Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

Each team had a spotter positioned up there on the roof of the grandstand, giving the driver a bird’s-eye view of the whole track. The spotter would warn the driver if another car was coming up on him. In the case of a wreck in which smoke might reduce visibility to a few feet beyond the hood of the race car, the spotter would tell the driver whether to go high or low to avoid any obstacles ahead. Sometimes the driver was running blind-at 180 mph-and then his life was in the hands of the spotter. If you were on pit crew, you could hear the spotter on a channel in your headset, and he was your eyes for the race, too.

The view of the pit crew, while immediate and thrilling, lacked in scope what it made up for in excitement. Cars roared by, and then vanished around Turn One, so that half the race went on behind them, on the far side of the infield, past a veritable village of buildings, crowds, trucks, and haulers, so that even if you turned around you would catch only brief glimpses of the race. All the pit crew could see was the few seconds of the race that played out as the cars swept past the pit stall.

Taran supposed that battles must be like that for infantrymen. All they can do is fight their little corner of the war, and then wait until the skirmish is over to find out the particulars of the conflict-who won and who lost and why. She felt rather like a soldier herself. Surely a Cup race was as loud as a battle, and the same pressures were brought to bear on the participants: the tension, the feeling that you might fail your comrades through panic or inexperience or simply a lack of skill.

You were less alone than an infantryman, though. Always there were the voices in your headset, drowning out, for the most part, the roar of engine noise. The driver would relay his questions and comments back to the team, although Badger wasn’t a particularly talkative driver. Tuggle talked to various team members to ask about the fuel situation, for example. Someone behind the wall was keeping track of fuel consumption; races had been lost at the finish line on the last lap when the car ran out of gas. It had happened to Dale Earnhardt once in the Daytona 500. Nobody wanted it to happen to Badger.

Hurry up and wait. If she’d had to sum up the feeling of being on a pit crew, that would cover it. There were the urgent voices, the pressure to be fast and accurate with millions of people all over the country watching you, and the noise and danger all combining to make the race feel like a three-hour reenactment of D-day. And above it all there was the fierce desire to be victorious, not for yourself, but for those who served with you, so that you could seal your bond of brotherhood in a struggle crowned with success. You would know that you did your part to ensure the win, and that your teammates valued you for your efforts. There would be more money paid to the winning team, but during the race itself, she doubted if anybody gave much thought to that. For the duration of that three-hour race, they were soldiers, wielding jacks and drills instead of rifles, to be sure, but soldiers nonetheless. Badger’s life might well depend upon their skill, as much as if he had been a brother in arms. She felt that nothing she had ever done had mattered as much as this.

So for Taran the first Daytona 500 in years that she had not seen was the one in which she took part. The next day she would watch a recording of the television broadcast of the event, and from that she could piece together what had been happening at a given time in the race, and then she would try to summon up her own confused memories so that she could fit together the two perspectives into one coherent experience: what really happened, and what it felt like to live through it as it happened.

One thing that she was sure of, though. It had not looked or felt like the report of it that appeared on Badger’s Din.

Badger’s Din

Lady Pit Bulls “86” The Badger by FastDrawl

Thank God it’s over, folks. If you’ve been reading my lamentations since Thanksgiving because racing season was over…if you’ve heard me counting down the hours until Daytona…then you may be amazed to hear me thanking heaven that the race is history, but there it is, guys. I almost changed the channel. I couldn’t take it.

They were awful.

If you want to measure Team 86’s pit stop times, get a calendar.

Okay, spare me all your excuses, you bleeding hearts. Granted, the 86 is a new team with novice personnel. Granted, this is an equality gimmick as far as most people are concerned, but, folks, we are not most people. We are the diehard, tried and true, whatever-he-drives-wherever-he-drives-it fans of Badger Jenkins, and I submit to you that it is cruel and unusual punishment to make us watch him sabotaged and humiliated by this bumbling bunch of Hooters wannabees masquerading as NASCAR technicians. It scours my soul.

Badger is the man. He drives like greased lightning. He is the king of the redneck ballet out there-and to have to watch him brought low by his lousy support staff is more than I can endure. Can we take up a collection to get him some decent help? Or, failing that, at least some hotter-looking useless babes? Is there a Swedish volleyball team? My twenty bucks is in the hat for a new pit crew.

Taran read FastDrawl’s article for the third time, wishing she had not decided to check on comments from her old Internet buddies. She had gone back to the hotel to check on Tony Lafon, who was still sick. Allergic reaction to seafood, he thought. He declined her offer to bring him dinner, and he was obviously in no mood for company. He had seen the race on television, and neither of them wanted to talk about that. After a few more awkward minutes, she left and went back to her room, wishing she had someone to talk to. That’s why she had logged on to Badger’s Din.

It had been more than a week since she’d visited the site, and she was so despondent after the race that she’d hope to commiserate with the faithful on Badger’s unauthorized fan site. But instead of sympathy, she had found FastDrawl’s screed, and now she was progressing from disbelief to shock to rage. He had no idea what it was like to be out there trying to do a job in thirteen seconds- thirteen seconds -with TV cameras 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.