Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

Hey, Sark. Sorry I haven’t checked in for a while. I got an assignment in Memphis-feature story on the jazz scene there. Probably not your cup of Quaker State these days, though. How are things going with the Dream Team?

  Sometimes it feels like I’m working for NASA, Ed. The engineers are always jazzing up some part of the car and worrying about modifying an obscure part to improve performance by a hundredth of a second or so. I bought my way into one of their meetings today with a bag of Krispy Kremes, and Julie and Rosalind were very patient about explaining things to me, but they refuse to let me do any articles about the technical modifications they’re working on.

  Why should you care? Engineering is a very hard-sell topic in feature journalism. Too technical for the average reader. Even if you catch the team cheating, the explanation would be so convoluted that you couldn’t make anyone care.

  I wasn’t thinking of ratting on them, Ed. They aren’t doing anything that every other team in racing isn’t doing. Car modification is a cat-and-mouse game that everybody plays-staying just ahead of the next rule change. Actually, I admire their expertise. Compared to the big five-car teams, they have so little to work with, but they’re all keeping crazy hours trying to make the team competitive. They have a new trick this week, but I can’t tell you what it is.

  I wouldn’t understand it, anyway. This is your story, not mine. What about Badger? Any dirt on him?

  Not really. I have no complaints about Badger Jenkins. He can be exasperating, apparently, when he doesn’t show up at the race shop or when he tries to get out of some dull but necessary bit of team business. Badger can’t focus worth a damn except in a race car, but he’s a sweet guy. He’s not a jerk.

  Ever thought about seducing him, Sark? That would be a juicy story.

  I did think about it, but not for journalistic reasons. In that firesuit he is a very pretty pony. Anyhow, he affected not to notice my one tentative display of interest. (He gave me a hello hug here at the shop one time, and my response said a lot more than “Hello.” He looked sort of surprised, but nothing came of it.) The consensus around here is that Badger Jenkins is not virtuous. He’s just damned picky. Any Playboy centerfold who lost ten pounds and spent a week at a spa might have a shot with him.

  I had those standards, too, but in my case they amounted to a vow of celibacy, so I’ve become easier to please. You can hug me anytime.

  Thanks for the offer. I’ll take you up on it when Badger asks me for your autograph. Meanwhile, I would like to put on a spiked vest and hug his manager. Spikes dipped in poison, that is.

  “Malady” Albigre? Why? Have you had another run-in with her?

  Yes, I suppose you could say that I’ve tangled with her. I am the team publicist. That is my job. But she seems to think that her job is to schmooze with sponsors and journalists on Badger’s behalf. The problem with that is that she has all the charm of a cobra with PMS. She generally manages to annoy people in less than five minutes. She talks to the owner (Christine) as if Badger were doing the team a big favor by driving for them-bad idea in a profession with only forty-three job openings! She seems to think he could do better on a bigger team, which is probably true, but he is neither young enough nor famous enough for them to want him. Don’t get me wrong: I adore him. We all do, but he’s not NASCAR’s golden boy. And she’s no help to his situation. The team hates her. She e-mails me at least twice a week, usually to order me around as if I were her clerk, and despite the fact that I correct her after every message, she still spells my name “Melonie.”

  Well, Melanie, perhaps your perfume smells like cantaloupes? You know: Melon-ie.

  Yeah. Or maybe the Dominatrix is dumber than a rock.

  Hmmm. The Queen of the Badgers is beginning to interest me. Stay tuned while I call in favors, Sarque. I shall make inquiries.

  There were legions of people-most of them female-who would have given worlds to know what went on inside the brain of Badger Jenkins, and most of the time it would have been very difficult indeed to pinpoint any particular train of thought inside the bundle of shiny bits (appetites and instincts), grass and twigs (mannerisms of charm and defensive strategies), and bits of colored string (skill, shrewdness, and common sense), that all woven together passed as Badger’s mind.

  But when he put the helmet on…When the green flag dropped and the engines roared and the world flashed past at 200 mph… Then one could read his thoughts like the ticker tape of a stock machine, because then and only then his mind focused into one single groove, zeroed in on the process of looping the oval faster than anybody else, lap after lap, until the checkered flag ended the exercise, and other thoughts were allowed to flow back into his consciousness.

  He had raced at Darlington many times before. He liked Darlington. He had won the Southern 500 there. And while to the casual observer every circular race track may look the same, they aren’t. This is how stock car racing differs-and becomes more difficult-than football or basketball, sports in which no matter where you compete the dimensions of the playing field are always the same. But in NASCAR, all the tracks are different. Every week presents a different set of challenges requiring different skills. The tracks vary in length from half a mile to more than two miles, which, among other things, changes the speed at which drivers race. Variations in banking change the angle and elevation of the turns at each track. Some tracks are not perfect ovals. Some tracks are road courses, so that even “left turn only” is not always the rule. A driver must master not one pattern of skills, but many-a different set each week.

  Darlington.

  The track is 1.366 miles long, and egg-shaped-wider on one end than on the other. Therefore, the turns on the narrow end of the egg are tighter than those on the wide end. Also, the banking in Turns Three and Four, the tighter turns, is two degrees steeper than on Turns One and Two, which means that every corner presents a different problem for the driver. As you hurtle up the track at nearly 150 mph, the walls seem to jump in front of the car. A second’s inattention will put you in the wall. You are perilously close to the wall already. As you loop the speedway, the grooves in the track channel your car closer and closer to the wall as you go, so that at each revolution you pass only inches from disaster. The “Darlington Stripe,” a long black mark down the right side of the car, attests to the times when you misjudge the turn and actually come in contact with the wall.

  This was a driver’s track, where skill mattered as much as expensive technology. The qualifying record had been set back in 1996 by Ward Burton: 173.797 mph. The record for speed during an actual race was much less than that: 139.958, set by Dale Earnhardt in 1993. Badger didn’t think he had a shot at breaking either of those records this year, but at least he didn’t hate Darlington the way some drivers did. He respected the “Lady in Black” as the track was called, and he knew that Dale Earnhardt had been right when he said that if you got fresh with her, she would slap you down.

  When Sark was writing her team press release on the Thursday before the race, she asked Badger to explain his strategy for winning Darlington. “Just one sentence,” she warned him. “All I want is a sound bite.”

  Badger thought about it for a moment between swigs of Gatorade, and then said, “To win Darlington: Aim for the wall and miss.”

  Badger was not a chatty driver. Very seldom did his voice come over the headset, except in answer to a question from Tuggle, but if Sark, the novice at racing, had been allowed to tune into Badger’s thoughts as he raced at Darlington, their telepathic dialogue might have gone like this:

  A lot of times at Darlington a car will look loose on the back end…that’s bad…if your car’s nose won’t turn, you’re out of control, so you’ll probably be getting a Darlington stripe. You know…scrape the wall, maybe wreck, even…

  So you’re saying that if the nose is not turned properly, the car will wreck?

  Right. You go straight when you get on the gas…Here at Darlington you’ve got four apexes to contend with, instead of the usual two…
You use a diamond maneuver… You go straight into the corner, and you exit on a straight edge the same way.

  But what is an apex?

  I’m coming into one now. It’s the turn at the bottom of the banking…You let the car drift up to the wall and ease on the throttle at the top of the corner…you enter-Stay on it… Stay on it…

  On it? The throttle?

  “Stay on it” means to stay on the throttle as long as your butt can stand it. Usually the pucker factor controls this issue…

  Until it scares the shit out of you?

  Yeah, so stay on it as long as you can… You’re right on the wall, as you’re going straight. Then you let off the gas; turn to the bottom of the groove… If the nose is wrong, the car is still gonna slide…If the nose is pointed and you are not sliding, then you work up to the top groove, aiming for as close to the wall as you can get…

  Why?

  Because the traction is at the top part of the track. As you enter the corner, you apply the throttle. See, I’m going up the hill…

  She sees him going down the front stretch wide open. As he sets himself up for Turn One, he dives low near the white line, backs off the gas, grabs a little brake, drifts the car up the banking until it is almost touching the wall. (This is called “walking up the track.”) Then as he comes off Turn Two, right where the wall wants to reach out and grab him, he eases the car a little to the left and points the nose down the backstretch.

  I’m at the top of the hill now…full throttle…There is a bad dip at the top of Turns One and Two. If the car is not pointed straight, the back end will come around. You got a push-loose condition…

  Which is?

  When the damn car is so tight in the front end that I have to turn the wheel so far left that it makes the back end of the car want to turn around on me. Sometimes the car is so tight that I have to put so much wheel into it when I get back to the gas that I lose the back end, and because of the car not being straight, I end up chasing the car up the hill.

  So you fight your way through the Turn Two apex, balancing the turning of the wheel against back end’s tendency to slide, so that you don’t skid into the wall… Then what?

  Now the track gets really narrow, coming out off Turn Two…I’m going downhill…easing out of the throttle…Then I hit the apex. I’d not keep it out. I aimed right for it.

  Early apex. Use bottom groove to make your car turn left.

  Another big bump off of Turn Two the whole back end squats down…going into Turn Three-a lot of guys would stay up high. I’d go down to the bottom, drive in really deep, and for the most part straight.

  Heavy braking until you hit the apex, then ease off the brake…Then a second or two later, I apply the brake again just to slow the momentum. Now the car is walking up the track.

  And that means…Drifting up the bank toward the wall, right?

  Uh-huh. So you ease back on it, next to the wall. When the car is almost straight, go to full throttle…twenty or thirty yards on full throttle…Sharp turn…Ease up a little…then full throttle again…Oh, and the braking technique is used more in Turn Three than in Turn One.

  Good to know.

  Aggressive on entry…aggressive all the way around…if the car is set up right, you are sitting wasting time if you’re not aggressive. Burning daylight.

  Okay. Okay. I get it.

  When the car is right, just before the middle of the corner, I go to the throttle hard…Also, when the car is right, you throttle up and go to the inside to pass…

  On the inside? Why?

  The inside is the preferred groove there. Because everybody else is running close to the wall, so most of the passing is done on the inside.

  And the other cars have to get out of your way?

  Look, Darlington is hell on tires. After about twenty laps the good cars shine. If the set-up is right it cuts down on tire wear. When your car is not right, every lap can feel like an eternity; but when the set-up is perfect, the other cars just become obstacles in your way. When I’m running good, I can average passing one car per lap. Do you get it now?

  Well, no. You might as well be saying the Lord’s Prayer in Comanche. But I’ll take your word for it. Aim for the wall and miss.

  But only if your race car is perfectly set up, and only if you have the reflexes of a tiger, the courage of a teenaged rhinoceros, and the focusing ability of an electron microscope.

  Badger Jenkins was a superb driver-better than his win-loss record would have showed, because he had always driven on underfunded one-car teams, where talent was almost the only weapon he had against the corporate giants of the sport. He may have been hell on owners, sponsors, and people who loved him, but he drove like an angel of light. For 367 laps at Darlington that day, he etched his diamonds, double apexed his turns, aided by augmented shock absorbers that didn’t overheat, and his engine held up, while he dodged the wrecks and lucked out on the caution flags, which always came just as he was in need of fresh tires or more fuel. The pit crew was in top form at last-hopeful, confident, and comfortable in their roles in the intricate ballet that was a thirteen-second pit stop.

  Sometimes the universe simply aligns itself in such a way that things go absolutely right for one person, and this was Badger Jenkins’s day. Two of the superstars had engine trouble, and another one lost a lap on a tire blowout. Another golden boy got caught up in somebody else’s wreck, damaging his car so badly that he was out of contention. What it all boiled down to was the fact that everybody who could have beaten Badger had a bad day, while he had a phenomenally good one.

  By the time the race had wound down to a ten-lap shoot-out between Badger and the driver that the pit crew referred to as the “Prairie Dog,” the 86 team was hovering between elation and the fear that even taking a deep breath could break the spell. Eight laps…Badger was holding his own, diving into every corner as if he were going to plow straight through the wall, and then at the last second cutting the diamond in the opposite direction, blasting down the straightaway, and then repeating the maneuver at the next turn. Five laps…He was keeping a one-second lead over the Prairie Dog, which didn’t sound like much, until you consider that races can be won by thousandths of a second. Three laps…The Prairie Dog scrapes the wall in Turn Two, which costs him a fraction of a second.

  “Prairie Dog’s shocks are going,” said Tuggle. “Yours are holding, though, right?”

  “Doin’ fine,” said Badger. “I think we may be gonna win this sum bitch.”

  “Bring it home, boy,” said Tuggle, trying to keep the catch out of her voice.

  And he did.

  Some of the younger drivers these days mark their wins in theatrical ways. The affable Carl Edwards does a backflip off the hood of his car. Two-time Cup champion Tony Stewart climbs the fence to collect the checkered flag from the official on the tower. Many drivers celebrate by cutting doughnuts in the infield or doing burnouts on the track. But Badger was an old-school driver, and mostly the old-timers did not believe in showing off.

  So Badger’s victory was celebrated in the restrained tradition of his predecessors. He let down the window net, collected the checkered flag, and took his Victory Lap, while the pit crew sprinted off to Victory Lane to join in the celebration, which was as much theirs as his. He couldn’t have done it without them.

  He drove the car into Victory Lane, climbed out the window, and hugged whoever was closest to the car. Tuggle. Christine. Sigur. Reve. Sark.

  With microphones and television cameras thrust in his face, Badger managed a grin, and launched into a carefully worded sound bite: “Like to thank my crew, and all the folks at Team Vagenya. We had a really good car, and they really came through for me out there. They’ve all worked hard to get this team up to speed, and I’m glad I didn’t let them down today.”

  A simple speech. A variation of what everybody else said, week after week, from one Victory Lane to the next. But if the one who says it this week is your driver, and if it is you that he is tha
nking, then the words are more eloquent than Shakespeare.

  Shortly after he exited the car, Badger was given something to drink-never mind what he wanted. He would be given the officially sanctioned beverage, whose makers have paid dearly for their product to be the one approved drink to be imbibed in Victory Lane.

  As team publicist, Sark finally had the chance to assist for real in the Victory Lane ritual called The Hat Dance. The winning driver is photographed over and over in the aftermath of the race, and each of the team’s sponsors wants a shot of the driver wearing their insignia. The purple and white Vagenya hat went first. Pose. Smile. Click. And then he swapped the first hat for another sponsor’s cap. Pose. Smile. Click. On and on.

  Then he posed with the trophy. The last time Badger had won at Darlington, the trophy had featured a crystal globe, but the track had recently rethought that design, and now they presented the winning driver with a layout of the Darlington Raceway mounted flat on a small pedestal. Badger hoisted the trophy over his head, while the team crowded around him, trying not to look astonished that they had won.

  Most of the time the pit crew figured only as a jubilant crowd in the background of the celebration, but because the 86 team was a novelty-all female-they got more attention than Badger did. No one said anything more profound than his simple thank-you speech, but for almost exactly fifteen minutes, they were famous. And on Tuesday morning, “Littlebit” Baird would receive Badger’s racing helmet, signed by the entire 86 team as thanks for her part in the victory.

  ENGINE NOISE

  Your Online Source for NASCAR News & Views

  Endangered Species? Is it open season on “badgers” in Cup racing? Engine Noise is hearing that, despite the big win at Darlington on Sunday (YOU GO, GIRLS!), the Warrior Princess of the 86 team is getting pretty fed up with her unhousebroken Badger. He blows off sponsor meetings, weasels his way out of appearances, and almost missed the plane to last week’s race. Hearing, too, that nobody likes having to deal with the person on the other end of the Vagenya driver’s leash. He may be a badger, but by all accounts she is a skunk. He’d better fumigate his business office before the stench drives everyone away and costs him his ride. We love you, Badger, but “Unchained Melodie” is our least favorite song!