Chapter 8
“Sorry!” Laurie huffed as she came within a few feet of Mack and the crew. “I tried to get here earlier, but security thinks I’m suspicious.” She glared at the man next to her and pointed at Mack. “See? That driver is my sister. A woman. On track. Like I told you.”
Janet gave an irritated wave in the direction of the security guy, and he turned and walked back toward the pavilion without a word.
Mack’s heart bounced between embarrassment and elation, and embarrassment at her elation.
She could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen her sister in the last sixteen years, but now Laurie was here on the biggest day of Mack’s life.
“What’s wrong?”
For her sister to show up randomly, something had to be catastrophically wrong. She hadn’t showed up when Mack was feeding Wes through a straw, or when Shaw’s colicky cries were so intense that Mack wouldn’t pick her up for fear of shaking her.
Laurie scowled as she pulled out a tissue to dab at the tiny beads of sweat on her forehead.
“You think I’d miss this? I left a pathologically needy associate in charge of a deposition, but I’m here.
” Laurie shifted in her four-inch heels and glanced quickly at the half dozen crew standing around the car, watching her.
She motioned at the concrete pit wall. “I’ll .
. . tuck back here. Out of the way.” She looked pointedly at Mack. “But I’m here.”
Mack was grateful her helmet smushed her face too much to reveal her emotions. Her earliest memories in a race car involved Wes, but also Laurie. How had she forgotten that her sister was woven into the very core of her racing life? Just seeing her now caused tears to build behind her eyes.
No crying, she reminded herself. Women don’t get to cry here.
“Williams, focus.” Janet’s tone was tight.
“Feel that breeze? Seems small but you’ll feel it like hell in turn two.
Ease out there and get a feel for the car.
We have plenty of fuel and tires for today.
I’d rather see you take it slow than slam the car into the wall.
Keep the throttle where you’re comfortable, I don’t give a shit if it’s one-thirty or one-eighty.
The first pass is about getting comfortable in the car.
We won’t start the rookie test until you’re ready. ”
Nerves fizzing, Mack nodded.
“Make sure the seat feels good before you take off. Jimmy and the boys built a special extender for the pedals to accommodate your height.” Mack was grateful; at IndyCar speeds, even the smallest discomfort could be debilitating.
Again, Mack nodded, a growing sense of disquiet building inside her.
“The back end is going to swing out hard when you first accelerate, and I mean hard.”
Another nod. Did Janet expect her to screw this up?
“And the—”
“Damn, Janet, let the girl try it for herself. You picked her, now you gotta trust her.” Jimmy’s voice sounded surprisingly low and soothing, like Peter Coyote.
“Yeah, yeah, tell me that when you’ve put your own money on the line.”
From the wall, Laurie called out, “Go fast! Be safe!”
Since her very first race, it was the last thing Laurie said to Mack before she buckled in, and she hadn’t even known she needed to hear those words today.
For her early races, Laurie had always been right there at her side, and now Laurie was here, and here was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Mack tried not to give in to nerves but her chest clenched with something dangerously close to panic.
Jimmy gestured toward the cockpit and held out a hand to help Mack over the high, clear safety shield, known as the aeroscreen.
The step distance from the ground over the screen was much longer than Mack’s legs but she was all too aware of the crew—and Leo Raisman—watching her, so she shrugged off Jimmy’s offer of help and gripped the side of the titanium and polycarbonate windshield.
She lifted her right leg but her foot only made it halfway up the screen.
She hopped on her left foot and stretched her right leg farther but got no closer to clearing the lip of the cockpit.
Behind her, Jimmy cleared his throat.
“You can use the sidepod as a step. You’re light enough, it won’t hurt.”
Gingerly, Mack stepped on the wide flange at the side of the car and slid down until her rear settled inches from the ground.
The cockpit was extremely narrow and tight, so much tighter than the open cage of a sprint car.
Her arms could expand no farther than the width of her own body, the close sides of the car squeezed her hips, and foam safety panels lightly pressed down on her shoulders.
Even more disorienting was the reclined forty-five-degree angle of the seat, making her momentarily feel as if she couldn’t see out of the car.
Panic took over her body and she fought the urge to flail like a wild animal.
Fear had absolutely no place inside the car. The day a driver succumbed to fear was the day they should retire. Fear created mistakes, and at two hundred and thirty miles per hour, mistakes could be deadly. But Mack couldn’t deny what she felt in that moment was sheer terror.
She felt gentle pressure on her shoulder and looked up to see Leo.
He held her eyes for a long moment, and she worried he could see the stress on her face.
But he calmly pointed at the steering wheel—a compact oval that comically resembled a video game controller with multiple buttons, dials, and two paddle shifters—and started rattling off the functions as another crew member helped buckle the four-point harness.
Leo cracked jokes along the way, gently teasing the crew for the nonsensical layout of control buttons and telling her a silly story about how he couldn’t figure out the built-in drinking straw for his first two races.
“You got this, Rookie. Only thing you really need to remember is to never turn right.” He winked, actually winked, and Mack rolled her eyes at the tired joke. It wasn’t until Leo had given her a fist bump and walked away that she realized he’d distracted her from her panic.
Jimmy gave her a quick thumbs-up before slapping her helmet with two quick taps. “Radio check. You hear me okay?”
Before Mack could answer, Janet said, “Show me that I’m not stupid, Rookie.”
“Heard that loud and clear,” Mack answered.
A crew member started the engine and the machine growled to life all around Mack.
The bassy rumble was a living thing: She could feel the vibration deep in her body and her ears flooded with the low moan of the engine.
The car was pure energy, designed for the singular purpose of going as fast as humans could manage.
Mack’s lizard brain briefly took over—It’s been too long, I can’t see, what if I wreck on my first try?
—and she ruthlessly shoved the thoughts away.
She wasn’t scared of the car; she was scared of failing and losing this last chance at Indy.
She flipped down her visor and thought again of Wes.
She’d told him not to come today, wanting to keep both of their expectations in check, but now she wished she could share the moment with him.
If Wes hadn’t discovered Janet’s business card, Mack might not be sitting in this race car getting ready to take her first laps on the track that had haunted her dreams. From her first race, he’d been right there when she closed her visor and there again when she flipped it back up.
It felt wrong that her dad wouldn’t see her first—possibly only—laps at Indy.
A crew member swept his arm in the universal release signal, and Mack’s brain simultaneously flipped into go-mode, a bolt of energy zipping up her spine as her right foot slammed the accelerator.
She peeled out exactly as Janet warned her not to do, swinging the back end of the high-strung car in a wide arc and screeching the tires.
Shit. The throttle was more sensitive than anything she’d ever experienced.
She caught the fishtail and steered the car off pit row and out onto the track.
Cool air reduced friction between the tires and asphalt, so Mack took her time bringing the car up to speed even though her foot itched to slam down.
She’d be damned if she shamed herself by slapping the wall on the first lap.
She steered onto the warm-up apron, a small lane below the main racetrack that kept slower traffic safely away from at-speed cars, then out onto the main track.
Above her, the empty grandstands towered over the track, casting laddered shadows on the pavement.
It was eerily silent, only the sound of the engine and wind filling her ears, but she’d heard part of the magic of the Indy 500 was driving through the sensory onslaught of hundreds of thousands of people cheering in surround sound.
For a split second, she let herself feel the magnitude of what she was doing, feel the awe and honor of driving at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, to imagine the fans on race day. And then she tucked her sense of wonder away and got to work.
She left the short chute and eased into the sharp ninety-degree bend of turn two, the most notorious of all corners at this track.
She exhaled in relief as she left the turn and headed down the long, straight backstretch.
IndyCars had no power steering, and her arms already ached from forcing the wheel to turn.
She pushed the accelerator down the backstretch, gaining a little more speed before downshifting into turns three and four.
In less than a minute, she crossed over the famous yard of bricks and completed her first lap at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“How’s it feel?”
Mack jumped at Jimmy’s gravelly voice, unused to radio communication while driving. She was used to being isolated in the car. “Spirited,” she said into the microphone of her helmet.
Slowly Mack built speed, and with it, confidence.
This car was as different from a sprint midget as the creek near her house was to the Ohio River, but cars intuitively made sense to her in a way that nothing else ever had.
Traditional learning had been a frustrating slog, full of tears and book throwing.
Now that she had a school-age child, Mack suspected she had some form of dyslexia, but in her teens she’d thought she was stupid.
Every time Shaw asked a question—Why do we eat pigs if they’re really smart?
Why does that sign say Black Lives Matter?
—Mack wondered if she fumbled the answer and screwed Shaw up for life.
She was an impatient, imperfect nurse to Wes, she hated housework and cooking, and she worried that Shaw would only remember her exhaustion and short temper.
Even running the family dirt track confused her because she didn’t understand why she was bored doing something she should love.
Everything else in her life was full of confusing contradictions.
But this, this, she knew.
From an early age, she could drive anything: raw sprints, nimble go-karts, heavy stocks, and finicky sports cars.
The best drivers had a unique skill, a little something that allowed them to step above the field, and Mack’s was versatility.
She could figure out a new car twice as fast as most drivers, and IndyCar was no exception.
Only a few dozen laps and she was zooming into the two hundred miles per hour range.
She slipped, almost spun, but even then her body hummed with euphoria as she wrestled the car around the track.
Nothing in her life had ever felt as good as wind in her face and an engine at her back.
How would she walk away from this moment and ever think that anything else was enough?