READING, Pa. - In the back of the Maple Grove Raceway parking lot, behind rows of campers and trailers, beyond thoroughfares bustling with motorcycles, 4-by-4s and golf carts, the Jr. Dragster racing team of Cory and Vicky Baldwin is on a cellular telephone talking to their mom.
It is mid-afternoon on an overcast day in late June, and Vicky, who is 14, is about to face her first round of elimination races. Cory will race after his sister when the organizers finally work down through the eight age groups to the 11-year-olds.
Their mother, Margie, is back home in Maryland because she had to work. Their father, Tod Baldwin, an Anne Arundel County firefighter, is standing beside them at the open door of his pickup. None of them is fazed by the hundreds of people milling around, by the smell of idling engines, by the drone of the loudspeakers broadcasting one 10-second race after another.
For Vicky and Cory, who live in Severn, this is the apex of summer vacation. This Jr. Dragster moment before the rubber, so to speak, meets the road.
Within a few hours, half the 500 kids who have come to this speedway 34 miles northeast of Lancaster for the National Hot Rod Association Castrol GTX Jr. Dragster League Eastern Conference Finals will be sent home. Vicky and Cory know this all too well. They were eliminated in the first round last year.
This is why Vicky fiddles with the silver container dangling from a chain around her neck that holds some of her late grandmother's ashes. Vicky twirls the cylinder as she tells her mom she'd worried about her "dial in."
Numbers matter
Every Jr. Dragster knows bracket racing is a numbers game. Sure, speed matters, but it's more complex than that. Two kids line up at the starting line and take off when the lights turn green, but the kid who crosses the finish line first isn't necessarily the winner.
So a girl needs to understand how the overcast sky affects the blacktop. She needs nerves of steel not to jump forward before the light turns. And she had better be able to estimate the time it will take her to reach the end of an eighth of a mile. That time is her "dial in," and it's determined before the race begins.
A Jr. Dragster wants to finish as close to that time as possible without beating it. That's called "breaking out," and that, Vicky tells her mom, has been happening to kids all morning.
"Like this one guy," she says over the phone, "he dialed in a 9.82, and he ran a 9.7. I was going to dial in a 9.8, but I changed it to a 9.75."
On the other hand, a kid doesn't want to set the time too high. And a kid still wants to be first across the line.
Vicky based her "dial in" on three trials she ran the previous day, before collapsing at the Holiday Inn afterward, worn out from the races, the hotel pool, her third day - a full eight hours each day - in the sun.
She learned about time trials three summers ago after Cory came home from a Cub Scouts meeting with a Boys' Life magazine. When he showed his dad the dog-eared picture of a Jr. Dragster, it stirred memories of the two years Tod Baldwin raced a 1967 Chevelle at the Capitol Raceway in Crofton - and that was enough.
Soon after that, Tod and Margie bought Cory his first dragster, used, for $1,800. Then they bought one for Vicky, for $2,500. Then Cory outgrew his, which was called "Pop-Pop's Headache," and they bought another for $4,500, and Cory named the new one "Rock This Boy."
Then the Baldwins bought a $9,500 trailer to tow the dragsters in and before long, all four were spending every other Saturday morning from April through November at Capitol Raceway.
Last year was their first trip to the national finals, and the four days they spent at Maple Grove, sitting in the same staging lanes and zipping past the same metal bleachers the racing legends have seen, convinced them to come back. Vicky saved her babysitting money, Cory saved what he earned helping at the concession stand at Crofton, and they each paid $65 to enter. They came with 27 other kids and their families from Capitol, and each has let the Hot Rod Association inspectors weigh their cars, measure their exhaust pipes, check their fire-retardant coats, pants and gloves for holes. And now, they wait.
'Dial in' for dollars
When Vicky is through talking, she hands the phone to Cory. One of the first things he says is, "Did you hear? The first place gets $1,000." Then he admits he is apprehensive, too. If the clouds vanish and the sun appears, he'll run faster than he should. He tells her a lot of the Jr. Dragsters have let the pressure rattle them. They've taken off before the lights have dropped down the starting pole and turned green.
In the world of a Jr. Dragster, that is "red-lighting," and it can be an automatic loss, worse even than breaking out.
The conversation is over minutes later, when Vicky recognizes several of the cars going by. They belong to kids in her age group, kids she's met from Florida, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee, and that means it's time to hitch her car to the family 4-by-4 and go.
The staging lanes begin at the top of a blacktop hill, and Vicky parks near the end, far enough away from the race strip so she can still hear the announcers over the rumbling engines below. The eight lanes slope downward until two dragsters at a time are directed onto the track.
As Vicky inches closer and closer, Cory and Tod stand beside her.
This is the part Tod and Margie like best. "When we're out racing, I know we're together," he says.
Of all the hobbies their children could have chosen, this one keeps them closest. Here, there's no sitting on distant bleachers. Here, Tod will be the one who hoses down the track and rolls their wheels over the water to lubricate them. He will be the one who darts in at the last minute and fills their tanks with racing alcohol. When their 5-horsepower engines need work, he'll replace sprockets, tighten belts, teach them how to change the oil, use a torque wrench and clean the dirt from their carburetors.
Margie would, too, if she weren't at work.
She'd be right here beside them when Vicky creeps so close to the gate they can no longer hear the announcer. She'd be able to see Vicky sitting in "Lil' Bunny," the car she named in honor of the professional racer, Bunny Beget, who sent an autograph with the words, "See You in the Winner's Circle."
If Margie were here she would see Vicky wearing a pink shirt that says "Baldwin Racing," and red pants guaranteed not to catch fire if the car does. Margie would see Vicky tapping the roll bar with her blue-painted fingernails. She would hear the fist-sized metal clasps click into place as Vicky buckles herself in.
If she were here, Margie could look around at her daughter's competition. She would see the words "Miss Attitude" painted on the car in the lane beside Vicky and "Blondzila" on the car the next lane over. She'd see "Top Dawg" behind her and "Wicked Rod" in front.
Then she would see Vicky roll through the gate and up to the pole. She would hear the engines rev, and see the lights on the pole come on: Yellow. Yellow. Then green!
A go-go feeling
Some girls Vicky's age think this is not a girly way to spend the summer. For one thing, it's hot and sweaty. For another, you get dirty. But Vicky knows something they don't: How great it feels when the light at last turns green.
Even if the feeling doesn't last long, she knows nothing else compares to hitting the pedal and gripping the wheel. That's why she keeps coming back.
The race is over in less than 10 seconds. By then, every moment until this one has been put behind them, the squirt gun fight back at the trailer, the cards they played beside a friend's camper, the time spent fretting about her dial in.
Vicky's reaction time to the green light is the worst it's been in three days. She's close to her dial-in, but the other kid was faster off the light, so he wins.
Cory doesn't know it yet, but he will lose his race within the next few hours and be eliminated, too. And like Vicky, he will be disappointed. But then they will go back to the hotel and play in the pool with their new friends. They will listen to all the things their dad will say to make them feel better, like, "That's the way it goes." And, "You can't win every time." And, "You got to come. You got to do it. Look at your friends you go to school with, they're not here."
And when it is time to turn out the hotel room lights, Tod will ask them if they've had a good time and lying there in the darkness they will say what they say every night at the races, "Thanks, Dad. It was fun."