Til You See God
an excerpt

I step outside into a gorgeous Virginia morning. The RV area set aside for the drivers is rather spacious, and there’s even a play area for the kids. It’s very much like a kart meet, only the machinery costs about a thousand times as much. But that’s not important here, nor is the fact that our own RV is somewhat smaller and less well appointed than most of the others. It is, like most of what we own, secondhand, or maybe third, I don’t know. It’s not fancy, but it’s functional. We bought it at an auction of a team that was “downsizing”, so to speak, going from three cars to two, and as it did, it shed quite a bit of crew and a driver. We probably still paid more than we might’ve, for it, but at the same time we fostered some goodwill between our little team and the bigger one we were buying into, more or less. We also picked up a spare car, Bess, which became the primary when I failed to catch the back end of the new car when it twitched at speed at Iowa during qualifying earlier this year.

That one hurt. The crashed car was good, maybe the best I’d ever had. Branch McCall, our engine builder, had put a special effort into that motor, knowing I figured I’d do well at the wide, multi-grooved little oval. Hell, a top ten finish would’ve been nice. It hadn’t exactly been a banner season for Sexton Motorsports up till then: two DNFs (did not finish), one from a brush with the wall at Homestead that bent a rear control arm to the point where it was dangerous to try to continue, and we didn’t have the spare available to fix on the spot. Then we blew a motor at St. Pete, but then I couldn’t blame anybody but myself for that, buzzing it when I let off the pit lane rev limiter too soon coming back out onto the racetrack after a darned fine pit stop for our mostly volunteer crew. We didn’t have the funds to go to Motegi, Japan, but the break allowed us to get things back together in time for Kansas. We even qualified pretty well. That was a pleasant change. Twelfth wasn’t exactly what we thought we were capable of, but the set of tires we had allowed for practice and qualifying was pretty far past its use-by date. We’d have to start on that set of tires, of course, but I was betting we’d get a caution fairly early on and we could put a new set on while everybody else just gassed up. We’d lose a lot of track position, but we’d still be with the draft, and I’d gotten pretty good at pack racing.

But the hoped-for caution never came. Worse, I’d guessed wrong on the setup, overruling Colie at the last minute on rear wing angle, going for something more conservative than fast. Oh, I had plenty of balance and grip in the car all right, but I was also embarrassingly slow in a straight line, so much so that after 22 increasingly slow laps, the tires giving up more and more, I was finally advised by race control to pit and somehow find another ten miles an hour. I didn’t even bother; I just headed back to the garage area. The only thing we could do once the race started that would make any difference would be to put on fresh tires and maybe take out some front wing, which would’ve only have made things worse. In retrospect I suppose we could’ve either changed or removed the wicker—that’s a small flap of metal on the upper trailing edge of the rear wing, easily pulled or swapped in the course of a normal pit stop—but we were already a lap down by then and I guess I was just too bullheaded (stupid) to think of it, and too angry for humiliating myself and my crew.

A brief aside: I have, right or wrong, come under fire from some quarters for being in the IndyCar series at all. Much is made on certain Internet forums about how slow I have been, how much better the series would be without me, how a middle-aged rich guy (apparently they’re not paying any attention to my bank balances) wasn’t contributing anything to the series except another car to make the grid look better. Supposedly I was being financed by “Tonybucks”, a derogatory term referring to series founder Tony George handing out checks to low-budget teams to help keep his fields full. If he ever did such a thing, he never did for me.

All that hurts, of course. In the end I’m just another guy chasing a dream. I shouldn’t let this sort of crapola bother me, but it does. Some much so that when we went to Indy, I was so determined to make a good showing that I splurged on a new engine and bought into some wind tunnel time. Well actually, I shared the latter with another low budget team trying to make it into the big show. And it paid off. Once we got on the track the speed came effortlessly; all that first week I was running more than fast enough. We put the car in the garage Wednesday afternoon with no intention of practicing Thursday at all. We brought it back out Fast Friday, the day before Pole Qualifying, and it was even faster. We smiled a lot. We knew that this year it wasn’t going to be a last minute struggle to get into the race that would make our season financially. We’d be in, not on the first weekend, but on the first day, start in the top 11, then we could concentrate on a good finish.

Not so fast. Pole morning we rolled out the car, I ran a few laps and brought it in. I knew something was wrong; the motor was down on power. Branch pulled off the valve covers and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong, or at least nothing he could do anything about there on pit road. We could take it back to the garage and swap motors, but we hadn’t run that motor at all and we weren’t even certain it would start. We gambled. We had speed, but not enough; we were thirteenth. Not fast enough for Pole Day.

Still, we’d run well. We figured second alternate on Day One might be good enough to get us in on day two. And it might’ve been, but for the lifter that broke while I was tooling down the backstretch at 230. My V8 became a V7 in short order, and by the time I got it shut down it was too late…the bits and pieces had ruined the block. Done for the day.

Day three, a week later, wasn’t much better. We’d spent much of the week arguing amongst ourselves about whether to buy a new engine, to pull the heads off the broken motor and try them on the spare, or to just plug in the spare as it was and take our chances. I particularly didn’t want to have to mortgage my only remaining house, even to make the 500. I’d already been in it twice, after all.

But I did the deed anyway. We bought the motor, installed it, and that morning the speed was back. Colie was convinced he had a setup on the car that would make the show easily. Branch felt good about the new powerplant. I felt good about my driving.

Then it rained, as it often does in Indiana in May. It rained a lot. Good for the farmers, bad for the racers. Qualifications were eventually scrubbed. Worse, so was the track. All the rubber that had built up over the past few weeks was all gone.

That was enough to do us in. The motor was just a little slower than our killer whiner, the setup just a little off on the “green” track, my driving just a little less precise and a little more cautious. We ran 217 and change. We were in, for a while. I guess I knew we weren’t going to make it, but when I was still sitting on the bubble at 5:54 PM, even I was surprised. But the shadows were over the track now, the coolest and fastest time of the day. And there was a car on the track. We were in line, ready to try again should it become necessary. And on the track? The car with which we’d spent part of the first week sharing the wind tunnel.

You’ve guessed it already, of course. They made it, we didn’t.

A half million dollars is a lot of money. That was how much of a mortgage I’d taken out on our house, which isn’t anywhere near what it’s worth, but it was as much as I dared. It was also the first bank loan I’d ever had to take out in my life. I’d counted on at least last place money from the 500 to pay most of that loan. Instead, I was locked in at a fixed rate which I had been assured was a very good rate for my part of the country. Whatever.

Milwaukee next. Okay, so I was a half million in the hole to the bank, but I did have two engines now, and I took some of what was left over and made sure Branch had everything he needed to ensure both of those mills were ready to go on the kind of flat bullring track I grew up running. We shocked a lot of people by qualifying a fairly stout eleventh—my best ever starting position in a series event—and we ran close to the front for most of the day. Hell, given some luck and a good stop at the end, we had a top ten at least. Then in my haste to get out of the pits during the last pit stop, under green, I goosed it too much too soon and twisted a half-shaft. The car doesn’t drive real well with power going to only one wheel, so that was it. We got a nice write up in the trades, and some of the Internet folks even had some good things to say about us for a change. Texas started even better; we had a real race there, easily running with the pack and even dicing it up a bit with the guys who would run the whole race in the top five. It was fun seeing the surprise in the eyes of the likes of Wheldon and Helio as they saw the blue and green of Bess up there amongst them, and they probably gave us a little of extra room as a result. But fate stepped in again and we got caught up in somebody else’s wreck. The damage to the car was minor, but a tire off Anthony Foyt’s car almost landed in my lap, and I ended up spinning down into infield of the tri-oval, not quite conscious. I had a headache and a stiff neck and got sat down for the rest of the day, which was probably the right thing to do, but it didn’t make the result any less painful. At least there would be a couple of weeks to rest before the next race.

But then things really became brutal. Rusty Wallace’s new Iowa track was next, and the weather was unbelievably cold (54 degrees in Iowa in June?) Most everybody was having trouble getting the power down to the track. But Colie had made a shrewd change just prior to the last practice, and there was a near riot when our number came up fifth best in final practice. And I knew there was at least another couple of tenths left in the machine, and maybe a few hundredths in my right foot.

Then, after a warmup lap that would’ve put us third on the grid, I overcooked it in one and wiped out the rear end of the car, pretty much ripping the entire assembly from the front of the engine backward, off of the tub, taking the attachment points with it and for all intents and purposes destroying the car.

Oh. And I aggravated my neck injury from Texas two weeks’ previous, and tacked on a strained back for good measure. I spent most of this past week flat on my back, chewing Ibuprofen and the occasional Vicodin. I didn’t get into the shop at all. Not good for morale, especially with the new guy on hand, just hired by Colie on my recommendation. A late model driver from Georgia used to working on his own machinery and who needs a break to keep his own efforts going. We can’t afford to pay him much, but it’ll get him through the rest of his season once ours ends.

So, on to Richmond then, Becca driving the RV pretty much the entire distance with me lying prone in the back, wincing with every bump the first few hours before finally falling asleep. From there she did darned well considering she’d never driven anything much larger than a Cavalier before, and even managed to pull into our assigned parking spot with aplomb, perfectly set up for the hookups. I was very proud of her and told her so as I dragged myself to my feet just long enough to hug her, then lay back down and fall asleep again. And dream that dream of the Brickyard again.