| 777 | Date: Thursday, 28 Oct 2010, 20.31 | Message # 1 |
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User ID: 777
Joined: 18 Oct 2010
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| One of the most humbling things about driving fast cars is realizing there are teenagers out there -- and even pre-teens -- who can kick your butt around a racetrack, just as talented youngsters could do in basketball, tennis or any other sport.
I met my latest batch of young hotshots at Pocono Speedway, where I lapped a NASCAR-style stock car for the first time. While the Stock Car Racing Experience school is a regular feature at Pocono’s tricky, 2.5-mile tri-oval, this day also featured young cast members of “Changing Lanes.” This eight-part documentary reality series, which debuts Sept. 1 on BET, follows a group of racing hopefuls as they compete for a coveted slot on the Revolution Racing team, which develops female and minority NASCAR drivers through its Drive for Diversity program.
From the series, narrated by the rapper and actor Ludacris, I met and drove speedway laps with cast members Jessica Brunelli, 17; Michael Cherry, 20; Katie Hagar, 24; and Ryan Gifford, 20. Between them, this foursome has raced everything from karts and dirt-track midgets to Formula BMWs and stock cars. And with contagious passion for the sport, they’ve been working their way up the daunting ladder that leads from obscure -- yet brutally competitive -- tracks in the boonies to the promised land of NASCAR’s big-name series.
Hagar, a petite blond sparkplug who’s originally from Maine, moved to Sacramento, Calif., and now to Mooresville, N.C. -- the heart of stock-car country -- to follow her dream. She started in karts at age 11, and remembers having to attend a gym to build enough upper-body strength to muscle cars around the track. At 17, Hagar became the first woman to win a race at Canaan Fair Speedway in New Hampshire, driving an Alison Legacy, a three-quarter-scale version of a NASCAR Sprint Car, one of five wins she logged that year. “Racing pretty much saved my life,” Hagar says. “It gave me a focus and direction I never had before.”
Brunelli remembers being bored to tears when she first attended a NASCAR race with her father, around age 3. But she soon fell in love with speed, and her dad bought her first go-kart at age 10. She’s been gunning it ever since, finishing third in the overall standings in 2009’s NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Modified division. As with most junior racers, who start running karts as young as 7 or 8, Brunelli had logged years of hard-core racing experience before taking driver’s ed to earn the right to putter around her own neighborhood. When that time came last year, Brunelli’s father highly recommended that she not tell her driving instructor that she was a stock-car racer -- or, as I might have done as an arrogant teenager, ask the instructor if he’d like some real driving lessons.
Brunelli managed to keep her talents hidden and, of course, easily passed her test.
“But he told me I took my corners too fast,” she said, smiling. With license in hand, Brunelli has begun a special, long-awaited project: building her first street car, a '69 Camaro that she picked out of a junkyard at age 7 with her father, a former Chevy dealer in Northern California. She hasn’t chosen the final color, but it’s going to have Corvette Z06 wheels and a Z28 engine under the hood -- and definitely racing seat belts, even for street driving: “I just love the way they look, and I’m comfortable wearing them,” she says.
Once I strapped into the driver's seat at Pocono, after that awkward climb through a stock car’s window, I touched about 160 mph down the Long Pond straight, the 358-cubic-inch Chevy Racing V8 engine bellowing at 7800 rpm. I would have loved to have gone faster: That pace was a walk in the park for a car specifically built and tuned to run at Pocono, as cast member Cherry noted. “I was taking it flat out through Turn 1,” Cherry half-whispered, clearly wishing for even more horsepower on tap. Cherry, a dirt-bike fanatic who started racing BMX motocross at age 11, has been racing cars for six years. He switched from dirt tracks to asphalt in 2008, credits his dad for everything he’s accomplished, and cites as a hero Wendell Scott, the first, and still only, African-American to win a NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) race, way back in 1963.
With an instructor in a lead car keeping us on the proper racing line, our speeds were still plenty to give us amateurs a thrilling taste of how a stock car sounds and feels from behind the wheel. Best of all, if you’re 18 years or older, with a valid driver’s license, you can have the same NASCAR experience at Pocono
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