watched.”
The man laughed. “Get used to it then! NASCAR is such a small world that you can dial a wrong number and still talk. But by and large, they’re nice people, and if you need any advice, most of them will be glad to help you.”
“Will they give me recommendations? Our biggest problem is that we don’t know anybody. How do we find mechanics and fabricators and all the rest of the people we need?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Mechanics and fabricators. All female?”
“That won’t be possible,” she said, with the air of someone rehearsing a sound bite. “Behind the scenes we need good, qualified people regardless of who they are. I just need to know how to find them.”
“Then hire a team manager who does know the sport, Christine, and then trust that team manager’s judgment. The less you meddle, the better, I’d say, until you get a better sense of what you’re doing. And don’t expect to do a lot of winning in your first year of competition. It will take a while for all the components to jell, you know.”
“But surely if we hire top-notch people…?”
“Experience counts,” he reminded her. “You specified an all-female pit crew. That will put you a few laps short on experience right there. They’ll learn soon enough, I expect, but you mustn’t expect too much too soon.”
“What if the sponsors get impatient?”
He considered the point. “Winning is pleasant,” he conceded. “But all in all, most sponsors would rather have a personable driver who is popular with the fans than an obnoxious winner who endears himself to no one. Ideally, what you want is a handsome nice guy who wins.”
“Jeff Gordon.”
He smiled. She was learning fast. “Exactly. If you could afford him. Which you cannot.”
She sighed. “It would take the economy of a third-world country to afford him. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that.”
“It’s not like hiring a pilot, you know, Christine. You’re not hiring a high-speed chauffeur. There’s a lot more involved in the job than just driving the car. Your driver is a brand, an image. He can attract sponsors or scare them off. But tell me: Why Badger Jenkins?”
Christine stared.
He laughed. “Almost all of him,” he said dryly. “I once saw him change into his firesuit before a race. I can’t say that the sight of any of them in skivvies does much for my blood pressure, but you might be favorably impressed.”
She thought it best to ignore that remark. “Badger is certainly personable. Photogenic. People seem to like him. To us he seemed an obvious choice.”
Her NASCAR mentor was silent for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but at last he said, “You know, Badger has had a hiatus in his career. Spent some time between rides, which isn’t a usual thing. Didn’t you ask yourself why that was?”
“No. We thought we were lucky to have a chance to hire him. I suppose we chalked it up to Fate. But since you brought it up, tell me: Why was he available?”
He hesitated. “Well, Badger is a nice young man…”
“Oh God! What is it? Drugs? Alcohol? Girl Scouts?
“None of the above, Christine. The word around the garage is that he’s just a little laid-back, that’s all.”
“A race car driver?
“Not at all. On the track he’s a mad dog. He’ll try to put that car in places I wouldn’t try to fit a shoe horn. Oh, he’s brave enough, all right. Except that I’m not sure it really counts as brave if you’re so deep in denial that you think death is something that only happens to other people.”
“Never mind that. You admit he’s a good driver. I know for a fact that he’s gorgeous. So what’s the matter with him?”
The Big Wheel sighed. “Nothing is the matter with him-at least not by the standards of the old days in racing. But times change. Badger is an old-style Cup driver. Southern, fearless, and likable. If he had been around in the era of Cale Yarborough and Junior Johnson, he’d have been a champion. But now-”
“Now?”
“He just wants to race. He thinks that’s what his job is. Drive the car. Then he’d like to go home. He doesn’t work in the textile mill like some of the old-timers did on weekdays, but he definitely thinks he can have another life besides Cup racing. And he
“He can’t?”
“Not in this day and age, Christine. He has to live and breathe racing. The team is his family. The job is his life. When he isn’t involved in the mechanics of racing, he ought to be giving interviews, doing charity work, filming commercials, and generally keeping himself on the map of celebrity. Dating a movie star would be a nice touch.”
She shuddered. “You make it sound as if we bought him, instead of just hiring him to race on Sundays.”
The Big Wheel considered it. “We pay them a lot of money,” he said at last. “And it isn’t forever, you know. The career of an athlete isn’t terribly long in most cases. Twenty years if he’s lucky. Anyhow, if he doesn’t want the job on those terms, there’s ten thousand other guys who would crawl over broken glass to get it. You’d be wise not to let him forget that.”
“Thanks. I’ll do my best. But he
“He’s a natural. Now it’s up to you to help him win.”
“And how do I manage that?”
“Hire the best people you can find; pay them enough to keep them; don’t meddle too much; let them know you appreciate them; and give them the wherewithal to win.”
She smiled. “As simple as that, huh?”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s like
“I guess I’ll find out,” she said.
Julie Carmichael stuffed the scrap of newspaper back into the pocket of her jeans. She wondered how other people remembered phone numbers. Or license plates. Street addresses. It was the only advantage she could think of to her unconventional upbringing: every number to her was a NASCAR name and face, which meant that she seldom forgot a number or transposed the digits. The difference between 12 and 21 was Ryan Newman versus Ricky Rudd-you weren’t likely to mix up those two. Her skill at remembering numbers was certainly useful, but it didn’t make up for the rest of her bleak childhood.
She remembered all the Spam and pinto bean dinners…the smell of motor oil and gasoline that pervaded the small frame house and never quite went away…the bill collectors she’d been sent to the door to deal with, in hopes that a wide-eyed little girl could convince them to leave. Those were hard times, but Daddy always said they would get better. Prosperity was just around the next turn in the track, he used to say. Only it wasn’t.
She had been an only child back in Rowan County, but she hadn’t felt like one. The real child of the household had been Daddy’s pride and joy-a hulking steel monster with a room of its own: the garage. For as long as Julie could remember, that car, or one of its predecessors, had taken precedence over her. All the spare time that Daddy could steal from his day job went into his relationship with that car-tinkering with it, racing it, repairing it. The car always got fed, got new shoes, got “doctored”-whether she did or not. Like some revered male heir, to whom its parents sacrificed everything in hopes that it would someday support them, the car was catered to, and the family often went without so that the monster’s needs could be met. The car was their hope of prosperity. That had been the plan, certainly. That hunk of steel and plastic was supposed to win races, and ultimately carry them all away to some happily-ever-after beyond Victory Lane, and from there onto bigger tracks and grander rides, until finally they’d have a fancy house and enough money so that everybody could have new shoes and a second helping of meat.
Well, it hadn’t worked like that.
Despite all the sacrifices, Big Brother the Car had never lived up to its promise, and Daddy had died too young to make it work or to wise up and try to do something else with his life. Julie decided that it was up to her to even the score between humans and machines, and she figured that cars owed her something to make up for the lousy childhood she’d had. Early on she had worked out a strategy to succeed. She treated herself like a car. She stayed
