Once Around the Track (29 page)

“S
hark
oil?” said Julie Carmichael, wondering when the Excedrin was going to kick in. You might learn a lot by going out drinking with the boys, but it was sure as hell hard on your system. She groped for her coffee cup and tried to focus on what Rosalind was saying.

Rosalind shook her head.
“Shock oil,”
she said. “I’ve been researching it since Monday, when Badger went to visit the children’s ward at the hospital, and I went along as his minder.”

Melanie Sark appeared in the doorway, waving a bag of doughnuts. “Bribe!” she said. “Can I sit in on the engineers’ meeting?”

Julie turned even paler at the sight of the heavily sugared doughnuts dumped out onto a paper towel on the work table. “You can’t report anything about car modifications. And you can downshift that cheerfulness.”

“Okay.” Sark lowered her voice to a soothing monotone. “I’ll take notes, but I promise not to use anything without running it past you first. I wanted to ask Roz about the hospital visit. Badger did it for free, didn’t he? That was nice of him.”

Rosalind nodded. “He did. And apparently good deeds do get rewarded. A little girl in the children’s ward was actually a Badger fan, and—”

“I thought Badger appealed more to
big
girls.”

“Littlebit is six. Her favorite color is purple, so that was Badger’s edge over, say, Jeff Gordon. Anyhow, it turns out that her father is Dr. Michael Baird, who is a chemical engineer with Carolina-Petrochem. He was so grateful to Badger for his kindness to his daughter that he offered to give us a little help on the track.”

Tuggle appeared in the doorway, with herbal tea in a Bill Elliott mug. “We could use all the help we can get,” she said. “What is he offering?”

Rosalind said, “I asked Tuggle to sit in on this, because she’ll know more about how this applies to racing. We can run it past Jay Bird, too, next time he’s here.”

“Great,” said Julie. “Tell me more.”

“Dr. Baird is working on an additive for shock oil.” Seeing Sark’s puzzled expression, Rosalind said, “We’re talking about the oil that lubricates the shock absorbers.”

Sark blinked.
Shock absorbers?
It sounded trivial to her. “So you want Badger to be more comfortable out there?”

Tuggle laughed. “He can sit on a thumbtack for all I care. He was supposed to have lunch with Christine yesterday, but he blew her off. Turns out she had a potential sponsor lined up to meet him. She’s not happy.”

Julie said, “Shock absorbers aren’t just for comfort, Sark. Shocks do soften the bumps to keep the tire in constant contact with the road, but for race cars, the important factor is that shocks control the weight transfer of the car.”

“Absorbing down force,” said Rosalind. “They absorb the banking forces. Every time the race car hits a banked turn, there is huge downforce acting on the tires, the springs, and the shocks.”

“I’m a journalist,” said Sark. “Keep it simple.”

Julie tried again. “Turning a race car is all about controlling the weight on the car. That’s why we weigh it so many times and put in different springs and different shocks. We build the inside of our shocks to have certain characteristics. When the shock oil heats up, it flows through the valve and shim stack at a different rate, which changes the characteristics.”

“That’s one of the reasons we have to make adjustments as the race goes on,” said Tuggle.

“Complex turns are a factor at Darlington,” said Julie. “If we can take those turns a hairsbreadth faster than anybody else, we stand a good chance of winning.”

“Okay,” said Sark, making notes on her legal pad. “What would make you take the turns faster?”

“Badger’s talent,” said Tuggle. “He’s the key. But if the engineers can give him some technical help, it could make all the difference.”

“Better shocks means that you have more control, especially in those turns where the downforce is such a factor,” said Rosalind.

“Shocks also help take care of the tires,” said Tuggle. “Darlington is hell on tires.”

“Right,” said Julie. “So, on every lap around the NASCAR track, Sark, there are at least four cycles on the shock: two for loading and two for unloading.”

“It adds up,” said Rosalind. “For a five-hundred-mile race, you’re talking about two thousand cycles. Each instance of loading and unloading will generate heat in the shock.”

“Heat,” said Sark, writing it down. “Heat is bad?”

“It alters the performance of the shock. Cuts down on efficiency—not much, but some. And in this sport, a hundredth of a second counts. Improved heat transfer would keep the shock operating at maximum efficiency.”

Tuggle said, “Shock absorber technology is an old shell game in NASCAR. At Daytona and Talladega the teams used to rig up shocks that would go down when the car hit the track and they never went back up, which made for good aerodynamics, but it made the car damn near impossible to control. NASCAR put up a stop to that. Now they issue the shocks to each team before the race at those two tracks.”

“But not at Darlington?” said Sark. This week they were headed for Darlington.

“Right,” said Tuggle. “Not at Darlington.”

One thing about being a journalist—you had to catch on quickly. Sark cut to the chase: “And this guy you met in the hospital has figured out how to keep shock absorbers from heating up?”

“Well, not entirely,” said Rosalind, “But he has developed an additive that keeps the oil cooler than it otherwise would be. He hasn’t announced his findings yet, but he offered to let us try it out in the race Sunday.”

“He’s going to give us some?”

“I can pick it up today,” said Rosalind.

“Is it illegal?” asked Sark.

Tuggle, Julie, and Rosalind all looked at each other.
“Not yet,”
said Julie carefully.

“Not this week,” said Rosalind.

“But when NASCAR finds out it exists, they’ll write a rule prohibiting it,” said Tuggle. “But this week, anyhow, we’ve got an edge.”

Sark set her wineglass next to the computer. It had been a long day, but she couldn’t go to bed until she checked her messages. As soon as she had logged on, there was an IM from Ed Blair.

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.
”