Trackday Diaries: Veni, Vidi, Vici, Amavi

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

I don’t Netflix and I don’t chill. I live my life in the first person and I take my stories through my own eyeballs so I can turn around and tell them to you. So here is a little story for you, about a girl I happen to know. You can call her a woman, if you like and if it suits your politics. She calls herself a girl.

Once upon a time, this girl was a pilot. She was still a teenager when she soared off into the New Mexico sky on her own for the first time. When she landed, her instructor cut off the tail of her dress shirt. This is a thing, if you did not know. She was tall and blonde and very serious. She grew up to own a few businesses and she became very much her own girl. She was independent. And if she did not always have things her own way, at least she always had the sky waiting for her.

This girl met a very bad man. He was bad in the way that men in the movies are bad, that violent, intemperate, dramatic way. And he was also bad in the tiresome little ways that men in real life are bad, the forgetting and the wandering and the way he was too slippery to pin down, like oyster meat under your fork or tongue. And one day she woke up to find herself fuzzy-headed in the hospital, bolted together inside and out, very far from home, stuck with this bad man like Belle in the castle of the Beast.

She wanted to fly home, but there was no way to fly home. There was no more way to fly at all. She was broken in ways that might always keep her from flying. I am sure she thought about giving up. But she put her head down and she worked on unbreaking herself. They say you cannot unbreak yourself, the same way you cannot un-ring a bell. But she unbroke herself.

“If I cannot fly,” she said, “I will race.”

She went racing with the same bad man who had broken her, which is the kind of unfortunate accommodation that happens when your story is dictated by fate and not by a friendly author. She went to racing schools and although it was painful for her sometimes, to have her crinkled bones strapped down in the cramped and unfriendly confines of rental racers and casual cars, she did not complain. They gave her a license and said she was ready to race. You could say that they cut off the tail of her shirt again. Once a pilot, now a racer.

This is the part of the story where our heroine should face adversity, and indeed she did. Her race team fell apart. First, the fellow who owned their race car decided to quit. It happened suddenly, though he did not tell anybody until later. He’d been standing at the pitlane wall at Watkins Glen when it occurred to him that he could die doing this. So he quit at the worst possible time, after all the entry fees had been paid and all the flights booked.

She was not easily discouraged. She got another car. It kept breaking. Her team members started to wander off. One of them told her, on the way out the door, that she should spend a lot of money on a new race car. He told her what car to get. But the decision would be hers alone and the cost would be hers alone.

It did not scare her. You can’t be the kind of girl who flies a plane alone at seventeen if you are scared of things. She bought the car. It was a horrible amount of money and there was more money to spend right away. Then more, and more. Until she thought that perhaps it had been a mistake.

In her first race with the new car, she spun on some oil and hit the tire wall at high speed. It was not fatal for her little convertible and her friends fixed it up for her, even as the bruises blossomed on the pale skin beneath her drivers suit. But some of them took it as a bad omen and they did not come back to the next race.

There were a few people who did not give up. Two men, Slavic like her, quiet and determined the way she was quiet and determined. A friendly-faced young giant of a fellow, a deeply committed Christian who would not swear when the car burned or cut him. They fixed the car. But the next race was even worse. The car did not finish either day. Everybody put on a brave face but most of them started to remember other obligations they had, ones that might be more pressing than joining her for the rest of the season.

Alone together in the castle of the beast, she and the bad man had a long talk. She explained they had asked too much of their friends. She would take the car back and race it by herself, paying all the bills and bearing the burden alone. But they would do one more race before that happened. She asked everybody to come back, to put in the effort one last time. Most of them said “no.” They said it in kind ways, they had reasons and schedules and excuses. But they still said “no.”

Eight people said yes: the Slavs and the big man from Michigan, who felt like family to her. A young man from Philadelphia volunteered to come at his own expense and work any job that was available for the whole weekend, even though he had never met her. He wanted to be part of something and this seemed like it was something. A friend she had made — a famous face who lived on the ocean but who was private and quiet like her when he wasn’t on camera — agreed to show up and help pay the bills. A professional race team sent their star driver, someone who had won the Daytona watch before turning twenty. He had never raced a car with a clutch pedal. A handsome, wealthy writer from Michigan arrived in an aircooled 911 he had rebuilt by hand, wearing a madras shirt with grease stains on the tails.

Everything went wrong before the race and the car only completed three laps in qualifying before overheating and quitting. The crew worked all night. The girl could not sleep. Her body hurt from lifting and carrying all the things required to get through a nine-hour endurance race. She was worried this would be the last time. That everybody would be let down and that they would go home. She thought that she could live her whole life without a trophy but she did not want to give up on her team.

When the race started they worked up to the lead. But they had led three races in the previous year, failing to finish every time, so the girl tempered her excitement. Sure enough, her car started to overheat. The left front tire rumbled in the corners. Under braking the back end would swerve in threatening fashion. Finally, they were knocked off course by a fellow who couldn’t control his own car or his own temper. I can tell you, dear reader, that things looked very dire.

It did not stay that way. The young pro driver was magic, slicing through the traffic and setting a lap time so low that the other teams complained that they must be cheating some how. The handsome writer was fast and composed. Her famous friend was steady and disciplined, avoiding the spinning cars and extending the lead. Even the bad man managed to put on a smile and hand in a solid stint.

It was time for her to drive. There was an hour left. Their lead was sufficient to guarantee her the win. She had her drivers suit ready and she knew the track and she believed in herself. But as she walked back to the garage to get ready, she decided the best way to thank her friends for believing in her was to put one of them back behind the wheel. So that is what she did. And when the checkered flag waved, her car was in front.

In club racing, the podium is really for the drivers only, but she brought everybody up to get her trophy — drivers and crew. In the crush and the crowd afterwards, the girl went back to the garage, opened the door and sat in her very own race-winning car. It had taken more than a year, there had been both expense and sorrow, but she had been prepared for that. And though everybody knows a car cannot fly, maybe if you closed your eyes for a moment you could imagine the tired little convertible taking her back up into the clear blue of the New Mexico sky. To fly free and happy, like on that long-ago day when she sat alone in the seat of her plane and saw the whole world below her for the very first time.

I was there, dear reader, and I saw it all happen, from beginning to end, but this is her story, not mine. And it is all true.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Brett Woods Brett Woods on May 28, 2017

    She looks nice

  • Baconator Baconator on Jun 07, 2017

    Nice to finally see a picture of Danger Girl, and also fun to know that Matt Farah is quiet when not in front of a camera or a microphone. Congrats to the whole team.

  • AZFelix Hilux technical, preferably with a swivel mount.
  • ToolGuy This is the kind of thing you get when you give people faster internet.
  • ToolGuy North America is already the greatest country on the planet, and I have learned to be careful about what I wish for in terms of making changes. I mean, if Greenland wants to buy JDM vehicles, isn't that for the Danes to decide?
  • ToolGuy Once again my home did not catch on fire and my fire extinguisher(s) stayed in the closet, unused. I guess I threw my money away on fire extinguishers.(And by fire extinguishers I mean nuclear missiles.)
  • Carson D The UAW has succeeded in organizing a US VW plant before. There's a reason they don't teach history in the schools any longer. People wouldn't make the same mistakes.
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