Chapter 14

It didn't take a house to fall on me to see what was going to happen next; the Sharp kid and his Hornet weren't all that far ahead of Bert and his Chevy. We had an old Army field phone arrangement with a line going from the pit gate to the scoring booth and the flag tower, and I got right on it. "Keep the black flag handy," I told Arlene. "I think you're going to need it. I think Mansfield in the 18 car doesn't want to race, he just wants a piece of Sharp in the 88."

"Got you, Mel," she replied. "I could see that coming all through the B-Main."

"Anybody would have to be blind not to see it," I snorted. "I'm going to go have a word with those two, not that it'll do any good."

I hung up the phone and headed down through the lineup, which was just getting set to head out onto the track. "You know what Bert has in mind," I told Sharp. "Keep it clean and don't start anything."

"I won't start anything," Phil told me. "I'll be ready for him."

That didn't exactly reassure me. I could tell from the tone of Phil's voice that he was half hoping that Bert would start something, and he was indeed going to be ready for it. I headed on over to Bert's car. He was still the arrogant little punk he always was, and the way he came through the B-Main didn't help it any. "Don't be starting anything out there," I told him. "Or your ass is out of here."

He just looked at me with a look on his face that said, "Who does this joker think he is?" It would have been nice if he'd thought about it a little bit, because driver's ed started in three weeks. Even though he'd been driving a race car for a couple years, he still needed to go through it if he planned on getting a license before he turned eighteen, but he wasn't the kind of kid who thought ahead. He wanted instant gratification, and he wanted it now. I probably should have set his ass down right on the spot, but I didn't. There wasn't much I could do but walk up to the head of the line and wave the cars out onto the track, hoping that too many of them wouldn't get bent up.

Bert may have had the fastest car in the field the year before, but he didn't this time, not by a long shot. He tried jumping the start big time from the last place in the field – he had his foot in it well before anyone else, but Arlene waved off the start because of it, made everybody line up two by two again, and started the race over. He pulled pretty much the same stunt on the restart, but timed it a little better. Since Bert was the last car in the field, he hung way back and put the hammer down before anyone else. He was still in last place as the flag dropped, but he had probably thirty miles an hour on the rest of the field, and that got him pretty close to Sharp. There were a couple other cars around that kept it from being one on one for a while, but eventually he got his shot at Phil, who'd seen what was coming.

I'll give Phil credit – he gave Bert enough room to hang himself. Rather than getting into a shoving match for the inside line, Phil moved up the track as if to let Bert pass, but Bert moved right up the track with him with the obvious intent of trying to spin him. But Phil saw it coming, tapped his brake, and all of a sudden Bert was three quarters of the way past him, still trying to shove him into the fence. Bert cut over on him, but wound up getting a quarter panel full of Hudson, and that knocked him sideways into a T-bone.

Normally, while a T-bone looks bad, it's often not as bad as it looks since both cars are going pretty much the same speed. I have said before that they don't build cars like they used to, and they really don't build them the way they used to build Hudsons. That car was built to take a hit, and Sharp knew it. You would have expected him to step on the brake instead of the gas, but the gas is what he stomped and he kept his foot on it until Mansfield's car went right through the fence, a little the worse for wear after having removed a couple fence posts. Sharp's Hudson, however, only had some mild fender damage thanks to using Mansfield's Chevy as a bulldozer blade.

There wasn't any great need to Arlene to black flag Mansfield because that car wasn't going to be running again that night anyway. She probably should have black flagged Sharp, but it was a little hard to tell what was happening. In any case, Mansfield had to be towed back to the pits, while Sharp got his position back. Sharp didn't finish the race anywhere near the top – maybe seventh or eighth, but it was a good showing for a first night out for a driver with only a couple of starts the previous year in a new race car. Don Boies wound up winning it, I do remember that; he had another Hudson Hornet, and this was its first night out on the track, too.

If that was the way the season was going to start, it looked to be an interesting one.

It took a while for the dust to settle that night. Everything ran lots later than planned, mostly because of the huge car count and all the extra races, but Smoky was tickled pink, and I don't blame him one bit. "Was that a race night or what?" he exulted as soon as we got together after the last car had left the track. "We ain't had one like that here in years."

"Yeah, that was pretty good," I agreed. "I just wish the Mansfield kid had come to race, rather than to settle some schoolyard score."

"Shit, that's a Mansfield, what do you expect?" Smoky snorted. "You want to make a bet whether there'll be a fist fight over at the school come Monday?"

"Wouldn't surprise me any," I told him. "But if it does it'll be over at the main building, not the Auto Shop. So, ignoring that, what did you think?"

Smoky shook his head. "Shit, I'm too dazzled to think, but you know, it's the same old thing in a way. You've got a few fast cars at the front of the field and a bunch of people that just can't keep up."

"You know, I was thinking the same thing. When you get right down to it, the kids with the Hudsons are mostly legal cheaters. That really is the hot set-up."

"Yeah, that's true," he agreed. "Are you thinking it might be time to pull your little trick, whatever it is?"

"Soon," I said. "The reason we got a big field tonight was that we had a lot of kids who didn't know who had what. There are going to be a bunch of kids who ran in the B-Main and now going to be looking for a little extra oomph. We might let it go another week, maybe two, but the time is coming."

As it was we let it go another week, mostly because Smoky had trouble finding a Kaiser-Frazer carb gasket for me to use as a model for the restrictor plate, and he didn't have it in time. And, as predicted, Mansfield and Sharp had a fist fight over at the main building on Monday. It really wasn't much of a fight, because while Sharp might not have been the most popular kid in school, the racers pretty well knew what was coming and stayed close. It was mostly a few wild swings that didn't land anywhere fragile before Alex Groves, the principal, showed up to break things up. Both of them got to spend three days at home, and I suspect they were working on their cars.

Even though I ultimately spent thirty years teaching, I never managed to understand why people thought it was a punishment to kick a kid out of school for a few days. Hell, for most kids who got into trouble like that, it's not a punishment but a treat. Hell, it's fifty years later, and they still get kicked out, and I still don't know why. Administrators are in the schools. Don't they learn anything?

In any case, two weeks after the season opener I sprung the restrictor plates on the Junior Stock class. The only person who had known it was coming was Arlene. It sure shook things up, just like I'd expected it to. The kids with the big Nashes and Hornets all of a sudden were down to having the same kind of power as the rest of the crew, so driving skills became more important. Of course, I heard a lot of complaining about it, and Smoky got a lot of it, too.

Needless to say, Glenn Mansfield was one of the loudest complainers. I mean, since it obviously was my idea he had to complain first and think later, if at all. "What is this shit? We ain't never had to do nothing like this before!"

"Glenn," I said, trying to reason with him a little. "You've been complaining for the last two weeks about how those Hudsons and Nashes are cheaters because they've got bigger engines. This brings them back to you. Yeah, you might lose a little power, but they're going to lose a lot."

"I still think the damn things should be outlawed," he snorted. "Shit, you won't let us build up an engine that will handle them. That's a crock of shit if there ever was one."

"It would have been nice," I conceded. "But we're just following the rules, that's all. They've got the same rule sheet you do. Since we've started the season with the Nashes and Hornets that we've ruled legal, we can't just outlaw them in the middle. What we can do is control them a little, but those controls have to apply to everybody."

"Well, God damn," he snorted. "We'll just have to see about this shit! This is the most half assed thing I've ever seen." He stomped off, presumably to see Smoky.

Tech that night was easy and fun. Engine tech consisted of counting the number of spark plugs and keeping track of the restrictor plate I assigned each kid to use. It gave me a little more time to concentrate on safety equipment and some other things that had been given a lick and a promise in weeks past.

By this time in the season the pecking order had pretty well been sorted out, who was hot, who was not, who was going to be a front runner and who was going to be a back marker. The addition of the restrictor plates sure sorted that stuff out in a hurry! Remember that kid in a Kaiser-Frazer? It was an early attempt at an economy car and it was lighter than most. It wasn't a big success in the postwar market it had been built for, so there weren't many of them built, but given the shakeup in equalization that the restrictor plates bought, I could just about predict a run on the local junkyards. It turned out that the kid ran at the front of the pack all night long after having been a back marker the week before, and ran something third or fourth in the A-Main. In case you're wondering, Bert Mansfield's expensive engine was one of those that suffered from the restrictor plates, and as I recall he ran about mid-pack in the B-Main.