Crap. The onslaught hadn’t even started yet and already she had a chip on her shoulder. Tuggle didn’t suffer fools gladly. She understood why Tony Stewart had to be restrained from assaulting reporters who harassed him with stupid questions. She might be tempted to deck one herself before the initial media frenzy was over.
Everybody was going to think this team was a gimmick. A joke. A bunch of know-nothing female amateurs teamed with a pretty boy from Georgia. They weren’t supposed to win. They were the sideshow, and who would care, because, after all, the money in NASCAR doesn’t come from winning races, but from sponsor support and souvenir sales. Success in those areas was a given, thanks to sexy little Badger, so the team’s absence from Victory Lane would hardly matter.
It mattered to her, though. And she thought it might very well matter to Badger Jenkins, too. He might be a pretty boy, but he was first and foremost a competitor. She had watched him that last year he raced, on the team that fired him after a mediocre season. It had been an underfunded two-car team, and the driver of the team’s other car was the owner’s pet. The team’s big sponsor was an RV manufacturer, and the nice young kid from Chicago who drove the RV-sponsored car happened to be the son of the owner of the biggest dealership for that brand of recreational vehicles. Naturally, that kid was first in line for everything, and Badger was the also-ran, getting the second-rate cars, the second-string crew, and a smaller share of the racing budget. Naturally, he did not do as well in competition as his teammate, because money buys speed, but instead of admitting what the real problem was, the owners chose to blame Badger. It was easier to replace the driver than to find another ten million dollars to upgrade the operation.
Watching Badger’s struggles last season reminded Tuggle of an exercise pony in horse racing. An exercise pony is the horse used to train the promising young thoroughbred by running practice laps with him and always losing. Even if the practice pony has a good day and is actually going to beat the golden boy, his rider pulls him up short to allow the other horse to win. Constant winning builds up the confidence of the promising thoroughbred, but its effect on the other horse is not so good. Eventually, the unbroken chain of defeats crushes the spirit of the practice pony. Maybe he forgets how to win. Or he just stops trying.
Tuggle had thought Badger might be in some danger of becoming like that. In some of the later races last season, when he was well out of the chase and not even within hailing distance of twentieth place, he seemed to be coasting through races on autopilot. In racing parlance, he wouldn’t stand on it. It hadn’t been his fault, either. She had made careful note of the outcome of Badger’s team in his last year’s races, where they had finished and why. It was a litany of misfortune-thirty-six races, and in twenty-four of them he’d never had a chance.
Daytona 500-penalized due to not securing lug nuts
Las Vegas 1-team changed motor, forcing him to start at the back
Bristol-hole in radiator caused overheating
Richmond 1-was in top 15 until lug nut left off, lost 2 laps
Daytona 2-backup car, started in back; by lap 18 was in top 20 until rear tire went flat and went 58 laps down
New Hampshire-brake problems
Michigan-alternator failed
Kansas-brake problems after 50 laps, lost 12 laps
Tuggle thought that another season with no chance of winning would probably finish Badger’s career; no team would want him, and he might lose heart for competition anyhow. It was hard to go out there and sweat through the danger and the discomfort of a race when you knew it was an exercise in futility.
She figured it was up to her to see it didn’t happen that way. Owners never cared overmuch about the drivers they employed to race for them. Cup drivers were like shuttle flights to Charlotte, you could always catch the next one. There was nobody except her who knew enough and would care enough to save him.
The expendability of race car drivers-43 slots in Cup racing and 40,000 guys who’d kill for the chance to be there. She thought that might be why Cup champion Tony Stewart had adopted fifty ex-racing greyhounds. Sure he loved animals-he had a tiger, for heaven’s sake!-but Tuggle also thought that he might have looked at those gallant canine racers in their cages, euthanized when their usefulness was over, and in the anxious brown eyes of his canine counterparts he would see himself and his fellow competitors. And so “Smoke” had saved the greyhounds, fifty of them-one for every single Cup driver and seven extra for the part-time field fillers. Oh, yes. Professional courtesy.
Well, she would save Badger. If those designer-clad checkbooks tried to treat him like a disposable greyhound, then she would make it her business to see that he did well, so that he could stay around as long as he wanted to. She hoped his future after racing would be one of peaceful retirement on his beloved lake or else perhaps a career in Hollywood or broadcasting, but whatever happened, she intended to look out for him. She didn’t hold with putting down champions just because they’d outlived their usefulness.
Of course, she thought, pursuing the metaphor, racehorses weren’t put down upon retirement. They were…put out to stud.
Grace Tuggle started to laugh. Poor Badger! From what she had seen of the pit lizards who stalked Cup drivers, she’d bet that Badger would rather live in a cage at Tony Stewart’s place.
Vagenya, indeed. They ought to be working on a cure for testosterone poisoning.
CHAPTER IV
In her more fanciful moments, Rosalind Manning sometimes pictured herself being interviewed by an earnest television journalist, who was leaning forward breathlessly and asking her, “But why, of all things, did you join a NASCAR team?” And Rosalind, perched on the black vinyl sofa under hot studio lights, would stare into camera number two and say, “Because I hate my mother.”
Daydreams aside, Rosalind knew that such an interview would probably never take place, except possibly on the SPEED Channel where no one her mother knew would ever see it, and even then Rosalind would not be so forthright about her motives. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter, with several centuries of patrician reticence bred in the bone. No matter how much she might resent her relatives, in many ways she was just like them. The family never discussed its personal conflicts with outsiders, much less on-air to the immediate world, but the fact that she would not broadcast her resentment did not make the statement any less true. She did hate her mother, and for precisely that reason she planned to deal the woman the ultimate insult: She would join the world of stock car racing.
Not that her mother had anything against sports. Rosalind had been taught to ride a Shetland pony before she could walk, and she had the requisite number of tarnished silver cups stashed in a closet somewhere, attesting to a youth spent competing in local horse shows. The family had several friends who were followers of Formula One racing, which was considered quite respectable, even in the best circles, probably because there was a large European contingent to the sport, or because the cars bore no resemblance to anything one might actually drive. Upper-class pursuits had to be archaic or frivolous to be acceptable; practicality was for the proletariat.