The Outside Groove (11 page)

“Still not convinced, are you?” Uncle Harvey said.

I rested my arm on the open window. “I'm racing again.”

“You don't have the skills, Case. I'm telling you.”

“Can I get them?”

“Not without seat time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Seat time. The time it takes for you to feel like you're actually a racer, not a human roadblock getting in everyone's way. Most drivers need a whole season for that.”

“I don't want to wait that long.”

Uncle Harvey chuckled. “No. I can see that. I'm telling you, though, you're not speeding the process along if you've got a lot of other nonsense on your mind.”

“Like what kind of nonsense?”

“You know what kind of nonsense, Casey. Demon's Run. You get rattled there, with your brother and everyone around. You'll never learn there.”

I looked over the mashed front end of dead car 07. “What about Byam?” I said. “They race Road Warriors?”

“They call them street stocks down there, the four-cylinder division. The Flying Tiger, there, is an eight-cylinder car. But, yeah, your ride would probably be up to streetstock specs.”

“You welcome at that track?”

“The Corkum County Speedbowl? As a matter of fact, I am welcome there. Slide on out now. You're making me nervous.”

I climbed out, banging my right knee on the steering column.

“Speedbowl's just a touch longer than a quarter-mile,” Uncle Harvey said, “but I doubt you'll notice the difference. I guess it's all new to you anyway. They're running a street-stock enduro a week from Saturday. I believe it's two hundred laps.”

An enduro, I knew from past dinner-table conversations at Wade LaPlante Motorsports, is just what it sounds like: a long race under “green flag conditions,” meaning there's no yellow caution flag for crackups. If there's a wreck, the other cars are supposed to drive around it while one special car tries to bump the breakdown out of the way. If there's a bad wreck, a red flag comes out and everyone stops where they are. When the green flag drops, the drivers jump on the gas. At least that was how they ran the enduros at Demon's Run. They held one or two over the course of each season, but they weren't prestige events. Wade called them “slamjams,” also the local slang for a demolition derby.

“An enduro,” I said. “There. That'll be some seat time. Can I get in?”

“I'll check and see, make a phone call.” Uncle Harvey started for the shop.

“What about a few driving lessons in the meantime?” I said as I followed him.

“OK,
now
we're getting somewhere. Now we're talking.” He spat into the grass. “Take your ride out into the field, there, and I'll give you some pointers.” He spat again.

I spat, too.

With the Corkum County Speedbowl enduro awaiting us at the end of our drive, Uncle Harvey became very involved in helping me formulate a racing strategy. Success, he said, would depend on “exit speed.” And, as if I might not be able to remember those two little words, he kept repeating them—“exit speed, exit speed, exit speed.” I didn't mind him repeating the words, but each time he said them, he'd remove his right hand from his steering wheel and draw a quick half-circle in the air. I had to lean back a few times to avoid getting smacked, and the sedan always jerked toward the shoulder. “You want to exit that corner with your foot punching that accelerator. Matting it.”

“Matting it?”

“Mat it. Floor it. You want to be already accelerating when you hit the straightaway.”

“Got it,” I said. “I want to carry speed
away,
into the straightaways, not just take the shortest route around the turns. I'll add some distance to my path around the corner, but I'll be driving a line that'll give me optimal exit speed.” I didn't disclose this to Uncle Harvey, but I'd already read all about exit speed in
Racing for Keeps
by Flip Brackey:

 

When you drive on “the line, ” you drive farther than
you would on the inside, but the added distance allows you proportionately greater speed coming out of the turn.

 

“That's right,” Uncle Harvey said. “It's about how your car settles in the turns and how you come out.”

“Radius.”

“What?”

“The radius of the turn.” I drew an imaginary oval in the dust on his dashboard. “The larger the radius, the least resistance. ”

 

The equation combines cornering force, the force of gravity, and turn radius measured in feet. Do the math (see table 4.1): Your line leads to better lap times.

 

Uncle Harvey looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I'd have told him about studying Flip Brackey's book, but I didn't want to insult him. And I didn't want to be reminded of what, in my gut, I knew to be true: the notion of
studying
my way into winning stock-car races was foolish. Still, I clung to the idea. Studying was not only something I was good at, it was something I understood to be good behavior. This last point helped offset the anxious feeling that, by racing, I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing and that, sooner or later, someone would force me to quit.

Of course, that feeling had little to do with racing and everything to do with spending time with Uncle Harvey. We hadn't talked about that, not even on the long drive to Byam, but every time two seconds of silence fell between us, the fact that I'd crossed into forbidden territory to be with him surrounded us. Surrounded me, at least. Fortunately, racing put Uncle Harvey in a chatty mood. We experienced no more than two periods of two-second silence in the first fifty or sixty miles out of Fliverton. My drawing in the dashboard dust had brought about another.

Uncle Harvey squinted at the dust oval. “Radius,” he said. “Hmm. Maybe so. Never thought of it like that. To keep it simple, remember that you're basically trying to make a circle out of an oval.”

“ Same thing. The
turn-in
point on the corner starts outside, not tight to the inside.”

“You definitely want to avoid a lot of cornering on the inside. You're pinching your car driving that way, basically making a square out of the oval. Hard turn, straighten. Hard turn, straighten. That won't get you anywhere but the back of the pack.”

“But with the wide arc going into the corner, I'm coming
down
from the top of the turn,
down
to the inside, picking up speed as I hit the inside of the second part of the turn, the
apex.
And then I ‘mat it' into the straightaway toward the outside again, the
track-out.”
I drew a couple of routes around the corners of my dashboard-dust racetrack.

Uncle Harvey reached over and erased the imaginary racecourse with his shirtsleeve, and, again, the car lurched toward the shoulder. “I need to clean this car,” he said. “Anyway, well, sure, that's all great in theory, Casey, but you've still got to race a bunch of other drivers.”

Thirty-two, to be exact, at least according to Uncle Harvey's latest update from the Corkum County Speedbowl's director of racing, a man named Doug Ladd. Apparently, the Speedbowl didn't have a Thundermaker division, just four-cylinder street stocks and eight-cylinder Flying Tigers. Uncle Harvey said that this was because Thundermaker-type cars cost too much to buy and maintain, and the Corkum County economy was hurting. Not that Fliverton was a wealthy community, but we did have industries there. Our granite quarry was still operating, and we also had a printing plant and a pretty big furniture factory. And Wal-Mart, of course.

I gazed out the window, watching the robust farm country of Granite County yield to brown fields dotted with mobile homes. I glanced back at Jim, who was driving the wrecker alone with Theo on the flatbed. I considered waving but didn't. Jim was kind of grumpy in the morning.

About an hour later, we crossed the Byam town line, passed a cruddy strip mall, cruised down what seemed like a Main Street lined with stores—every fourth one with its windows boarded up—and turned down Speedbowl Road. About a half-mile farther, pulling into the Speedbowl lot, I understood what Uncle Harvey had been talking about with regards to the Corkum County economy. Uncle Harvey's beater sedan was a popular car there, at least among race fans. The grassy lot was full of them.

***

Rolling into the pit area, I noticed three girls who looked roughly my age walking in a pack. The way they swaggered along, laughing and waving to people, led me to speculate they were popular—maybe Byam's equivalent of the Dolphins. Two of them wore tight-fitting T-shirts, and one girl was wearing a tube top. They all had on what looked like men's work pants cinched at the waist with wide leather belts and rolled up to the shin. They scuffed the dirt path leading into the pits in high-top sneakers with no socks. Their key accessory seemed to be sunglasses—the old-fashioned, square kind that made me think of the 1950s. All in all, it was a bizarre look they had going on—a look with an edge. They seemed more like Sharks than Dolphins. One girl, a redhead with a long braid, looked at me as Uncle Harvey and I passed. I looked away, but I'm sure she caught me staring.

A tall man with silver, slicked-back hair and roundish, pilot-style sunglasses stood outside a trailer, clipboard in hand, talking to a teenager in a black-and-neon-green firesuit and black baseball cap and a man who looked like the kid's father. The guy with the clipboard said something that made all three of them laugh, then he whapped the kid on the butt with the clipboard. The kid and his dad walked away.

Seeing Uncle Harvey's car, the silver-haired man motioned for him to pull around behind the trailer, and then he checked something on his clipboard. Jim found a pit midway down the row and started maneuvering the flatbed into position.

“That the racing director?” I said as I got out of Uncle Harvey's car and walked around to the front of the trailer.

“Yeah. That's Ladd. Mr. Ladd, you call him. A good guy. He's an old friend, but he's still doing you a huge favor, letting me swap some repair work for your license fee.”

“I'll pay you back.”

“We're thinking about racing, Casey. That's all we're thinking about today. So listen to what Ladd says.”

Uncle Harvey shook Ladd's hand while I hung back. Then I walked up and extended a hand. “Hello, Mr. Ladd.”

“Casey,” he said. “Welcome to the Speedbowl.” He shook my hand. “Glad you came out. We always need new drivers, new blood—uh, I mean, not blood, but, well, you know what I mean.” Mr. Ladd rested a hand on my shoulder—a gesture I wouldn't ordinarily have welcomed but one that seemed natural here. At least it wasn't a whap on the butt with a clipboard. “You ready to raise a little hell out there?” he said.

I wasn't sure what the correct answer was, since what I'd been hoping to do was run a full race without eating too much wall or getting knocked off the track. “Raising hell” wasn't on my to-do list. “I suppose I am,” I said. Mr. Ladd and Uncle Harvey laughed. I guessed I'd given the right answer.

***

My practice laps felt pretty good. Sure, I got plenty of cold looks from the other drivers, but that didn't bother me. Fletcher had been right: Getting that first race out of the way made me sit differently behind the wheel. I couldn't see Theo's front end, but it didn't unnerve me that much anymore. Also, being away from Demon's Run, out there in Byam, where no one knew me, I could focus better. Theo's mood also seemed to have improved. He handled great in the corners, even when I pushed him. This might've had something to do with what I'd heard Uncle Harvey saying to Jim back at the shop, something about making tire-pressure adjustments to account for the weather, which was supposed to be on the cool side.

Pulling into the pits after practice, I noticed the three mean-looking Speedbowl girls—the Sharks—flirting with the driver and crew two pits down from mine. They tracked me with their square shades as I climbed out the window and hovered around my ride, pretending to be inspecting it.

Uncle Harvey came over and nudged me in the arm. “Handles a lot better, doesn't she?” he said.

He,
I mentally corrected him. “Definitely. I noticed it right away, especially in the turns.” The redheaded Shark drifted toward Jim, who was sitting on the wrecker tailgate, thumbing through his GED booklet.

“Feel free to push it,” Uncle Harvey said, gazing into the sky. “If the track warms up a little, we should still be OK. You're running two hundred laps, though, so expect your car not to respond as well in the later laps.”

“Why's that?” I asked, thinking it'd be a triumph if I could stay in the race until these fabled “later laps.”

“You're going to lose tread,” Uncle Harvey said. “Track'll heat up, your tires will expand, and the car will start pushing across the asphalt instead of gripping as you turn. That's what we call ‘pushing.' ”

“What should I do then?”

“Save your tires by lifting on the gas going into the turns, but not braking. Drift your line in the corners, giving just a tap on the gas here and there, and then really mat it when you're ready to exit.”

“Lift and tap.”

“It's called feathering the throttle. You'll figure it out.” He turned to the track. “Seat time,” he said. “That's what today's all about, Casey. Seat time.”

I looked over at Jim, who was surrounded by the Sharks and didn't seem happy about it. Catching my eye, he practically leaped off the tailgate. Halfway to me, he pulled a slip of paper from his back pocket and waved it. “We drew numbers,” he said, handing me the slip. “Me and the other crew chiefs.”

I read the slip: 19.

The track loudspeakers clicked on: “Drivers, please report for the drivers' meeting,” the announcer said. “Drivers, all drivers, to the pit bleachers, please.”