Free Once Around the Track by Sharyn McCrumb

Truck all run on twelve-inch wide slicks that are normally pretty sticky. It seems to me that if you reduced the tire size to eight or ten inches, then the cars could not negotiate the turns at two hundred miles per hour. That would make driver skill a greater factor in super speedway racing again.”
    “Yeah, but it would be easy to overdrive the tires,” said Rosalind. “Might even increase wrecks.”
    Jay Bird shook his head. “If they go to smaller tires, the teams would have to put more downforce in the cars. Plus, drivers would have to brake going into the turns. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, I’m just saying it would tee-totally change the way they race those super speedways, and I’m not sure that’s what anybody wants. Seems to me, if you do all that, you’re just duplicating the truck series—big heavy clunkers with no restrictor plates—’cause they can’t go fast enough in the first place to need ’em. Neutering the cars.”
    Julie nodded. “Well, there are no easy answers. So what would you do, Jay Bird?”
    The old man didn’t bat an eye. “Considering the current crop of Cup drivers? I believe I would sedate every driver whose last name starts with B . That ought’a do it.”
    Julie shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.” She grinned at Rosalind. “So what do you think? Do you want to join this wacko team?”
    “Yeah, I do,” said Rosalind.
    Jay Bird peered at her over the top of his bifocals. “Why? Start-up team full of amateurs. You’re not one of those Badger groupies, are you?”
    “No, sir. He’s a decent driver, and I respect him for that, but personally? No. Handsome jocks are not my thing. I want to join this team because I want the experience, and to be honest with you, NASCAR is still largely an old boys’ club, so it’s hard for a newcomer to break in. And if the newcomer is a woman, then breaking in is next to impossible. I thought this team was my best shot. I didn’t care who your driver was. I just figured this is the one place that my gender would be an asset rather than a liability.”
    “Fair enough,” said Julie.
    “But it’s really an honor to be able to work with Jay Bird Thomas, too.”
    The old man waggled his eyebrows. “So you’ll work for free then, will you?”
    “No. But it’s not your money anyway, so I doubt if you care,” said Rosalind.
    “You’re right, he doesn’t,” said Julie. “He just wants us to pull at least one victory out of the hat to show that old boys’ club what we can do. Now how do you suggest we do that?”
    Rosalind shrugged. “Same way the old boys do it. Cheat.”

CHAPTER V

Finding Your Marks

    W ell, it would probably be better than working for the food page of The Charlotte Observer. Probably. Too bad the pay wasn’t better, but at least the hours were.
    Melanie Sark knew that there were lots of people in the world—70 million, in fact, if you believed Sports Illustrated —who would clutch their hearts and faint with envy at the thought of getting a job as a publicist to a NASCAR team. To get paid to attend races. To get up close and personal with an actual Cup driver—as part of your job. Oh, sure, a dream come true. But not to her it wasn’t, because she wasn’t a NASCAR fan, and neither were any of her colleagues in journalism, as far as she knew. The glamour of this line of work would be lost on them, which meant that gloating would not be among the perks of her new job.
    Her fellow journalists would ask her the same questions they’d pose if she had just taken over the editorship of Shoppers Weekly : How much does it pay? (Not a lot); What are the hours? (Erratic, as far as she could tell, but less arduous than that of a newspaper reporter); What are the perks? (Well, attending NASCAR races, if that happened to appeal to you, but she couldn’t suddenly start pretending that it did.)
    Sark had already thought out her response to the polite cynicism of her acquaintances: plausible enthusiasm . No, she