Once Around the Track

worrying about modifying an obscure part to improve performance by a hundredth of a second or so. I bought my way into one of their meetings today with a bag of Krispy Kremes, and Julie and Rosalind were very patient about explaining things to me, but they refuse to let me do any articles about the technical modifications they’re working on.

Why should you care? Engineering is a very hard-sell topic in feature journalism. Too technical for the average reader. Even if you catch the team cheating, the explanation would be so convoluted that you couldn’t make anyone care.

I wasn’t thinking of ratting on them, Ed. They aren’t doing anything that every other team in racing isn’t doing. Car modification is a cat-and-mouse game that everybody plays-staying just ahead of the next rule change. Actually, I admire their expertise. Compared to the big five-car teams, they have so little to work with, but they’re all keeping crazy hours trying to make the team competitive. They have a new trick this week, but I can’t tell you what it is.

I wouldn’t understand it, anyway. This is your story, not mine. What about Badger? Any dirt on him?

Not really. I have no complaints about Badger Jenkins. He can be exasperating, apparently, when he doesn’t show up at the race shop or when he tries to get out of some dull but necessary bit of team business. Badger can’t focus worth a damn except in a race car, but he’s a sweet guy. He’s not a jerk.

Ever thought about seducing him, Sark? That would be a juicy story.

I did think about it, but not for journalistic reasons. In that firesuit he is a very pretty pony. Anyhow, he affected not to notice my one tentative display of interest. (He gave me a hello hug here at the shop one time, and my response said a lot more than “Hello.” He looked sort of surprised, but nothing came of it.) The consensus around here is that Badger Jenkins is not virtuous. He’s just damned picky. Any Playboy centerfold who lost ten pounds and spent a week at a spa might have a shot with him.

I had those standards, too, but in my case they amounted to a vow of celibacy, so I’ve become easier to please. You can hug me anytime.

Thanks for the offer. I’ll take you up on it when Badger asks me for your autograph. Meanwhile, I would like to put on a spiked vest and hug his manager. Spikes dipped in poison, that is.

“Malady” Albigre? Why? Have you had another run-in with her?

Yes, I suppose you could say that I’ve tangled with her. I am the team publicist. That is my job. But she seems to think that her job is to schmooze with sponsors and journalists on Badger’s behalf. The problem with that is that she has all the charm of a cobra with PMS. She generally manages to annoy people in less than five minutes. She talks to the owner (Christine) as if Badger were doing the team a big favor by driving for them-bad idea in a profession with only forty-three job openings! She seems to think he could do better on a bigger team, which is probably true, but he is neither young enough nor famous enough for them to want him. Don’t get me wrong: I adore him. We all do, but he’s not NASCAR’s golden boy. And she’s no help to his situation. The team hates her. She e-mails me at least twice a week, usually to order me around as if I were her clerk, and despite the fact that I correct her after every message, she still spells my name “Melonie.”

Well, Melanie, perhaps your perfume smells like cantaloupes? You know: Melon- ie.

Yeah. Or maybe the Dominatrix is dumber than a rock.

Hmmm. The Queen of the Badgers is beginning to interest me. Stay tuned while I call in favors, Sarque. I shall make inquiries.

There were legions of people-most of them female-who would have given worlds to know what went on inside the brain of Badger Jenkins, and most of the time it would have been very difficult indeed to pinpoint any particular train of thought inside the bundle of shiny bits (appetites and instincts), grass and twigs (mannerisms of charm and defensive strategies), and bits of colored string (skill, shrewdness, and common sense), that all woven together passed as Badger’s mind.

But when he put the helmet on…When the green flag dropped and the engines roared and the world flashed past at 200 mph… Then one could read his thoughts like the ticker tape of a stock machine, because then and only then his mind focused into one single groove, zeroed in on the process of looping the oval faster than anybody else, lap after lap, until the checkered flag ended the exercise, and other thoughts were allowed to flow back into his consciousness.

He had raced at Darlington many times before. He liked Darlington. He had won the Southern 500 there. And while to the casual observer every circular race track may look the same, they aren’t. This is how stock car racing differs-and becomes more difficult-than football or basketball, sports in which no matter where you compete the dimensions of the playing field are always the same. But in NASCAR, all the tracks are different. Every week presents a different set of challenges requiring different skills. The tracks vary in length from half a mile to more than two miles, which, among other things, changes the speed at which drivers race. Variations in banking change the angle and elevation of the turns at each track. Some tracks are not perfect ovals. Some tracks are road courses, so that even “left turn only” is not always the rule. A driver must master not one pattern of skills, but many-a different set each week.

Darlington.

The track is 1.366 miles long, and egg-shaped-wider on one end than on the other. Therefore, the turns on the narrow end of the egg are tighter than those on the wide end. Also, the banking in Turns Three and Four, the tighter turns, is two degrees steeper than on Turns One and Two, which means that every corner presents a different problem for the driver. As you hurtle up the track at nearly 150 mph, the walls seem to jump in front of the car. A second’s inattention will put you in the wall. You are perilously close to the wall already. As you loop the speedway, the grooves in the track channel your car closer and closer to the wall as you go, so that at each revolution you pass only inches from disaster. The “Darlington Stripe,” a long black mark down the right side of the car, attests to the times when you misjudge the turn and actually come in contact with the wall.

This was a driver’s track, where skill mattered as much as expensive technology. The qualifying record had been set back in 1996 by Ward Burton: 173.797 mph. The record for speed during an actual race was much less than that: 139.958, set by Dale Earnhardt in 1993. Badger didn’t think he had a shot at breaking either of those records this year, but at least he didn’t hate Darlington the way some drivers did. He respected the “Lady in Black” as the track was called, and he knew that Dale Earnhardt had been right when he said that if you got fresh with her, she would slap you down.

When Sark was writing her team press release on the Thursday before the race, she asked Badger to explain his strategy for winning Darlington. “Just one sentence,” she warned him. “All I want is a sound bite.”

Badger thought about it for a moment between swigs of Gatorade, and then said, “To win Darlington: Aim for the wall and miss.”

Badger was not a chatty driver. Very seldom did his voice come over the headset, except in answer to a question from Tuggle, but if Sark, the novice at racing, had been allowed to tune into Badger’s thoughts as he raced at Darlington, their telepathic dialogue might have gone like this:

A lot of times at Darlington a car will look loose on the back end…that’s bad…if your car’s nose won’t turn, you’re out of control, so you’ll probably be getting a Darlington stripe. You know…scrape the wall, maybe wreck, even…

So you’re saying that if the nose is not turned properly, the car will wreck?

Right. You go straight when you get on the gas…Here at Darlington you’ve got four apexes to contend with, instead of the usual two…You use a diamond maneuver… You go straight into the corner, and you exit on a straight edge the same way.

But what is an apex?

I’m coming into one now. It’s the turn at the bottom of the banking…You let the car drift up to the wall and ease on the throttle at the top of the corner…you enter-Stay on it… Stay on it…

On it? The throttle?

“Stay on it” means to stay on the throttle as long as your butt can stand it. Usually the pucker factor controls this issue…

Until it scares the shit out of you?

Yeah, so stay on it as long as you can… You’re right on the wall, as you’re going straight. Then you let off the gas; turn to the bottom of the groove… If the nose is wrong, the car is still gonna slide…If the nose is pointed and