Read Online Once Around the Track by Sharyn McCrumb - Free Book Online Page B

expecting her. Rosalind walked into Julie Carmichael’s office at team headquarters with a brittle smile and ice water in the pit of her stomach. Julie Carmichael was a lanky woman about her own age, with horn-rimmed glasses and a hank of brown hair bound in a long braid. She wore designer running shoes, faded jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt over a vintage Davey Allison tee shirt. Beside her, with his nose buried in a technical manual, was a sweet-faced old man with jug ears and a fringe of white curls around a shiny bald pate. He peered up at Rosalind through rimless bifocals and twinkled a welcoming smile.
    The small office, which had beige cinderblock walls, a tiled floor, and a curtainless metal window, looked as if it were a converted classroom, furnished from the Used Office Furniture Depot without much regard for style or ambiance: a faux wood and steel desk and table half buried under books and piles of paper, a large black-rimmed clock, and a collection of die-cast race cars from previous years in NASCAR. On a white erasable bulletin board was a photo of the 86 car (without Badger) and a computer-generated banner that read VAGENYA TECH .
    Rosalind shook hands, belatedly remembered to smile, and nodded toward the sign. “Cute,” she said. “This is the engineering headquarters for Team Vagenya, but the sign is also a pun on your alma mater, isn’t it?”
    Julie nodded. “Virginia Tech. Right. And Tuggle tells me that you graduated from MIT.”
    Jay Bird Thomas looked up from the manual he had been reading, and said, “How do you spell that?”
    Rosalind felt a ridiculous urge to curtsey, but she didn’t. “Same way they spelled it when you guest lectured there, sir.”
    The old man looked pleased. “That was back before your time up there,” he said. “Nice bunch of fellas. After my lecture a bunch of us spent half the night in a bar trying to figure out an alternative to restrictor plates. Wore out the batteries on my calculator.”
    “Wish I’d been there to hear that discussion,” said Rosalind.
    “What would your solution be?” asked Julie. She pulled out a chair and indicated that Rosalind should sit down.
    An alternative to restrictor plates. Rosalind had given some thought to that question already. Everybody in racing groused about restrictor plates, the metal plates that restricted the air flow to the carburetor preventing the car from going over 200 mph, in an attempt to keep the cars from going airborne. It was a safety precaution, enacted in the 80s after Bobby Allison’s car achieved lift-off at Talladega and nearly took out a grandstand full of spectators. The plates served their purpose of restricting speed on super speedways of Talladega and Daytona, but they also prevented cars from pulling away from the rest of the field, so that a race tended to be a clump of closely packed cars all going about 190 mph: If any driver lost control or tapped another car, the result could be a chain reaction wreck that could take out half the competitors. Finding a safe, workable alternative to restrictor plates was the holy grail of racing engineering.
    “What would I propose as an alternative to restrictor plates?” said Rosalind. “Well, there are a lot of alternatives that would produce the same results. You could mandate a smaller carburetor, or an engine with less horsepower, but those changes wouldn’t solve the problems. I might go to the speedway package they’re using on Busch cars. The blade across the top of the car, and then set the spoiler at about seventy degrees instead of the fifty-something setting that Cup is running. It makes the car more stable and knocks the engine down about twenty-five horsepower.” Too much information. Rosalind stopped short and tried to gauge their expressions. Was she being a knowledgeable professional or a hopeless geek? “Er—what would you do?” she asked Julie.
    “I might reduce tire size,” said the team’s chief engineer. “Cup, Busch, and