Once Around the Track

zeroing in on you like snipers, and people barking orders into your headset, and having to worry about whether some car coming down pit road would lose its brakes or blow a tire and plow into you. Easy enough for that arrogant jerk FastDrawl to sit at home in his recliner, swilling beer and second-guessing the race, assuming that he could do everything better than the people who actually had the jobs. What was that quotation about critics? Teddy Roosevelt had said it, she thought.

Thank God for the Internet: All you had to do was type in a few keywords and you could find almost any quote you’d ever heard.

A few moments later she had found it, saved it with the copy command, and prepared to fire it point-blank at the smug little asshole at Badger’s Din.

From Mellivora: Fastdrawl, who are you to criticize people who are actually trying to accomplish something instead of sitting on their butts critiquing life instead of living it? This is what I think!

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

– Theodore Roosevelt

So, shut up, FastDrawl, as Badger himself would say, “You’re a useless streak of widdle whose opinion isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” If you’re going to root for Badger, support his team. If you’re not, find somewhere else to be a blowhard.

Taran stayed online for a few more minutes, reading the crossfire between FastDrawl supporters and people who agreed with her defense of Team Vagenya. She found, though, that she didn’t much care anymore what any of them thought. They didn’t know Badger, and she did. They hadn’t lived through a Cup race, and she had. All their endless paragraphs of speculation now reminded her of the work of some remote Pacific cargo cult, building a contraption out of sticks and vines and then expecting it to fly. They didn’t understand anything at all. And she’d never be able to explain it to them.

She logged off. She was too tired to read any further entries, and too depressed to post any more comments, even to thank those who sided with her. Tomorrow they would be flying back to North Carolina, and there they would face a critic who did count, a critic who was quite entitled to point out how the doer of deeds could have done them better: Grace Tuggle-or worse-Badger Jenkins himself.

Taran decided to take another shower, so that Cass, her hotel roommate, couldn’t hear her cry.

“Well, we sucked,” said Tuggle, facing the despondent 86 team in their postrace analysis.

The pit crew and assorted other team members were back in Mooresville, sitting around the conference room table in various stages of misery, waiting for the crew chief to comment on their performance, not that they needed to know what she thought. The expression of disgust would be a mere formality, but it had to be endured. They would be watching the footage of the overhead view of each pit stop and analyzing each strategy call to see what they could have done differently. It would be unpleasant, but they all knew it was a necessary ordeal. They would never get better unless they knew exactly what had gone wrong before.

Taran had brought her own box of tissues to the meeting, and her swollen eyes and reddened nose suggested that this was her second box since the race; the others were maintaining a stoic calm, awaiting the storm.

“We sucked,” Tuggle said again in that voice of preternatural calm that is worse than shouting.

“Aw, don’t be too hard on ’em, Tuggle. They’re new at it,” said a drawling voice from the doorway. “And at least we qualified. That wasn’t exactly a given, you know.”

Nobody gasped, but nobody breathed, either. Badger and Sark were standing in the doorway, looking grim. Taran let out a stifled sob and buried her face in her arms.

“At least he isn’t wearing the firesuit!” hissed Reve, elbowing her in the ribs.

He didn’t have on sunglasses either, but he still managed to look intimidating to people who knew that his career and even his life had been in their hands-and that they had let him down. The fact that he was being nice about it only made it worse. Taran reached for another tissue.

“Come in, Badger,” said Tuggle, indicating the empty chair beside her. “You, too, Sark. I’m sure the team would welcome your comments on their performance yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Reve muttered under her breath. “Nice to know he isn’t on his yacht today, or out earning another ten grand signing his name somewhere.”

“I’m not sure how you want me to write this up,” said Sark.

Tuggle shook her head. “Smoke and mirrors,” she said.

Sark nodded. “We are a new team, and we view this first race as a learning experience. We value Badger Jenkins’s expertise, and we are grateful for his patience as we learn the something-something of motorsports. Like that?”

Tuggle sighed. “Whatever. Just don’t say I said we sucked… But we did.”

“Well, at least we didn’t come in last,” said Jeanne, the tire carrier.

“Only because Badger had the good fortune not to wreck the car, and because Jay Bird and Julie’s engine didn’t give out during the race,” said Tuggle. “But I’m sure you all know that apart from the DNFs who left the race in wrecks or with mechanical problems…apart from them…we were dead last, y’all. I assure you that you gave a lot of chauvinistic owners and sports writers a great deal of satisfaction with your performance.”

That remark even silenced Reve, whose primary goal was proving that women could perform as well as men in motorsports.

Badger had poured himself a cup of coffee, and now he sat down next to the crew chief, looking gaunt and weary. Supposedly, drivers lose about ten pounds in a three-hour race. Looking at Badger this morning, no one doubted it.

“We’ll look at the video footage in a minute,” said Tuggle. “But before we do that, do you want to start us off, Badger?”

He stared into his coffee and sighed. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Well, we can start with you then. Your speeding down pit road cost us a lap. And this may be the crew’s first real race, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours, boy. We could have used that lap.”

Taran raised a tear-stained face, ready to defend her hero. “It wouldn’t have helped,” she said in a hoarse voice that trembled on the breaking point. “I got the catch can stuck in the gas tank, and his having to come back to get that removed cost us a lap, anyhow.” She looked at Badger pleadingly. “I’m really, really sorry.”

The others exchanged uncomfortable looks, and Badger closed his eyes and held the coffee cup against his forehead. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “You didn’t mean to. And it’s not like any of the rest of us were perfect.”

Taran wiped her eyes. “But I let you down.”

Badger gave her a rueful smile. “You can’t take all the credit for this defeat. We’re a team. We all pitched in to make this fiasco.”

The rest of the team nodded, but nobody would look at him.

“I left off a lug nut,” said Cindy. “I had them taped to my arm, like you showed us, Tuggle, and one must have come off that time.”

“And one time I let the jack slip during the tire change,” said Cass Jordan. “I guess I had it at the wrong angle or something. Maybe I was more nervous than I thought I was.”

Tuggle nodded. “And the rest of you did not make any howling blunders, but you were slow. I don’t expect you to make a thirteen-second pit stop right off the bat, but I gotta tell you, you were putting me in mind of the days when drivers used to take five-minute coffee breaks on pit stops.”

“When was that?” asked Sigur.

“Early fifties,” said Kathy. “Leonard Wood of the Wood Brothers was the man who figured out that you didn’t have to have a faster car if your team shortened the pit stop. And that’s what we need to do, folks-shorten the damn pit stop.”

“How?” said Reve.

“We stop screwing up,” said Badger.

“Practice,” said Tuggle. “We practice the moves until you can do them in your sleep. Until crowds and noise and cars whooshing by don’t faze you anymore. We’ll practice this afternoon after we finish here.” She turned to Badger.