Once Around the Track (5 page)

“Well, you have to have them anyhow. Shop jobs may take skill and experience, but anyone reasonably spry and willing can be taught to serve on the pit crew. We’ll just hire the people who are willing to do both jobs at a salary we can afford to pay. That suit you?”

They nodded, looking relieved that she was looking out for the team’s budget. It had been quite a shock to most of them to learn how expensive Cup racing was. A million dollars for a crew chief? More than twenty-five thousand dollars per race for
tires
? No wonder sponsorships were so expensive.

“What about equipment?” said Tuggle. “I take it we’re not building the cars from scratch?”

“I got some advice about that,” Christine Berenson said. “We’re going to buy the chassis from…Oh, what is his name? I have it written down somewhere…”

“Never mind,” said Tuggle. Four guesses would have told her what the name was, but it really didn’t matter at this point. “And you’re getting the engines from Hendrick?”

“However did you know? I believe that
was
the name.”

Tuggle nodded. It had been an educated guess. Hendrick was a five-car race team with about 500 shop dogs at their disposal. If anybody could spare adequate engines for a price, it would be them.

“All right,” said Tuggle, “so we buy the components and get our people to overhaul them. That ought to work.” It won’t win you a championship, she was thinking, but with reasonable skill on the engineers’ part and a halfway decent wheel man, it ought to keep you in the game.

“And you’ve had your application cleared by NASCAR? Got assigned a number and all?”

They nodded. “Apparently you can’t pick your own number,” one of them remarked.

“Well, no. Teams are assigned numbers. Some of them not in use are still already taken,” Tuggle explained.

“We wanted number 7.”

“Taken,” said Tuggle. “Both 7 and 07; both. Why did you want it in particular?”

They glanced at each other uneasily. “Well, there’s a feminine product, Monistat 7 for yeast infections, and we thought—”

Tuggle’s eyes glazed over as she tried to picture Badger Jenkins as the spokesperson for a yeast infection product. He’d have to carry pepper spray to the drivers’ meetings. Thank God that number was taken by Robby Gordon, who already had a sponsor. She’d have paid money to see Robby Gordon’s face if the yeast infection people had approached him about sponsoring his car.

“Twenty-eight would have been a good number, too!” said Diane Hodges, the former Miss Texas. “I think that pharmaceutical company with the birth control pill would have come on board if we could have got that number.”

“That was Davey Allison’s number,” said Tuggle. “And Ernie Irvan’s.” Both Daytona 500 winners: one of them dead and the other so badly injured he’d never race again. No, you wouldn’t see the number 28 back on a NASCAR track anytime soon, and she was glad of it. She wouldn’t want to see anything disrespectful done with that number. She didn’t want to jinx Badger, either. Repressing a shudder, she said, “So what’s our number?”

Christine Berenson said, “NASCAR assigned us the number 86.”

Tuggle tried not to wince. Not an auspicious number in Cup racing. It had been used fewer than a dozen times in the past thirty years, and never with any notable success.

“Isn’t 86 a slang term for terminating something?” asked one of the women.

“Maybe they want to
eighty-six
a woman’s team,” another one said.

“It’s just a number,” said Christine, with the weary patience of one who has had this discussion often. “Randomly assigned, I expect.”

“It’s okay,” said Tuggle. “It’s as good a number as any. Better than some. At least it’s not a number whose past would overshadow you, like…oh…22.” 22. Now that was a number to conjure with. The legendary Fireball Roberts, who had died after a fiery wreck at Charlotte in the sixties; country singer Marty Robbins, who used to try to come in second because he didn’t need the prize money; the respected and popular modern drivers Ricky Rudd and Bobby Labonte; and Daytona 500 winners Bobby Allison and Ward Burton. They all had driven the 22. She’d hate to have to compete with that reputation in her first season. At least it wouldn’t take much to
eighty-six
the previous reputation of number 86. She said, “So if you’ve got enough money to buy engines and chassis, you must have a primary sponsor lined up.”

“We do. A pharmaceutical company has developed a pill for women—you know, like Viagra. It’s supposed to—”

“I know what Viagra does,” said Tuggle, hoping to forestall the lecture. “For women, huh? What’s this one called?”

“Vagenya.”

“Virginia?”

Christine smiled. “Yes, it does sound like the way Southerners pronounce the name of the state, doesn’t it? Actually, I think the makers may have been playing with the words ‘virginity’ and ‘vagina,’ but who knows where they come up with these peculiar names for drugs nowadays? Anyhow, since it is a women’s team, the company decided that we would be a good place to advertise their product. So our sponsor is Vagenya, and our colors are royal purple and white.”

“Um…purple,” said Tuggle, trying to think of something to say other than what she was thinking, which was that if they decked Badger out in a purple firesuit with a Vagenya logo on it, he was probably going to have to beat people up in the drivers’ meeting to stop the catcalls. “There’s a brand of synthetic oil called Royal Purple. You might see if they’re interested in being a secondary sponsor.”

“Thank you,” said Christine, making a note of the name. “That’s exactly the sort of thing we need to know. As inexperienced as we are, I think we were very fortunate to get the makers of Vagenya to sponsor the car.”

“Of course, it helps that Eugenia’s father is the CEO of the company,” said Diane Hodges with a wink and a grin.

Tuggle stared at the circle of satisfied smiles. They were pleased. They were smug. They had managed to snag a twenty-million-dollar sponsor for their new Cup team. Weren’t they clever? Tuggle was thinking,
Oh…my…God…
She pictured drivers meetings. Fan sites on the Internet. Press interviews. But most of all she pictured having to be the one who tried to explain to Badger Jenkins what Vagenya was.

“And we can get free samples if you want some,” said one of the investors happily.

Tuggle summoned a queasy smile
. Great,
she thought,
maybe I can swap it to Bobby Labonte for some of his Wellbutrin.

Later that afternoon, Tuggle sat on the polyester bedspread in her room in the Mooresville Best Western and tried to figure out what had just happened. She had taken the job. She had just accepted responsibility for a multimillion dollar operation and a temperamental race car driver, all funded by a sponsor that she still couldn’t mention with a straight face. There must be easier ways to make a living. Nothing she’d rather do that would pay a tenth of the salary, though, come to think of it.

Now she’d have to see about finding a place to live nearer to Mooresville, and then she’d have to begin the process of building a team she could work with. Well, she wasn’t in the market for a Lake Norman McMansion, that was for sure. Lake Norman was the Beverly Hills of NASCAR: a community of upscale homes on a man-made lake north of Charlotte. Oh, they paid some drivers well enough—though merchandising and commercial ventures counted for more of their income than winnings—but compared to the lords of the wheel, crew chiefs as a rule didn’t get obscenely rich in this sport. But if they didn’t try to outspend the drivers, they earned enough to be set for life.

Crew chiefs who were really fortunate stayed around for a decade or more, ultimately prospering enough to promote themselves to owners and start teams of their own. It would take considerable luck and consummate skill for such a thing to happen to her. She wasn’t counting on it. Just get through these first days of building the team and see how it went from there, she told herself.

Or, as everybody in racing said:
One lap at a time.

She was now the very first female crew chief in NASCAR Cup racing, which meant that pretty soon word would get out—it might be on
Engine Noise
already—and then reporters from all over kingdom come would be tracking her down for an interview. They’d be asking her all sorts of silly questions, more than likely. Not the questions they’d ask a male crew chief, like what’s your strategy and which tracks do you think you’ll have the best chance of winning on? No, she’d get all the smarmy questions: Would the team wear designer-made uniforms from Vera Wang? Would they put Perrier in Badger’s water bottle? Did she have any NASCAR-themed recipes to share with the public? And now, God help her, did she use Vagenya?

Crap. The onslaught hadn’t even started yet and already she had a chip on her shoulder. Tuggle didn’t suffer fools gladly. She understood why Tony Stewart had to be restrained from assaulting reporters who harassed him with stupid questions. She might be tempted to deck one herself before the initial media frenzy was over.

Everybody was going to think this team was a gimmick. A joke. A bunch of know-nothing female amateurs teamed with a pretty boy from Georgia. They weren’t supposed to win. They were the sideshow, and who would care, because, after all, the money in NASCAR doesn’t come from winning races, but from sponsor support and souvenir sales. Success in those areas was a given, thanks to sexy little Badger, so the team’s absence from Victory Lane would hardly matter.

It mattered to her, though. And she thought it might very well matter to Badger Jenkins, too. He might be a pretty boy, but he was first and foremost a competitor. She had watched him that last year he raced, on the team that fired him after a mediocre season. It had been an underfunded two-car team, and the driver of the team’s other car was the owner’s pet. The team’s big sponsor was an RV manufacturer, and the nice young kid from Chicago who drove the RV-sponsored car happened to be the son of the owner of the biggest dealership for that brand of recreational vehicles. Naturally, that kid was first in line for everything, and Badger was the also-ran, getting the second-rate cars, the second-string crew, and a smaller share of the racing budget. Naturally, he did not do as well in competition as his teammate, because money buys speed, but instead of admitting what the real problem was, the owners chose to blame Badger. It was easier to replace the driver than to find another ten million dollars to upgrade the operation.

Watching Badger’s struggles last season reminded Tuggle of an exercise pony in horse racing. An exercise pony is the horse used to train the promising young thoroughbred by running practice laps with him
and always losing
. Even if the practice pony has a good day and is actually going to beat the golden boy, his rider pulls him up short to allow the other horse to win. Constant winning builds up the confidence of the promising thoroughbred, but its effect on the other horse is not so good. Eventually, the unbroken chain of defeats crushes the spirit of the practice pony. Maybe he forgets how to win. Or he just stops trying.

Tuggle had thought Badger might be in some danger of becoming like that. In some of the later races last season, when he was well out of the chase and not even within hailing distance of twentieth place, he seemed to be coasting through races on autopilot. In racing parlance,
he wouldn’t stand on it.
It hadn’t been his fault, either. She had made careful note of the outcome of Badger’s team in his last year’s races, where they had finished and why. It was a litany of misfortune—thirty-six races, and in twenty-four of them he’d never had a chance.

Daytona 500
–penalized due to not securing lug nuts

Las Vegas 1
–team changed motor, forcing him to start at the back

Bristol
–hole in radiator caused overheating

Richmond 1
–was in top 15 until lug nut left off, lost 2 laps

Daytona 2
–backup car, started in back; by lap 18 was in top 20 until rear tire went flat and went 58 laps down

New Hampshire
–brake problems

Michigan
–alternator failed

Kansas
–brake problems after 50 laps, lost 12 laps

Tuggle thought that another season with no chance of winning would probably finish Badger’s career; no team would want him, and he might lose heart for competition anyhow. It was hard to go out there and sweat through the danger and the discomfort of a race when you knew it was an exercise in futility.

She figured it was up to her to see it didn’t happen that way. Owners never cared overmuch about the drivers they employed to race for them. Cup drivers were like shuttle flights to Charlotte, you could always catch the next one. There was nobody except her who knew enough and would care enough to save him.

The expendability of race car drivers—43 slots in Cup racing and 40,000 guys who’d kill for the chance to be there. She thought that might be why Cup champion Tony Stewart had adopted fifty ex-racing greyhounds. Sure he loved animals—he had a tiger, for heaven’s sake!—but Tuggle also thought that he might have looked at those gallant canine racers in their cages, euthanized when their usefulness was over, and in the anxious brown eyes of his canine counterparts he would see himself and his fellow competitors. And so “Smoke” had saved the greyhounds, fifty of them—one for every single Cup driver and seven extra for the part-time field fillers. Oh, yes. Professional courtesy.