Chapter 12

My driver training schedule sometimes bounced around from week to week, and as luck would have it, the next week my last session of the day ended at three PM, with no evening students. It couldn't have picked a better week to happen.

It had been no secret that I'd helped Don Boies work on his car. I honestly didn't do that much to it, although I'll admit to showing him how to do some things and telling him how to do others – just like a good auto shop teacher, which I really was. However, I had tools available in my barn that he didn't have at home, and that helped out a lot. What helped out even more was that he was ready and eager to learn some of the really basic things I had to show him.

The other thing that had helped him out was that I had taken the time to go down to the track and drive a few laps with him. For some people driving a race car on dirt isn't the easiest thing in the world, and some of the things you have to do are things that you don't realize since they're not obvious. Controlling a car in a power slide heads that list – there just isn't much on the street that calls for that kind of knowledge. What little I had managed to teach Don in a few laps on Friday night had made the difference between an exciting win and a finish in maybe eighth or tenth place.

While I hadn't told Smoky about it, over the course of the fun in the pits after the end of the Junior Stock feature, I had every last Bradford kid and some other kids come to me and ask if I could show them a few things like I'd done for Don. While I liked Don and he'd been the first, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't help the others out a little – Don and I had agreed to that even before I'd taken him down to the track on Friday.

To be honest, this was part of my plan. I figured that with luck and a little cooperation from Smoky, I could keep the most blatant cheating under control. The other half of my plan was to bring the competence of the rest of the field up a notch or two, so if the cheaters were forced into cars that were more or less legal, there might be talent enough in the rest of the field to keep things under control. I guess that was the teacher in me being turned loose. It was pretty much down my alley, although not exactly the kind of thing I'd done before.

The fun started on Sunday afternoon, when I had no less than nine kids show up at the house, bringing their race cars. I'll tell you what, it looked like a mini-pit out there that afternoon. Once again, I wasn't doing much work on the cars myself except where I had to show a kid how to do something, but I had the knowledge and most of the tools available to make the most of it. We couldn't get everything done in one afternoon, of course, but I left each of the kids with some homework to do on their cars.

The rest of the week alternated between the ongoing backyard speed shop and the track. I'd already told Smoky I was going to be taking some of the kids out there to give them a few pointers, and he hadn't had any problems with it. "You're right, some of those kids need to learn how to do this shit," he agreed. "I wouldn't mind doing it myself, but what with the store and everything else I just don't have the time."

Well, I sure had the time, and I had something more – a second teacher. Arlene was right in the middle of running the kids around the track in the late afternoons with me, and having two cars on the track at the same time made it possible to cover a lot of things that it's hard to do with just one. Needless to say, some of the kids were a little leery of a woman teaching them how to drive a race car, but the kids who listened to her got a lot that was useful out of it.

Of course I was curious at what Glenn and Bert were going to try and pull this week, or whether they'd even show up at all. There was a lot of talk about it among the kids, but none of them seemed to know anything more than I did.

What with everything, the week went by quickly, and I really was looking forward to Saturday night, if for no more reason than to see if Glenn and Bert were going to show up at all. I mean, I didn't think they'd be any less assholes if they did, but I hoped that setting them down when they deserved it sent the message to a lot of people that things had changed.

We had an even better turnout of Junior Stocks the next Saturday. Smoky even said that it was the best that it had been all season, so I guess the word was getting out that the bullshit days were over with.

It was a hot sunny day again, and again I set up the tarp as a canopy to keep the sun off of the tech area. This time I pretty much had to do the tech work by myself, but that wasn't totally bad since I made a point of not checking everything the same way, just to keep people on their toes. A little to my surprise, Bert and Glenn showed up a little early and pulled their car into the tech line without any comment. If nothing else, that made me just a little suspicious, since I didn't know what their game must be. Well, I'd find out soon enough.

The cars came through steadily, and I didn't have as much time as I wanted for each one. Pretty soon Glenn came up to look over my shoulder to see what I was doing – I guess to see if I was being as hard on everyone else as he suspected I was going to be on him. "Glenn," I said. "If you want to speed things up, you can go back and yank the head off that thing while you're waiting."

"Yank the head?" he yelled. "What the hell do you mean yank the head?"

"I mean, take a socket wrench, take out the head bolts and loosen the gasket," I told him. "Every car that got downchecked for engine last week is having the head off so I can make sure they're legal or at least close to it. My father-in-law couldn't come and bring the P&G meter with him this week, so we have to do it the hard way."

"We'll see about this," he muttered and stomped off. I figured he was going to be heading for Smoky's office again, which would at least keep him out of my hair for a while. I glanced up as I turned back to the car I was working on, and saw him heading up the line to Bert's car, rather than over to the office, so I figured that the two of them would be headed for Manchester.

But, no. Half an hour later Bert's car was pushed under the canopy, with the hood off and the head off the engine. Of course, the first thing I did was take the micrometer to a cylinder; not terribly surprising, it was within limits for the normal bore and stroke of the Chevy Stovebolt six of that era.

"I damn well told you last week that it was stock," Bert snorted.

"Don't bullshit me," I shot right back at him. "That's not the same mill you had last week and we both know it. This started life as a 235, not the 261 block you had last week. The ports are different, it's as plain as the nose on your face. But all right. Those're the right carbs and header. You could have ported it out a little bit, maybe put a truck camshaft in it or something hotter, but I'm not going to call you on it this week. Also, from the serial number on the engine I think it's a '53, but there's no real difference between the years, and I'm not going to call you on it just on general principles. But, if that's not a stock cam in there, you might want to think about putting one in before you show up next week."

By now, I'd figured out what the two were up to. Yeah, there might be a hot cam or something in the car, but I doubted it. My guess was that they'd gone to some junkyard and hauled back an engine out of a wreck, and used it to replace the cheater engine that had been in the car last week. Once they'd proved to have a perfectly legal car they wouldn't have people pointing fingers at them quite as badly, and by being a little careful they could soup the engine back up again.

"That's a stock cam in there," he protested.

"Oh, no doubt it is," I told him, and then let him know that I was seeing right through him by saying. "But I might decide to check cams next week anyway." While I was at it, I gave the rest of the car a once-over.

"I don't really see anything I can gripe about," I said finally. "So you can put the head back on. You pass. Just as a word to the wise, while the roll bar meets rules, if you value your kid you might want to think about beefing it up. That's a little flimsy to my taste, and I've already talked to Smoky about beefing up the roll bar rules for next season."

"Yeah," he said, a little subdued. "I thought it was a little light myself, but that's all the rules call for."

"That's my point," I told him. "I'm giving you a head start on a rule change for next year. This isn't anything that I haven't told a lot of people already."

To be honest, I was a little surprised that I'd managed to get past Glenn in this round as easily as I did, not that I thought that the leopard had changed its spots any. I'd had a rougher time with some of the other cheater crowd, and I still downchecked four cars for oversized engines after everyone should have gotten the message the week before. Eventually I got everyone through tech inspection, swearing to myself that I was going to find an extra set of hands somewhere to help me out with it. I thought maybe I might be able to get either Tom or Willy over from Schererville next weekend, just on general principles. I wanted to have Tom over at least once more with the P&G meter, but one of the beauties with that deal was that no one would know when he was coming. Give it two or three weeks, I thought, and there's going to be some oversized engines showing up in these cars again.

I had a little while before the races actually started, so I took the opportunity to go over to the concession stand and get a chili dog, and yak with some people I knew. The crowd seemed to be a little better than it had been the week before, so I figured that word must have gotten out, too. It made me wonder just how much some of those people who hadn't run the week before realized that things had changed a little.

I finished the chili dog and Coke, then walked back over to the pit gate to help with the lineup of the race. Smoky had given me the list of the qualifying times, and I was not terribly surprised to find that Bert Mansfield was going to be starting right at the absolute back of the first heat. I figured that his dad had told him to take it easy and stay out of trouble, and for once to act like he was a good little boy so he'd have something to fight with when the post-race politics got started. I doubt he had thought that all the way through, because running at the back of the field would just show to everyone who knew anything about what was going on just how big a cheater he'd been. I doubted anyone else in the field would forget that, or how much of an asshole the Mansfield kid had been up until that point in the season.