“Thinking of Matt makes me wonder if he got his car put back together,” Chuck commented after a moment. “You got any idea?”

“No idea,” she said. “I’ve been avoiding that part of Paddington.” She had little doubt that he’d been working hard on it, fixing the damage from last week. She only hoped that he hadn’t fixed the gas cap.

As it turned out when they got to the track, he at least had the car back running, although it still looked a little worse for wear. The left side still had the dents from the 52 car in it – the roll cage had prevented real damage, although the cosmetic damage was still striking. The right side looked rougher in a way. There was a new back fender that still had paint that didn’t match the car, there were raw welds showing, and evidence of things having been crinkled.

Chuck and Larissa figured it was politically best to stay away from Matt, but Telzey wandered over to talk to him. He admitted to her that he’d only had a few hot laps to test it earlier in the afternoon, and he couldn’t tell whether it was handling funny or whether he only thought it was handling funny after being bent. “It’s still a pretty fast car, though,” he told her. “I’ll get the rest of that stuff fixed up as I get time to work on it.”

Matt was right – it was still a fast car. He didn’t qualify the fastest for the evening, but was right close to it. It was a touch less than his best for the season but not enough less to complain about, considering the battering the car had taken. Telzey was a touch quicker, but she’d been getting quicker all year, and if she was learning to get what she could out of the car, it was at least partly because the car had a lot to give her.

Matt remembered when Dean Sprinkle had the car – it had been very fast indeed, for a Pony Stock. Many people thought it was probably the most blatant cheater in the series, but in spite of many tech inspections no one had ever found anything against the rules. It was just that there were a number of little things that had been done to the car that made it run well, especially some legal things done to the suspension work with legal stock parts, if not necessarily common ones. There were a number of legal Dodge parts that could be applied to the car and Dean had been serious about finding them. It may have been the only car in the field with the 1.22 transfer case gears, for example. Those had only been made for one year, and mostly sold in cars going to western states, so finding a set was difficult at best. Yet, it was the best gear set for Bradford, and while they wouldn’t do much for the average driver they would reward the good ones – which Telzey was rapidly becoming.

But Matt felt that despite the accident he still had the better car – and not only because of the computer chip that controlled the ignition and allowed the engine to turn faster before the rev limiter kicked in. If you knew where to look and were willing to pay the price, it could be had so that it was impossible to tell the difference visually from the regular one. Only a test kit from a dealership could discover the replacement, and he’d never been asked to have it tested. Even though he’d taken a beating in the points with his DNF the previous week, he still felt he had a reasonable shot at the title, and a good run tonight would get things back on track.

Once he’d qualified, he drove back to the pits and spent a little bit of time making sure he was as ready as he could be to race – checking the oil, cleaning the windshield, things like that. Among them, he topped off the gas tank, making sure the gas cap was on tight. Satisfied, he headed off to the infield concession stand, glad that they were back in the infield this evening. That trebuchet thing had been fun but it hadn’t balanced off not being able to have his weekly heartburn on a bun.

There was still plenty of time to wait around before they called for the lineup of the second Pony Stock heat, after the first heat had gone onto the track following the National Anthem. From his seat in the 17 car, he could see that Jack Kaufmann won the heat in the 25 car, although the kid in the 24 wasn’t far behind him. She was still learning how to get the best out of the car, and if she continued to learn at the rate she had been, she was going to be one tough kid to beat next year. He was just as glad that he wasn’t going to have to be the one to try; he wasn’t sure what he was going to have for a ride next year but it wasn’t going to be a Pony Stock, whatever happened. That was another reason to want to do well this year – he could get more money out of this car when he went to sell it at the end of the season, especially if he got finished fixing up the damage from last week.

Finally, he got on the track for the second heat. His real competition in this heat was going to be Alan Gustafson, who was third in points for the season and had been hard to handle at any time. Gustafson was starting next to him in the back row in the 12 car, but Matt thought he had a little bit of an edge on him. Not much of an edge, as it turned out; the two of them battled each other every lap as they worked their way past the slower cars that had started in front of them. The Gustafson kid managed to pass him a couple times, but as luck would have it, he was leading when the checkered flag fell. Once again, Matt made his way to the Winner’s Circle for a photograph that would join the others on his bedroom wall.

As soon as he pulled off the track, the third heat pulled onto it. Matt went back and parked his car to see what was happening with it – the Austin kid was in this one and he was close behind in the points. If he ran poorly, Matt would pull ahead a little on the season total. It didn’t happen; Will won his heat, picking up the same points that Matt had earlier, so there was no change in the standings.

With that out of the way Matt decided he was still hungry. He’d cut into his meal time to work on the car over the course of the past week, and on thinking about it he realized that another onion-smothered kielbasa chili dog would set well with him, so he headed back over to the infield concession stand. There, he got into a discussion with some other racers around one of the picnic tables. It got interesting – he heard of a couple people who might be looking for drivers for the next season, one of them in a dirt track sprint car, and he thought he might have a shot at that. It would definitely have to be investigated as soon as he could manage.

The discussion lasted right up through the Sportsman heats. They went pretty well; Chuck Austin won a close battle in the last heat. If he couldn’t manage a better ride next year, then a Sportsman might be a way to go, he thought. He could probably build one; it wouldn’t quite be starting from scratch, after all, and he had a spare 350 Chevy engine from his dirt car that would give him a place to start. Maybe even sell the dirt car as a roller and just concentrate on running the Sportsman, he thought – keeping two cars up was getting to be a pain in the butt.

He was still kicking that idea around when Austin brought his 15 car into his pit stall. Matt happened to look up and saw a sight that really frosted him: he saw Larissa go running up to him and plant a big kiss on him as he climbed from the car. That was no little peck, either – they were seriously exploring each other’s tonsils.

Doesn’t that just about take the prize, he thought. Up until that moment, he’d thought that there might be a chance to get back together with her once she got over whatever bug she’d gotten up her butt, but that kiss told him that it was a lot less likely to happen than he thought.

What really put the frosting on the cake was that he’d run off that cute Ashley chick to keep Larissa from being mad at him. She had been hot for him, ready to rumble, but he’d done the right thing in sticking by his girlfriend. But she hadn’t stuck by him. No matter how you cut it, that meant he was getting the short end of the stick.

All of a sudden, that heartburn on a bun seemed to explode on him. The sight of Larissa kissing the Austin kid just didn’t set well on his gut at all, even less than the chili dog. No matter how you cut it, it stank. Maybe if he’d agreed to sit out one race, just one, he could have kept her. Getting wrecked and getting the DNF last week proved that he could have done it without killing him in the points, but no, he had to keep racing. The hell of it was that he hadn’t seen that Ashley chick since that time in his garage. He wondered if he still had her phone number – maybe it wasn’t too late to at least call her up.

Matt tried to stay out of sight of Chuck and Larissa through the intermission, mostly because he didn’t want to look at them and realize how he’d booted the whole thing. He could have done a better job and he knew it, but he hadn’t. It was still burning his fanny when he got in the car for the feature. After seeing the two of them together, about all he wanted to do was to win the stupid thing, load the car and get out of there as soon as he could cross the track. He was in the car and ready to go long before they called for the lineup for the Pony Stock feature.

Sometimes starting the fast cars at the back like they did at Bradford was a pain in the butt, and this time it was especially the case. There were five cars in the field that were way better than the rest: his 17 car, Austin’s 89, Amberdon’s 24, Gustafson’s 12 and Kaufmann’s 25. To try to get a head start, Matt tried his standard move of diving to the outside right at the starting line, but the 25 car and the 24 cars ahead of him had the same idea. He was third in line as they went into the first turn four wide – the 89 and the 12 were doing the same thing on the inside. Things were wild there for the first couple laps, but somehow when the smoke cleared after that, he was in fifth, with Gustafson in the lead.

In the next twelve laps he passed all of them, and led a lap, when all of a sudden he saw the 89 car getting past him on the outside. He stepped down on the throttle as hard as he could, but the 17 car just didn’t have it to give him, and somehow the Austin kid made it past. Within another lap, the 24 car went past him on the inside. Now what the heck was happening? He’d passed both of them easily a few laps before! By the time another couple laps had gone by, both Kaufmann and Gustafson had passed him as well, and there was no hope of catching them – in fact, he was falling back and they were getting away from him. His engine didn’t seem to be putting out very well at all; it seemed to be flat, just not putting out the power that he was used to.

By then, a lot of the back markers that he’d passed earlier were catching up to him, while his engine was running worse and worse. Now it was cutting in and out a little, and he was beginning to doubt that it would last out the race if things kept going this way.

They didn’t; on the next lap it cut out completely, and this time didn’t restart. There was nothing much he could do but let the car slow, and take it down the pit lane and into the pits without causing a yellow.

This was just going to kill me in the points, he thought as he coasted down to his pit stall.

*   *   *

Larissa had been running well behind Matt in a group of cars that covered about sixth through ninth places when his engine faltered, but caught up with him and passed him before it quit completely. It had worked after all!

Now maybe, she thought, he might not figure out what the problem was, and it might even catch him next week . . . that would be almost too good to be true. She couldn’t spend too much time gloating since there was a race going on and she was running really well. She might even be able to do some good in this thing – Wolsley was right ahead in the 48 car and she thought she might have a chance to get past him if she set him up right.

Down in the pits, Matt looked up to see that the race was still green – which meant that whatever happened he was dead last, except for a couple people who had dropped out earlier. Even if he got the car running again there wasn’t much chance that he could do anything to salvage some points. He said a few choice words, got out of the car, and tossed his helmet inside.

Matt was too good a mechanic to not have some idea of why the engine had gone sour. It didn’t act like the electronic ignition system or anything to do with the computer – those either worked or they didn’t, but here the car ran poorly for a while. That pointed at the fuel system, and the most likely culprit was the fuel filter. He couldn’t remember when the 17 car’s filter had been changed, but it had been a while and might have been when he finished rebuilding the engine over the winter. Normally a fuel filter shouldn’t plug up in that amount of time, he thought, but maybe there had been some crud in one of his gas cans or something.

In the back of his truck he kept a tool box, which included a few useful spare parts, and a replacement fuel filter was one of them. The problem was that it was buried in there somewhere. He figured he might as well find it and get it changed now so that he’d have it done with. The way things had been going this week, something might happen and he might forget about it. He didn’t want to get his driving suit messed up under the hood, and it was hot to wear anyway. He peeled it off, getting down to jeans and T-shirt, but before he could start digging in his tool box for the fuel filter the Pony Stock Feature ended and people began coming back to the pits.

Of course, half a dozen people stopped and asked him what had happened, and as people got out of their cars, a discussion got going, replaying parts of the race and talking about what his second DNF in a row was going to do to his standings in the points. He couldn’t tell at that point but it was dead sure that there was no way he was going to be able to retain his lead in the standings. He’d have to wait until the results were posted after the race to know for sure, but it might have dropped him as low as third or fourth. That still wasn’t an impossible deficit to overcome the way he’d been running, everyone seemed to agree, and he thought they might be right. It was just that he was going to have to be on it for the rest of the season if he still hoped to win the points championship.

So it was that it was a good half an hour before Matt actually got around to changing the fuel filter, which only took him a couple minutes, at worst. He walked around to the cockpit, flipped on the kill switch and the fuel pump and hit the starter. The engine started right up, so that was good. He went around to the engine, grabbed hold of the throttle cable and gunned the engine a couple of times. It wound right up, just like it was supposed to. Satisfied that he’d found and fixed a frustrating but simple problem, he got into the car and drove it up onto his trailer for the drive back to Paddington.

What Matt didn’t know was that his gas cap wasn’t quite airtight. Almost, but not quite. A tiny little bit of air leaked around the threads, drawn by the vacuum in the tank where the gas had been drawn down. By the time he got around to starting the car the vacuum had been reduced to the point where the fuel pump could provide gas enough to run the engine again – maybe not under load, but just gunning it out of gear, or easing it up onto the trailer was still possible. Air was still slowly leaking into the tank, and by the time Matt got around to topping off the gas it would have equalized itself again.

What with everything, it was getting to be time for the Sportsman race to get started before Matt had everything loaded up and ready to go. He had to sit out the race and wait for it to be completed before he could cross the race track and head for home. He wanted to get out of there; the trouble with the car and seeing Larissa with Chuck had made Bradford a place he didn’t want to either be around or remember tonight. As a result he was ready to go the minute the race was over with, and he was the first rig out of the pits – so quickly that he didn’t see Ashley trying to catch up with him.

On the way home, he gave some thought to whether he wanted to go to Moonshine Valley tomorrow, but quickly rejected the idea. Partly it was because he knew he still had some work to do on the Pony Stock to get it back to looking decent so he could get a better price when he went to sell it in a couple months. But partly it was because he knew that Chuck hung out there a lot, what with having that six-cylinder Maverick they raced. The odds were that Larissa would be with him, and right then he didn’t much care if he saw her anytime soon or not. He had to face up to the fact that it was over with, like it or not.

He decided that after he got home, maybe tomorrow, he’d have to hunt around in his room and see if he could find the phone number of that Ashley chick. He still couldn’t believe a gal with that kind of class would be interested in him. But if she was . . . then maybe Larissa wasn’t that big a loss after all.