commandeered without permission.” Her tone suggested that they had the Mooresville police on speed dial.
The woman ignored this salvo. “Ah,” she said, “you are Grace Tuggle. I have certainly heard of you. So you are the other person who has to manage Badger-in a manner of speaking.”
Tuggle scowled. “Nobody told me that Badger had a
Ms. Albigre regarded the crew chief for a moment with the speculative gaze of someone who is trying to decide whether or not the snake is poisonous. “I just came on board,” she said, peering at the screen of her laptop. She tapped a few keys. “I will decide what personal appearances Badger will make and I’ll negotiate the fees, that sort of thing.”
“Badger has a contract with this team,” said Tuggle. She spoke so softly that one had to strain to hear her, but she gave the impression of someone who was a heartbeat away from bellowing with rage. “He has certain obligations spelled out in that contract, and those duties are not subject to negotiation. Of course, if he doesn’t want the job…”
If Tuggle had hoped to intimidate the interloper with the threat of her client’s dismissal, she was to be disappointed. Without a flicker of alarm at the prospect of Badger’s imminent termination, Ms. Albigre said, “Did Badger actually sign a contract for once? He’s the handshake type. Hopeless. Well, if there is one, I’ll need to see a copy of it, I suppose.”
“He has already agreed to our terms,” said Tuggle. “He did sign an agreement.”
The manager nodded. “Yes, in crayon, I expect. I still need to see it, so that I will know precisely what his obligations are. Then I can go from there.”
Tuggle took several deep breaths and her eyes bulged, but the explosion did not come. Miraculously, the woman’s laptop was not thrown across the room, and the cell phone stayed on the table in one piece. Finally, in strangled tones the crew chief managed to say, “Deanna, get this-get
The secretary gave a quick nod and scurried out of the room, relieved to be given an excuse to flee. When she was gone, Tuggle said, “We like Badger. He’s a good man. He can be tricky to work with, though.”
Melodie Albigre nodded. “Impossible, I expect,” she said. “I imagine that working with him is like trying to keep fifteen kittens in a laundry basket.”
Tuggle stared. “I thought you said you just started working with him. How would you know that?”
The woman smiled. “Well, he is a race car driver. There are certain traits common to most of them. Being difficult is certainly one of them. But, actually, I had Badger tested. Have you ever heard of the Myers Briggs- personality test?”
“Nope.”
“Really? You should check it out, especially since you have a number of employees to supervise yourself. It’s quite a useful tool.” The Albigre cell phone went off. Its owner glanced at the caller number, wrinkled her nose in distaste, and went on talking. “We at Miller O’Neill like to give that test to all of our new clients, so that we can determine what style works best in dealing with them. It divides people into four categories-thinking or feeling, perceiving or judging, introverted or extroverted, and so on.”
Tuggle smirked. “So you classified Badger, did you?”
“Verified an educated guess,” said Melodie. “I was already pretty sure what he would turn out to be-because quite a lot of athletes are. He’s an ISTP.”
“The motor oil?”
“Not STP. I-S-T-P. It is a classification of personality traits. It stands for introverted, sensation, thinking, and perceiving.”
“Gobbledygook,” said Tuggle. “What does it mean?”
She shrugged. “Oh…I suppose you might sum it up as
“I could have told you that,” said Tuggle. “On a race track he is zeroed in like a laser.”
“Exactly. But in, say, a classroom where they’re teaching American History, he would be bouncing off the walls. Probably was, in fact. I don’t imagine he did very well in school.”
Tuggle’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You’re not thinking about giving him drugs, are you?”
“No, of course not. You can’t dope a racehorse.” She paused to consider a stray thought. “Or neuter him, more’s the pity. We just wanted to know how best to communicate with Badger, that’s all.”
“A two-by-four upside of the head?”
“Tempting,” said Melodie with a grim smile. “In case you’re interested, it’s no good berating him or shouting at him. He will simply shrug it off. And if you read him the riot act, he will promise to reform. He will even mean it, but that’s only good for about four days, and then he reverts to being his old self.”
“Which brings us back to the two-by-four,” said Tuggle.
“Considering the head injuries he has sustained over the course of his career, you probably shouldn’t joke about that,” said Melodie primly. “I expect those accidents made him worse, but I’m sure he was always like this to some extent. ISTPs love excitement and danger. Managing Badger requires firmness and persistence. Whoever nags him the most wins his time-temporarily. He tends to give his attention to the person who demands it the loudest.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet he’d hate you for it.”
“Apparently not. ISTPs tend to be fairly good-natured. But that point is irrelevant, to me in any case. I am not here to be his friend. Badger Jenkins is a project to be managed, and I intend to manage him as efficiently as possible.”
“More power to you,” said Tuggle. “If he’s fool enough to put up with you, I won’t stand in your way. Just don’t interfere in my operation here, and don’t schedule Badger for anything that conflicts with the needs of this team. And one more thing-”
“Yes?”
“Why the hell are you using our conference table as your office?”
At “Vagenya Tech,” as the chief engineer’s office was now called by everyone on the team, Julie and Rosalind were brainstorming with Jay Bird.
When Rosalind had said, only half in jest, that the way to win a race was to cheat, she had been oversimplifying a basic premise of motorsports. NASCAR made rules intended to even the playing field, so that no team had any particular advantage over the others. Racing teams tried to find loopholes in those rules, or else they tried to come up with equipment modifications not yet banned in the sport. This would work briefly, and then NASCAR would discover the infraction and devise a new, more stringent rule to cover it. Jay Bird called this artful dodging an endless game of Whack-a-Mole: find a new outlet, get slammed by the inspectors, look for a new way out. One of NASCAR’s legendary drivers best summed up the teams’ position on unauthorized modifications when he said, “There are two types of racers: cheaters and losers.”
“Creative engineering” went all the way back to the beginnings of the sport, and it ranged from something as simple as fabricating the car’s bumpers out of Styrofoam to reduce its weight to something as complicated as restructuring the entire chassis slightly off-kilter in order to minimize wind resistance.
The patron saint of creative engineering was Smokey Yunick, the legendary racer and mechanic from Tennessee, who back in the sixties tried all sorts of gimmicks to circumvent NASCAR’s racing regulations. Once he drove his Chevelle at Daytona with an eleven-foot fuel line snaking its way back and forth in an intricate maze between its fuel cell and the engine. That illegal gas line held six gallons of gasoline in addition to what was in the fuel cell itself, which would have given him an incredible advantage in the race-nearly an extra hundred miles of racing before he needed a pit stop. The second helping of gas might have won the race for him, except that he got caught. A new NASCAR rule about gas lines followed immediately.
Since then it had become more difficult to bend the rules. Stock car parts had to conform to templates-molds that specified the exact size and dimensions of a given part or piece of hardware down to a thousandth of an inch. Cars had been penalized for having the wrong size screw on a part in the engine. Getting caught with a nonstandard modification could cost you in fines, result in the suspension of the crew chief, and get the car sent to the back of
