In a few minutes she and Will were in the back seat of Ray’s crew cab pickup, heading for the restaurant; Ginger said she’d meet them at the track a little later. It was only a few minutes’ drive, and the parking lot was not anywhere near as full this early on a Sunday morning as it had been the night before. They settled down at a table, and the waitress brought menus.

“Mr. Austin,” Telzey said as soon as there was a moment’s peace after the waitress had taken their orders, “I don’t know what you said to my grandparents, but whatever it was, it put them over the top about me getting a car.”

“Not a great deal,” Ray told her. “I told them that I thought you showed signs of doing well with it. Telzey, you show a great deal of responsibility for someone your age, and I think you can handle it. I’ll just say that this is going to be a learning experience for you. Don’t expect to go out and always get laps on the field. You’re going to have beginners like yourself in the Pony Stocks, but you’re also going to have some people with lots of experience that just don’t want to have to spend the time and money that they’d have to on a faster car. That means that you’re going to have plenty to learn, but you’re going to have plenty of people to challenge you and teach you.”

“I can’t really ask for much more than that,” she said. “Uh, do you know much about this car?”

“Not really,” he told her. “I know it was a fairly good car a couple years ago, and we’ll check it over, at least if it proves to still be available.”

“Thank you,” she smiled. “I figure you’ll be fair by me.”

“I want to be,” he said. “And that’s something we have to talk about, being fair with you. You’ve done a lot of work out at the track already, and I guess you’re planning on doing more.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “It gives me something to do, as opposed to nothing to do, and gives me the chance to be with Will.”

“I appreciate that,” he smiled. “So I talked it over with your grandparents after you went to bed last night. What we worked out is that I’m going to buy the car and loan it to you out of the goodness of my heart. And, of course, you’re going to help me out at the track out of your own good will. To keep everything on the up and up, your grandfather is going to handle the entry fees, pit passes and like that. You’ll probably win a little cash, and get some tow fees, and you can work it out with him what you’re going to do with it, whether you pay him back or what.”

“You mean it’s not really going to be my car, then?” she said, a little deflated.

“Well, yes and no,” Ray smiled. “It’ll be your car as long as you’re here to drive it. This actually works in your favor, since your folks could be coming back with little or no notice, and that means that you won’t be stuck in North Carolina with a car to sell sitting here.”

“Uh, yeah,” she nodded. “I never thought about that.” She was silent for a moment, thinking about that. While she wanted to be home with her folks, that would probably also work out that she’d be done racing, too, at least for the time being. It also meant that she’d be leaving Will behind when that happened. While there was no way of telling, the war was going real well from what she’d been seeing on TV, and it was reasonable to think that they might be coming home in the next few months. After all, she’d told Kayla that there was a good chance she wouldn’t be going to school in Bradford next fall. “I guess we’ll just have to do the best we can while it lasts,” she said softly, “and then see what happens then. This may be the only chance I get to go racing, so I’d better do it while I can.”

“Maybe, and maybe not,” Ray grinned. “It’s clear to me that the bug has bitten you hard. Telzey, this isn’t the only place where they race Pony Stocks. In fact, they’re pretty common. Oh, other places they’re sometimes called other things like Hornets or Mini-Stocks, and every place is a little different. I can’t believe that they don’t race them in a place like North Carolina.”

“Yeah,” she nodded sadly, “but I wouldn’t have people like you and your dad and Will around to teach me how to do it.”

“Then I guess that means we’re going to have to teach you what we can while you’re here,” he laughed. “And I’ll bet you’re a quick learner.”

“You know, Dad,” Will said thoughtfully, “maybe we ought to load her up and haul her over to Moonshine Valley some Sunday. That’d give her a chance to run on dirt some. I wouldn’t mind doing it some more, either.”

“That’s a good idea, Will,” Ray smiled. “In fact, she’ll learn a fair amount if we can get her around to some other places, too. I’m thinking that I might just run the Modified for the sake of racing this year, just travel around a bit and not try racing up at M-50 for a points championship. Chuck, assuming this deal with the Sportsman works out, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t mind doing a little traveling, either.”

“No, it sounds like a good idea to me,” he replied. “I can stand to get caught up, and I don’t have a so-called girlfriend to steal time from me.”

“Boy, last night sure changed the shape of this season around, didn’t it?” Ray smiled. “M-50 opens next Friday night. I assume if we have four cars ready, we’ll want to go?”

“Or go with what we have ready,” Will smiled. “I think you and I are ready, anyway. It looks like it’s going to be a big year for Austin Racing.”

“I’ll settle for a good and safe and fun year,” Ray grinned. “But just remember, all of you, there’s going to be a lot of work to be done. Not just on the cars, but we have to keep everything going at the track. That means it’ll cut into other things you could be doing.”

“Like I said,” Chuck snorted, “it’s not like I have a girlfriend to waste my time on anymore.” He glanced over at Will and Telzey then added, “At least Will has a girlfriend that’ll hang around the track with him.”

“Chuck, don’t let it bother you,” his father advised. “You needed to come up for air anyway. Besides, you don’t know what’s going to be around the corner.”

*   *   *

Out at the track there was indeed work to be done. Ginger had some paperwork, and Ray had some items that needed maintenance, so he went to work on them. Chuck, Will, and Telzey got garbage bags and started picking up trash. A lot had accumulated from the crowd the night before, even with trash cans all over the place. It took a couple hours to get the grandstands looking respectable again. The pits were quite a bit better; it seemed like most of the racers had taken their trash with them, although there were a few pit stalls where that hadn’t been the case. “Some people are slobs, racers or not,” Chuck complained at one point.

Still, every time Telzey or Will saw him, he seemed to have a grin on his face. “What’s so funny?” Telzey finally asked.

“Oh, nothing really,” he smiled. “I just can’t imagine Ashley out here doing this. It’d be so beneath her to do anything useful.”

“That’s a thought,” Will laughed. “I sort of got the impression last night that her dad more or less planned on taking that three thousand dollars out of her hide. I wonder if Dad could work a deal with him to have her do this little chore.”

“Wonderful thought, but it wouldn’t happen,” Will laughed. “No, she’ll get a slap on the wrist, she’s Daddy’s little girl, after all. I know it’s not the first time he’s had to open his checkbook to get her out of a mess that she’s caused.”

“I don’t understand what you ever saw in her, anyway.”

“I don’t know myself,” Chuck said, stopping his picking up of a pile of trash. “I guess I wanted the status of having a beautiful cheerleader for a girlfriend. You know, the guys saying, ‘You’re going out with Ashley Hitchcock and you don’t even play football!’ You know what I mean? You put up with a lot of stuff to look big to your friends.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Will agreed. “I mean, my friends mostly are used to the idea that I race and don’t do school sports, and I guess they envy me driving. I don’t know how that’ll work when everybody has driver’s licenses.”

“It fades quite a bit,” Chuck said. “I know, I’ve been there. Racing may be cool, but it isn’t as visible around school as football. You get these football players thinking they’re a big deal with their hot cars, their Camaros and Mustangs with the V-6 engines, they think they’re so cool, and they don’t realize that if they got out on the track with you in your Pony Stock you’d suck their doors off. Like Chris Holdenhoven. He goes drag racing occasionally and he thinks he’s hot stuff. A couple times I thought about trailering the 86 car to the drag strip just to show him up. If this Sportsman deal works out I might just have to do it. The problem is that you can’t exactly cruise Main with a Sportsman.”

“That’s a thought,” Will grinned. “Maybe we ought to talk to Dad about taking some cars out for the Fourth of July parade. Grandpa said he used to do it with the midgets.”

“Yeah, that might be fun,” Chuck said. “At least it’d show off the cars to some of the kids that don’t come to the track. Grandpa might even let us take the midgets.”

“How’d you like driving the midgets last night?” Telzey asked. “I never remembered to ask.”

“They’re kinda neat to drive around slowly,” Will said. “But I’ll tell you what: sitting out in the open like that, no shoulder harness, only a lap belt? No roll cage, just a flimsy excuse of a roll bar? No nerf bars to keep from locking wheels up with someone? And the nothing much they used for helmets back then? It’d scare the heck out of me to really race one of those.”

“Darn straight,” Chuck nodded. “It just increases my respect for Grandma and Grandpa to no end to think that they used to race those cars darned near every night. Let’s face it, it’s pretty rare that someone gets hurt these days, but I guess it happened a lot more often back then. I mean, think about what happened with Ashley last night. She backed my car into the wall and pretty well destroyed it, then got out and walked away. You wouldn’t have walked away from one of those midgets in a hit like that.”

*   *   *

It was nearing noon when they finished picking up the trash around the track. They finished up by walking around the wall on both sides of the track, where airborne trash tended to accumulate. Toward the end, Ray and Ginger came out with one of the track’s pickup trucks to help with picking up the filled garbage bags. By then they’d accumulated a number of bags of trash, both from trashcans and off the ground – enough to pretty well fill a dumpster behind the concession stand.

“Well, that pretty well does that,” Ray commented. “You kids want to go look at some race cars?”

“I’m more than ready,” Telzey said. “Do you think I should go home to call this Sprinkle guy?”

“No need for that, I already talked to him,” Ray said. “He still has it. I also called on the Sportsman, and it’s still there, too.”

“Good deal,” Chuck replied. “Did you find out much about it?”

“Didn’t really ask, just confirmed that it’s set up for a Chevy 350 block, and that it’s for sale. This is your deal, so you’ll have to make up your mind and dicker with him about the price. I’ll help you look it over, but you don’t have to take my advice.”

“Fair enough,” Chuck nodded. “You think maybe we ought to take a trailer?”

“I think we need to take the big trailer,” Ray said. “Let’s face it, the odds are that we’re going to be coming back with at least one car, if not two. The two places aren’t that far apart, so we might as well not waste a trip. We need to swing by and pick up Telzey’s grandfather, though. He wants to ride along. I figure we can stop at a burger shack and get something to eat on the fly.”

It was a good hour and a half up to Herman Wohlstadt’s farm, where the Sportsman was sitting. Herman came out of his house and greeted them as they drove into the yard. “How’s it going, Ray?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you around for a while.”

“I didn’t race much last year except at M-50,” Ray replied. “Looks like we might do a few more of the big shows this year, though. Everything got shook up a little last night.”

“Yeah, Jim Kaufmann called, he told me about your son’s girlfriend piling up his car.” He glanced at Telzey. “Was that you?”

“No,” she giggled. “I’m his other son’s girlfriend. I won the race she crashed in.”

“So,” Chuck said, “what’s the deal on this Sportsman? Jim seemed to think it was pretty good.”

“Well, it was pretty good back when I was racing it,” Hermie replied. “For a while I kind of planned to keep both cars so I could race whichever one seemed to be a better deal. That turned out to be more work than I wanted to go to, so I wound up stealing the engine out of it. It hasn’t moved in a couple years, and I can use the space. You want to go look at it?”

“Yeah, let’s see it,” Chuck said.

Herman led them out to an old barn behind the house, to a nondescript tarp-covered pile with some farm machinery sitting around it. They all pitched in to move the tarp, which was covered with dirt and bird droppings, to find a fairly decent looking blue and white car underneath. “Let’s roll it out in the light where you can get a better look at it,” he suggested.

Outside, it looked sort of like a stock bodied car, but only sort of – even on a casual inspection it could be seen that these were not stock body panels, but aluminum pieces that covered a tube frame, much like Ray’s Late Model. “Dad?” Chuck asked dubiously, “does this thing fit our rules as a Sportsman? It looks an awful lot like a Late Model to me.”

“It’s right on the borderline,” Hermie said. “When I raced it, there were places that insisted that I had to race it as a Late Model, but I didn’t have the engine to keep up with them. It made a heck of a Sportsman, though.”

“He’s right,” Ray said. “It’s right on the borderline. Speaking as the chief tech inspector at Bradford along with all my other hats, I’d say that it qualifies as a Sportsman if you’re careful, don’t overdo the motor and run the Hoosier eight-inch tires. Throw ten-inch wheels on it, though, and you’ve got a Late Model. Of course, if you decided to run it as a Late Model there’s a few other things you’d want to do to it, too.”

Chuck, Ray and Will looked it over carefully, while Telzey looked over Ray’s shoulder, listening to him talk about some of the features of the car and their condition. “It needs some work,” Chuck summed up. “But nothing major that I can see. Dad, what do you think?”

“Burn some midnight oil and you could have it on the track next weekend,” Ray agreed. “I don’t see anything wrong that’s really gross and disgusting.”

“All right,” Chuck said to Hermie. “What have you got to have for it?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it until I was talking with Jim about it the other day,” Hermie replied. “Tell you what. Two grand for what’s right there, or two and a half and I’ll throw in some spare wheels and some Hoosier 970s, about a dozen. Some are used, most are new, but I can’t use them anymore. There’s probably a few other spare parts laying around here I could throw in, too.”

“Done deal, as far as I’m concerned,” Chuck smiled. “Dad’ll have to write you a check, and I can pay him back after the bank opens tomorrow.”

“It probably would be best if you can hold off cashing the check till I can make a deposit tomorrow,” Ray said, reaching for his checkbook. “Chuck, it looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you this week.”

It took them a while to back the trailer around, put the car on board by the brute strength of the six of them pushing on it, and get it tied down, then pretty well fill the back of the pickup with tires and parts. A few minutes later they were on the road. “Hey, Chuck,” Cal asked, “I thought you were going to haggle with him, just on general principles.”

“Not when he was going to throw in twelve hundred bucks worth of tires for five hundred bucks,” Chuck said. “Those things go for a hundred bucks apiece, so if I’m careful, that’s a season’s worth of tires.”

“Looks to me like you got a deal, then,” Cal smiled.

“Yeah, and I still have five hundred bucks left over for odds and ends,” Chuck replied. “I’ll spend most of it, but I shouldn’t have to spend some of it right away. Boy, I have to thank you for what you said to Ashley’s dad last night. This is going to be a whole lot better than trying to turn a junker into a Street Stock at the last minute.”

The sun was getting low in the sky when they got to the Sprinkle residence, in a town about half an hour from where Chuck had bought the Sportsman. Telzey was now chafing to actually see the car, and the long delay at Wohlstadt’s had just gotten her more anxious, if anything. What would the car be like? Would it be worth getting? What was it, for that matter? She knew it was a legal Pony Stock, or at least pretty close to it, but that was about all she knew.

The Sprinkles lived on a side street in an older house. They no more than got the truck and trailer parked and were climbing out when Mike Sprinkle came out to see them. “I see you’ve been busy,” Mike grinned. “That’s Hermie Wohlstadt’s old Sportsman, right? That used to be one pretty good car!”

“Yeah, when I saw it I remembered it,” Ray grinned. “I think it ought to work out pretty good for Chuck.”

“So you need another car for your other boy? Will, isn’t it?”

“No, for his girlfriend,” Ray smiled. “That’s Telzey here.”

“Are you a racer, too?” Mike grinned.

“Trying to be,” Telzey said, a little shyly for some reason.

Ray laughed out loud. “She put two laps on most of the field in the race she won last night,” he explained. “Granted, it wasn’t a lot of competition, but if she wasn’t a racer before that then she was right afterwards. We’re looking for a car for her to get some experience in.”

“Well, let’s go out back and see what I’ve got for her,” Mike said, turning to walk down the driveway. “When you said you were coming, I rolled the car out and charged the battery up. You might want to think about replacing it; I don’t know how well it’s going to hold a charge.”

Telzey was right next to Mike Sprinkle as they walked around to the back of the house. There in front of the garage sat a very neat-looking race car. It had white sides, with a green hood, roof and trunk deck. On the side, in big, bright red letters was the number “24.”

“Oh, wow!” Telzey gasped. “It’s even a 24 car!”

“Jeff Gordon fan, huh?” Mike laughed. “The problem is, it’s not a Chevy. In fact, it’s a ’92 Dodge Shadow. It’s got the 2.5 liter engine in it with an automatic. Dean pulled it down and rebuilt it to factory specs the winter before he joined the Army, so it’s only got like about three races on it.”

“What gears?” Will asked.

“It’s got the 1.22 gears that you want for M-50 and Calhoun County,” Mike said. “And Bradford, for that matter. There’s a set of 1.06 gears if you want to run a quarter-mile place like Spartan.”

“Not bad,” Will grinned.

“That’s good?” Telzey asked.

“Very good,” Will said. “The 1.22 transfer gears are a little hard to find. In my car at Bradford, you can hit the computer rev limiter with the 1.06s if you’re not careful.”

“Well, good,” Telzey said, taking a closer look inside the car. The inside was all stripped out fully painted in white, and from what she could see the instrument panel and switches were neatly done. There was a removable wheel sitting on the steering column. The roll cage was painted gray, with the tubing padded near the aluminum driver’s seat; it seemed to be an even more substantial roll cage than the one in Will’s car. She glanced back; there was a battery box and a small fuel cell way in the trunk. She looked up to see Ray and Chuck pulling the pins from the hood tiedowns and lifting off the hood.

It was only a couple steps to see what they were looking at. There was a neat engine, more in the open than would be found in a street car, because things like the heater and air conditioner had been removed. “I think you might want to change the plugs, just on general principles,” Mike told them. “Dean drained the radiator and block before he left and they’re still empty. You could listen to it run for a minute or two, or I can get the hose and fill it if you want to run it a little longer.”

“Might as well,” Ray said. “You got any odds and ends that go with this?”

“Some,” Mike replied. “That’s an almost new set of Sumimoto rubber on it, and there’s another set on rims that haven’t been used. I think there may be some Coopers back there. I’ll have to hunt around; there’s a few more spares. Dean said to get rid of everything for the car, if he comes back and goes to racing again he’s going to do something besides a Pony Stock.”

While Mike went to get the hose, Ray, Will, and Chuck poked around the car a little, as Telzey looked over their shoulder and her grandfather looked on. Not much was said, but everybody seemed impressed. As soon as the radiator was filled, Ray said to her, “Telzey, why don’t you get in and start it up so we can hear it run?”

With her heart beating so fast she could scarcely believe it, Telzey clambered through the window, and settled into the seat. “It’s kind of far back and low for me,” she commented.

“Yeah, we’d have to work on that,” Ray said. “We don’t have to worry about that right now, though.”

“OK,” Mike said. “The kill switch is there on the front of the door frame, and that’s your master switch. The starter is that switch over on the right. I had it running earlier to back it out of the garage, so it ought to start right up.”

Taking a deep breath, Telzey switched on the kill switch and flipped the toggle for the starter switch. The car started right up. It wasn’t terribly noisy; it had a muffler, although it wasn’t a very strong one. She found the accelerator and gunned the engine; it revved right up, without a hint of hesitation. “It sounds good to me,” she said as she let it idle.

Ray went back around in front of the car, looked under the hood, then reached out for the accelerator linkage and gunned the engine again, then let it idle. “Sounds to me like it’s got the racing computer,” he observed.

“I’d be surprised if it didn’t,” Mike said. “Dean did just about everything he could to that car and still keep it legal.”

“All right, Mike,” Ray said, “how much?”

“Let me put it this way,” Mike replied. “Dean put a lot of work into that car. He said he could probably get more than five hundred for it but didn’t want to go to the trouble what with being in Iraq and all. But he wanted to be sure that whoever got it was someone that was going to appreciate the work he put into it. If you’re really going to race it, it’s five hundred. If you want to haul it over to Kalamazoo or some place like that and screw it up in one of their Enduros, then it’s fifteen hundred. I know I can’t stop you, but it’s a handshake on that.”

“I think the Enduros are kind of fun, at least to watch,” Ray smiled, “but if I were going to run one, I’d take a junker, not a decent car. This is a very decent car. What do you think, Telzey?”

“I like it,” she replied. “I really like it, and I think I can do pretty good with it.”

“I think you’ll do all right with it,” Ray grinned. “Mike, is a check all right?”

“If it’s from you, it is.”

“Then Chuck, Will, get the ramps down on the trailer. Telzey, as long as you’re in the seat you might as well drive it aboard.”

The sun was going down by the time they got the 24 car tied down and got the spare tires and other parts loaded, mostly into the car itself, since the back of the pickup was pretty well filled with tires and stuff for Chuck’s Sportsman. They found a promising looking restaurant out on the edge of town, and stopped for dinner. The discussion, of course, was mostly about the cars and what would need to be done with them, and a couple of napkins were appropriated to make lists on.

The list for the 24 car wasn’t long, at least until they could get it out and run it at speed around the track to see if there were things that needed to be done to it, although no one expected much. The biggest item that anyone could come up with was to put new seat belts in it – the belts expired after three years and the ones in it had expired the previous year. Some sponsor signs had to come off, and “Austin Auto Service” and “Bradford Speedway” signs had to go on it. There was a woman in town who made the plastic signs, and Ray promised to arrange to have them made.

Of course, the list for the Sportsman was considerably longer, and it was going to push everyone to have it done for the next weekend. The engine and transmission had to come out of the old 86 car. While it was empty and easier to work on there was some work that needed to be done to its replacement, like putting competition exhaust headers on it instead of the stock exhaust manifold, and changing the intake manifold to accommodate a four-barrel carb. Ray said he thought he had the necessary items in stock, so that would be easy. He advised against putting the high-compression aluminum heads on it, unless Chuck really wanted to run it as a Late Model most places he went. Chuck already had a fairly aggressive camshaft in the engine, so there was no point in changing it now, given the time available.

There were a number of other items that needed to be done to the car, most relatively minor in comparison to mounting the engine and transmission. Ray suggested that he pull the brake discs and grind them, just on general principles, then put on new brake pads, which would have to be replaced frequently. There were several other items to check or fix.

One of the items on the list was, as on the 24 car, to change the sponsor logos. “Which leads to a question,” Ray said. “The car is numbered 15 right now. Do you want to stay with 86, or what?”

“Leaving it as is fine with me,” Chuck said without hesitation. “Frankly, after last night, I’d just as soon leave the 86 behind. It really wasn’t all that lucky for me.”

“Good idea,” his father replied. “Maybe it’ll change your luck.”

It was after dark before they got on the road again. They’d all had a long day, and after the excitement Telzey was especially wasted. She and Will sat next to each other in the back seat, with Chuck over in the other corner. The two of them talked for a while, mostly about the new car, and before long Telzey was leaning against Will, sound asleep with his arm around her. Will held out for a while, just satisfied to hold onto his girlfriend, before his head sagged against hers as he fell asleep, too.