Once Around the Track

make it out there, but not now. Not anymore.” She remembered a photo taken at a motorsports banquet back in the early sixties-half a dozen of the greatest drivers of the time posed together, all heavy-set, middle-aged men in loud sports jackets. They were indistinguishable from any small town newspaper photo of the local bigwigs; any school board grouping, any Moose Lodge membership portrait would have looked the same. Not anymore, though. Now there were drivers with image consultants and maybe even makeover specialists, for all she knew. Most of the young ones could pass for movie stars these days, or at least for country singers. Well, not the Busch brothers, of course. Sometimes talent did take you places without any help from charm or beauty.

She raised her voice and gestured to the crowd. “One more shot with Badger, folks, and then it’s time to get this show on the road. You’ll be riding one at a time, couple of laps around the track, and remember that the only way in or out of the car is to crawl through the window. I would also ask that anyone who has heart problems or a tendency toward motion sickness to please excuse themselves now.” She paused and scanned the crowd. One older woman pulled the helmet off and shook an equally hard helmet of tight gray curls. Tuggle nodded her thanks. “All right,” she said. “Who’s going first?”

Badger surveyed the eager passengers with solemn intensity; then he grinned at the blond stork who had called him her boy toy. “You look brave enough to take it on, ma’am,” he said, motioning her forward. “Heck, you could probably do the driving yourself, Miz-what was your name again?”

The woman bridled at the unexpected praise. “Katharine-with-a-K,” she said, patting her hair. “You want me to go first, honey? Well…maybe just once around the track.”

Tuggle and Badger looked at each other for a long, silent moment in which volumes of information were exchanged between crew chief and driver. Asked and answered.

Then Badger smiled at Katharine-with-a-K. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “I reckon we’ll get started.” He ushered her over to the car. “I’d open the door for you, but like Tuggle said, there isn’t one, so why don’t you climb on in the window there and let’s get started.”

In one graceful movement, he swung himself up and through the driver’s side window, making the process look easy, but his passenger’s awkward clambering on the other side of the car suggested otherwise. She bumped the helmet trying to go in head-first, straddled the window frame, and then hung there for a moment with one leg outside the car until one of her cohorts put both hands under her dangling foot and boosted her in.

“Puts me in mind of Michael Waltrip,” Tuggle murmured to Sark. “Tall, gangly people have a hell of a time getting into race cars.”

“What worries me is how much trouble they’d have getting back out in a hurry,” said Sark. “If they had to.”

They exchanged looks, and with some trepidation, they turned to watch Badger begin the first ride-along.

Badger hit the ignition switch and then the starter, but there was a further delay while Tuggle went over to make sure that Katharine had fastened the safety harnesses correctly. When this was done, she put up the passenger side window netting, tapped the car, and stepped back, waving Badger on.

With a roar the car leaped forward and they were off. When the car was far enough away so that you could hear again, Sark said, “Well, at least he knows what he’s doing.”

Tuggle sighed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Katharine-with-a-K had been thrilled that the sexy little race car driver had chosen her as his first passenger. Maybe her not-altogether-joking remark would lead somewhere later on. Too bad he couldn’t keep the firesuit on while he did it. Somehow, despite the fact that there was a part of her mind that knew better, she had envisioned the ride-along as a chance to get better acquainted with Badger. She spent the last few seconds before takeoff trying to think of some pleasant remarks to make to a race car driver as they whirled around the track, but now she realized that she needn’t have bothered, because the helmets they wore and the engine noise prohibited conversation. The words would have stuck in her throat anyhow.

As they plunged into breakneck speed (she hoped that adjective wasn’t too appropriate), she tried to focus on the details of the experience that were not as she had expected. She had envisioned her experience of speed to be similar to the sensation of traveling in a fast car, say, on the autobahn, only more so. Perhaps the landscape would be more blurry. But she discovered that moving forward at nearly three miles per minute on a circular track proved to be nothing like zooming along an interstate. She had very little time to worry about her visual impressions, because the rest of her body was experiencing peculiar effects that she had not even considered.

Some force seemed to be pinning her back against the seat, making it difficult for her to move. The phrase swimming in molasses flashed through her mind. She tried to concentrate on the proper technical term for such a phenomenon. Gravity? No. Inertia? No. Paralysis? Incontinence? Hubris? Stephanotis? No, that last one was a flower. She realized that her brain was just throwing out long words now, too overloaded to manage anything resembling critical discernment. She struggled to zero in on another impression. There was something strange about the scenery. What would you call it? Immediate. That was it.

She discovered that if you looked straight ahead through the windshield, the view was not blurry at all. It was as clear as a photograph. Except for the peculiar paralysis she was experiencing, she might not even realize- oh, wait…if you turned your head just enough to look through the window netting on the side…suddenly it looked as if someone had put the world into a blender.

Perhaps if he slowed down just a teensy bit. She tried to raise her hand to tap him on the arm, and then she decided that at 180 mph this might not be such a good idea, even if she could have managed it, which seemed not to be the case.

Katharine found that her thoughts were not quite keeping pace with the speed of the car, and also that each observation that ran through her brain was now punctuated with an expletive, as in: Oh shit, I’m pinned back against the seat and can’t move… Oh, shit, the landscape isn’t a blur straight ahead, it’s perfectly clear so that I can see exactly which wall we’re about to slam into… Oo-oooh, shit, here comes a curve and I’m leaning into it and I can’t straighten up… oh shit…leaning to the right more and more…and the wall is awfully…and my head is…oh shit oh shit oh shit…

Given the fact that NASCAR fined people $10,000 for saying swear words on-air, that thought expressed aloud could have constituted a most expensive conversation, except, of course, that no one would hear it. Not even Badger, as it happened, because her throat did not seem to be working. She kept opening and closing her mouth like a fish, while Badger, as intent upon the track as an automaton, seemed to have forgotten that she was there.

He certainly seemed calm enough, as if orbiting a track at 180 mph was like a morning commute to him, which it probably was.

The waiting passengers stood well back from the track as they watched the car whip past them in a blur. At Turn One they let out a collective gasp. The blur hurtled down the straightaway, faster and louder than they had anticipated. Oh, they had been told the speed and they had been issued earplugs, but somehow the mere recital of facts and figures did not translate into this rush and roar before them. It was loud. It was blindingly fast.

As the car dove into Turn Two, one of the women tapped Tuggle on the arm indicating that she was trying to speak. It shouldn’t be possible to shout meekly, but the worried woman managed it. Round-eyed with fright, she pointed and mouthed, “Isn’t he going awfully close to the wall?”

Tuggle’s reply was drowned out as the car sped past them again, but they all caught the phrase “hitting his marks,” whatever that meant. The car surged on, leaping for the wall at every curve.

Bugs to a windshield, thought Sark, and wished she hadn’t.

“But Katharine’s head is poking out the window, through the netting!” shouted one of them, jiggling Tuggle’s arm.

“And she’s next to the wall!” shouted another one. As she mouthed the words, she inclined her head and used her open hand to pantomime the proximity of the wall to the passenger side of the car.

Tuggle held up a circled thumb and forefinger to signal “okay,” but she couldn’t quite manage the reassuring facial expression to go with it.

Moments later, someone thrust a note into the crew chief’s hand. It said, “Tell her to sit up straight.”

Tuggle nodded solemnly, keeping her eyes on the car. Pointless to attempt conversation over the engine noise. Later she would explain to the ladies about g-forces; that is, that Katharine could not sit up straight without breaking several laws of physics. And those same laws of physics meant that her head was going to poke out of