under a green flag, she knows most others will have to as well. She’ll regain her place on them. Unless...”

  On the monitor, the cars seemed to move slowly. But that was because the camera panned the track with them, so the background moved instead. But if the camera were fixed on one spot, the cars would flash by quicker than an eyeblink.

  Tim had paused halfway into his sentence because he too had looked up at the monitor. Sandy darted downward on the track again at the end of a turn.

  “She’s caught his draft!” Tim said. “She’s making it past!”

  Draft. I knew what that was too. The drivers stayed as close behind the leader as they could to stay in the draft of the lead car as it cut through the air. Every car behind had less air to cut through. It could help them go another five miles an hour faster.

  “She’s in third place,” Tim hollered. “And moving into second!”

  Sure enough, she was using the draft of the second-place car to slingshot ahead.

  George Lot had not moved. If he was happy with what was happening, nothing about him showed it.

  This was good stuff. If we could contrast Tim’s excitement with George’s professionalism, viewers would love it. I moved my camera back and forth.

  “All right,” Tim said. “From what I can see, here’s the situation. She might have another five laps left on her tires. And maybe seven laps of gasoline. But her pit crew knows the distance better than she does. If they think she’s going to lose a tire, they’ll call her in. But they’ll want to wait as long as possible, hoping for a yellow flag. The worst thing that could happen is to have her come in under a green flag, lose a lap and then two laps later get a yellow so that everyone else can refuel without losing any time.”

  Tim took a deep breath. “Second place,” he said. “This is awesome. If she can keep it there without losing a tire, or a motor, or running into someone else’s accident, or seeing any trouble in the pit...”

  I was beginning to understand why everybody was so keyed up every single second of a three-hour race. Even if Sandy looked like she had it made, there were a hundred things that could go wrong.

  “So now it’s a waiting game,” Tim said. “She’s got to run every lap at this same pace, not a split second less. And she’s got to keep doing it as long as possible, hoping for a yellow, even if it means staying out there on her final six ounces of fuel.”

  Six ounces. Less than a can of soda. And this was in a car that was burning a gallon every two laps.

  I felt a strange excitement. I realized I was getting caught up in the race. I gave myself a mental slap across the face. I couldn’t ever be a good director if I let my emotions get involved with my subject.

  As I forced my excitement to cool down, I glanced back at Tim Becker. His eyes were on the monitor. A red flush covered his face. His voice was growing higher in pitch.

  “Okay,” he said, “this is what she has to watch out for as she comes into the pit. If there’s a yellow flag, there will be a traffic jam as thirty cars all come in at once. If it’s a green, she’s got to start slowing down in turn four and drop to the bottom of the track to approach pit road. She’s got to get in and out as fast as possible, but if she’s even a half mile an hour over fifty-five, she’ll break the pit road speed limit, and she’ll get a black flag.”

  Black flag. That means the driver has to return to the pit for a stop-and-go penalty—waiting those endless seconds while the chances of getting back to the lead get smaller and smaller.

  “And she’s got to stop right on the mark,” Tim said. “If she overshoots the pit, she’ll have to back up. That can cost more valuable seconds.”

  I walked around Brian Nelson to see what he was getting through his camera. If the light gave a good angle, the red flush of excitement on Tim’s face would show up clearly and give more to this segment. Standing at an angle behind Brian, I shot some of Brian’s camera and Tim Becker.

  I frowned.

  Brian’s camera light was not on.

  How could he see anything through the viewfinder if the camera wasn’t on?

  I tapped him on the shoulder. I pointed at the dull light.

  His jaw dropped. “Sorry, man,” he said. “I just got so caught up in watching the race that I stopped paying attention to my view-finder.”

  And at that moment, the roar of a hundred and fifty thousand people was so loud that he snapped his head back toward the track.

  It snapped me back to the track too. Along with my handheld. I had the view-finder so glued to my eye that it was just like another part of my body.

  I saw that in front of us, a car was spinning out of control. Another car slammed into its back end. Then another.

  Three other cars zoomed by. They all separated so quickly that the next car didn’t see the stopped cars until the very last second.

  Into my viewfinder came the next car. Red. Scarlet red. Sandy Peterson’s car. And she had less than a heartbeat to react to the accident.

  chapter ten

  I kept filming.

  Sandy swung her wheel hard. Her front fender clipped the back end of the car in front of her. She plowed ahead, smoke rising from her tires. She fought for control and somehow swung the Chevy down to the bottom of the track. Still going, still smoking, she headed toward pit road.

  Yellow flag!

  Sandy was closest to pit road. Her speed was down. Way down.

  She gunned the motor and the car strained to push forward against the tire that burned against the fender.

  More smoke.

  More squealing tires.

  And she was headed right toward us.

  I took my camera away from my eyes so I could look where I was going as I got out of the way.

  I saw that Brian Nelson was watching the action with his mouth hanging open.

  “Shoot this!” I shouted. Uncle Mike was too busy juggling the in-car cameras and audio to notice that Brian was doing nothing. “Shoot this!”

  I swung my camera around toward the car.

  “Tim!” I shouted as I searched for the action through my viewfinder. “Give me audio. Keep talking. Give us the play-by-play.”

  My camera would catch the action and his words. Later, we could patch everything together. Now I just needed to record as much as possible.

  The back end of the Chevy swung crazily back and forth as Sandy fought to control a skid.

  She brought the car in perfectly. And I had it all on film.

  As George barked orders, eight crew members shot forward. One of them pushed a giant jack under the car.

  “She caught a break,” Tim said. He spoke quickly, urgently. “This yellow flag lets her come in without losing time to the other drivers. She’s looking at a minute, maybe two minutes in the pit for her crew to fix the damage she just got. That could have put her
down maybe three laps under a green flag.”

  The Chevy was already off the ground. Four men attacked the tires.

  With a couple of high-speed screams from their air guns, the single giant bolt on each tire released. Other crew members were ready to pull the tires off and throw new ones on—except for the front right tire where the front fender was pushed in against the still-smoking tire.

  “Move it with the hammers!” George shouted. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  Two of the crew jumped forward, pounding with big hammers to knock the fender back off the tire. As soon as the fender released, the fourth tire fell loose. Another two crew members hoisted the new tire into place.

  In the back of the car, they’d already finished pouring twenty gallons of fuel into the car. While all of this was happening, someone was mopping Sandy’s face with a cool wet cloth.

  “It’s been forty-five seconds,” Tim said. “On the track, they’ve pushed the cars down and cleared the wreck.”

  I checked the main television monitor, filming it as I did. All three cars were off the track. The drivers had pulled themselves out of their cars. One kicked the ground. The other two walked away with their shoulders slumped.

  I swung my camera back to the Scarlet Thunder. Sandy was just swinging the visor of her helmet down.

  All the crew cleared the car.

  She roared ahead, just beating another car coming down pit road behind her.

  Then I noticed the crew had drawn into a circle. Someone was down in the middle.

  I stepped closer, filming, filming, filming.

  One of the crew, a little red-headed guy, was squirming in agony. I could see him clutching his knee.

  “He got bounced with a hammer,” someone explained. “Took him down like he’d been shot.”

  I closed in on the guy’s face. Our television viewers were going to love how real this was.

  “You guys are vampires,” I heard a voice say. “Real vampires.”

  That came from George Lot.

  “Huh?” I said. I didn’t stop filming my close-up. “Vampires?”

  “That man is flesh and blood. He’s in agony. And all you can think about is the camera shot?”

  Without shifting my camera, I gave him the answer I’d heard Uncle Mike give dozens of times. “We didn’t hurt him. We’re not part of it.”

  “You would be if you were human,” George said.

  Before I could argue, his radio squawked.

  He walked away.

  That left me standing there. Alone.

  What does he know about our job? I asked myself. Nothing.

  I zoomed back from the hurt pit crew member and got a wide angle of the people helping him walk away.

  chapter eleven

  That night, long after the race had ended, Uncle Mike and I watched it from Sandy Peterson’s point of view.

  That had been Uncle Mike’s job—juggling Sandy’s audio and the cameras that showed the front and rear views.

  We sat back in the darkness of a motel room as we reviewed those segments.

  After the yellow flag that let the crew repair her dinged front fender, Sandy had reentered the track.

  The front camera had a view from the dash. It showed the pavement in a blur coming toward her. The rear camera, mounted with a view through the back window, showed the pit crew growing smaller behind her, with another race car slowly filling the view.

  Then she entered the track.

  “I’m looking to get back in line,” she said into her audio. “I wish the yellow-flag restart was more like Indy Car.”

  Uncle Mike put the video on pause and asked me to explain. I told him what I knew from all the studying I had done earlier. The Indy Car Formula racers in their low-slung sleek cars, unlike stock cars, had a much easier time restarting. Indy Car rules put all the cars in single file with the lead-lap cars mixed in with the lapped cars, in the order they came out of the pit.

  In stock-car racing, leaders were allowed to bunch up for a restart, with the cars that are down a lap lined up single file to the inside of the leaders. That meant Sandy, as one of the leaders, would be in a big pack of cars when the race began again.

  Sure enough, the front and back cameras showed cars moving in on her. The cameras gave a wide-angle view that distorted the bumpers of those cars. Still, it was accurate enough to make you almost feel like you were there.

  “Come on, boys,” Sandy said in her mike, “give me your best shot.”

  I grinned. That would be a good voice-over to splice into the finished documentary.

  Restart!

  Sandy’s audio picked up the swelling roar of a couple of dozen 750-horsepower engines all gunning it together.

  Another great audio clip.

  Then the ducking and weaving and fighting for position began all over again.

  Her front camera showed that she almost drove onto the trunk of the car in front of her. Her rear camera showed one car on each side, both of those almost banging her bumper.

  And this was at 180 miles per hour.

  “Heat’s bad,” Sandy said to audio. “It’s like sitting in a sauna for three hours. Not only that—”

  She stopped.

  “Hang on,” she said calmly. “I see daylight.”

  I didn’t. All I saw in her front-view camera was rushing pavement and the spoilers of the two cars ahead.

  She swerved, and then I saw it. But it didn’t look like enough room. Then the car on the right gave way, and she was through.

  “That was a paint-scraper,” she said. “It—”

  Again, she stopped short. A car was coming up behind her fast on the left-hand side. The camera showed her going high into a corner. She moved slightly left, the car behind her backed off.

  Then she was through the corner, coming out low.

  She drifted high again, almost kissing the concrete wall. The pavement and concrete were moving so fast that I could not imagine the concentration it took to stay in place.

  The silence over the next half hour showed exactly how much concentration it took. She had warned us before the race that talking to our audio system would be the last thing on her mind. The race and her pit crew were more important.

  Not that there was total silence.

  Every half lap or so we could hear George on her radio.

  “How do the tires feel?” he asked.

  “Hot,” she said. “But I don’t want to give anything up going into the corners. Not when we worked so hard to get us here.”

  “Pushing hard enough to squeal?” he asked.

  “This isn’t my first race,” she answered.

  Another voice took me away from the race.

  I realized it was Uncle Mike. Asking me to hit Pause.

  “Tire squeal?” he asked.

  “You know the answer, don’t you,” I said, grinning. “This is a test.”

  He nodded. “Pass it.”

  I thought it over. “All right. Once tires get over two hundred and twenty-five degrees, they lose grip. As they lose grip, they slide and get even hotter. Squealing is the fastest way to let you know you’re pushing too hard.”

  “A-plus,” Uncle Mike said, matching my grin. “Let’s get back to the race.”

  We watched another five laps. Again, all I could do was shake my head in admiration. The front and back camera views showed how much skill it took to stay on the track at those high speeds. She was still silent, intent on keeping her second-place position.

  George’s voice broke in. “Are you losing speed on the straights?”

  “Don’t seem to be. Worried about the bodywork?” she replied.

  I hit Pause on the video playback.

  “I asked one of the crew about the new fender they banged into place,” I said to Uncle Mike. “Actually, I did more than ask. I filmed one of the guys. He told me that their biggest worry was spoiling the air flow. He said banged-up bumpers and crumpled fenders were as much a part of stock-car racing as hot dogs a
nd cola in the stands. A few dents won’t slow a car, but any major fender damage will cause air drag above one hundred and forty miles per hour. If they did a bad job, it might cost her ten miles an hour in speed.”

  I hit Play on the video again, catching her voice as she went into the straights.

  “The crew did a great job,” she said. “No vibration, no shake. I feel good about this race.”

  She should have. She finished fourth.

  Fourth might have made her happy, but it didn’t do much for us. Because we didn’t get it on film.

  Ten seconds later, in the hotel room where we sat, the television screen went black. We figured out later that someone had loaded nearly dead batteries into all the equipment.

  chapter twelve

  We were two weeks behind our shooting schedule.

  We had traveled to a different track for a different race. Concord, North Carolina. But it still looked the same, because all I really saw was either a hotel room or an infield track with stands in the background.

  It was the night before qualifying runs. The Scarlet Thunder crew had invited the film crew to a barbecue on the infield, in front of the motor homes. A storm had passed by earlier, clearing the air of heat and humidity.

  I looked around the gathered crowd. I saw Brian Nelson and Margaret Lynn, another camera person. Ken Takarura, a famous sports interviewer, sat with Uncle Mike. Mike had flown Ken in for the weekend to interview Sandy Peterson. Al Simonsen, who was in charge of audio, hovered nearby.

  Tim Becker had joined us too. Sandy had gone back to her hotel room to try to get as much rest as possible. So Tim, as public relations man, had been assigned to stay with us to answer any and all questions. He was pleased we had accepted the invitation to enjoy this family-style barbecue with the crew instead of eating at a restaurant somewhere. I was too, because I had a huge steak on the grill that smelled great.

  I was also filming with my handheld camera. People had long stopped joking about the camera as a growth on my shoulder. Now they just went about their business and left me alone. I got a few minutes of footage of the crew standing around talking and laughing. Then I turned the camera to Uncle Mike.