Bird Thomas, who had forgotten more about race car engines than most people would ever know. Working with him would be an honor. Rosalind hoped they would like her; in her experience, people mostly didn’t, but she intended to do her best to be agreeable. She did Google Julie Carmichael and Jay Bird, looking for some clues about their backgrounds and interests. How did people talk to strangers in the days before Googling?
They were expecting her. Rosalind walked into Julie Carmichael’s office at team headquarters with a brittle smile and ice water in the pit of her stomach. Julie Carmichael was a lanky woman about her own age, with horn- rimmed glasses and a hank of brown hair bound in a long braid. She wore designer running shoes, faded jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt over a vintage Davey Allison tee shirt. Beside her, with his nose buried in a technical manual, was a sweet-faced old man with jug ears and a fringe of white curls around a shiny bald pate. He peered up at Rosalind through rimless bifocals and twinkled a welcoming smile.
The small office, which had beige cinderblock walls, a tiled floor, and a curtainless metal window, looked as if it were a converted classroom, furnished from the Used Office Furniture Depot without much regard for style or ambiance: a faux wood and steel desk and table half buried under books and piles of paper, a large black-rimmed clock, and a collection of die-cast race cars from previous years in NASCAR. On a white erasable bulletin board was a photo of the 86 car (without Badger) and a computer-generated banner that read VAGENYA TECH.
Rosalind shook hands, belatedly remembered to smile, and nodded toward the sign. “Cute,” she said. “This is the engineering headquarters for Team Vagenya, but the sign is also a pun on your alma mater, isn’t it?”
Julie nodded. “Virginia Tech. Right. And Tuggle tells me that you graduated from MIT.”
Jay Bird Thomas looked up from the manual he had been reading, and said, “How do you spell that?”
Rosalind felt a ridiculous urge to curtsey, but she didn’t. “Same way they spelled it when you guest lectured there, sir.”
The old man looked pleased. “That was back before your time up there,” he said. “Nice bunch of fellas. After my lecture a bunch of us spent half the night in a bar trying to figure out an alternative to restrictor plates. Wore out the batteries on my calculator.”
“Wish I’d been there to hear that discussion,” said Rosalind.
“What would your solution be?” asked Julie. She pulled out a chair and indicated that Rosalind should sit down.
“What would I propose as an alternative to restrictor plates?” said Rosalind. “Well, there are a lot of alternatives that would produce the same results. You could mandate a smaller carburetor, or an engine with less horsepower, but those changes wouldn’t solve the problems. I might go to the speedway package they’re using on Busch cars. The blade across the top of the car, and then set the spoiler at about seventy degrees instead of the fifty-something setting that Cup is running. It makes the car more stable and knocks the engine down about twenty-five horsepower.”
“I might reduce tire size,” said the team’s chief engineer. “Cup, Busch, and Truck all run on twelve-inch wide slicks that are normally pretty sticky. It seems to me that if you reduced the tire size to eight or ten inches, then the cars could not negotiate the turns at two hundred miles per hour. That would make driver skill a greater factor in super speedway racing again.”
“Yeah, but it would be easy to overdrive the tires,” said Rosalind. “Might even increase wrecks.”
Jay Bird shook his head. “If they go to smaller tires, the teams would have to put more downforce in the cars. Plus, drivers would have to brake going into the turns. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, I’m just saying it would tee- totally change the way they race those super speedways, and I’m not sure that’s what anybody wants. Seems to me, if you do all that, you’re just duplicating the truck series-big heavy clunkers with no restrictor plates-’cause they can’t go fast enough in the first place to need ’em. Neutering the cars.”
Julie nodded. “Well, there are no easy answers. So what would you do, Jay Bird?”
The old man didn’t bat an eye. “Considering the current crop of Cup drivers? I believe I would sedate every driver whose last name starts with
Julie shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.” She grinned at Rosalind. “So what do you think? Do you want to join this wacko team?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Rosalind.
Jay Bird peered at her over the top of his bifocals. “Why? Start-up team full of amateurs. You’re not one of those Badger groupies, are you?”
“No, sir. He’s a decent driver, and I respect him for that, but personally? No. Handsome jocks are not my thing. I want to join this team because I want the experience, and to be honest with you, NASCAR is still largely an old boys’ club, so it’s hard for a newcomer to break in. And if the newcomer is a woman, then breaking in is next to impossible. I thought this team was my best shot. I didn’t care who your driver was. I just figured this is the one place that my gender would be an asset rather than a liability.”
“Fair enough,” said Julie.
“But it’s really an honor to be able to work with Jay Bird Thomas, too.”
The old man waggled his eyebrows. “So you’ll work for free then, will you?”
“No. But it’s not your money anyway, so I doubt if you care,” said Rosalind.
“You’re right, he doesn’t,” said Julie. “He just wants us to pull at least one victory out of the hat to show that old boys’ club what we can do. Now how do you suggest we do that?”
Rosalind shrugged. “Same way the old boys do it. Cheat.”
CHAPTER V
Melanie Sark knew that there were lots of people in the world-70 million, in fact, if you believed
Her fellow journalists would ask her the same questions they’d pose if she had just taken over the editorship of
Sark had already thought out her response to the polite cynicism of her acquaintances:
