Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Popular American Fiction,
Fiction - General,
Sports & Recreation,
Sports,
Businesswomen,
motor sports,
Sports Stories,
Automobile Racing Drivers,
Stock Car Drivers,
Stock Car Racing,
Women automobile racing drivers
of new secondary sponsors. Companies who sell primarily to women will want an image that appeals to them.”
“Oh, honey, he does.”
“And remember that souvenir merchandising is a significant source of income in motorsports. Pretty faces sell tee shirts…hats…coffee mugs. The potential is huge. Even if he loses, we’ll still win. But, of course, we want to win.”
CHAPTER III
Hail to the Chief
G race Buell Hoskins Tuggle hoped that the job interview wasn’t going to include lunch, not that she minded a free meal, but from the looks of the ladies on the interview committee, every one of ’em about two ribs short of a shadow, she figured their idea of a noonday meal would be a lettuce leaf and an Ex-Lax pill. They were skinny enough to be drivers’ wives for sure, but they looked a little too steely-eyed and Old Money for that.
Now back in the old days, when Daddy had been racing, the wives were whoever the racers had happened to marry back when they started out working in the factory or wherever, and their lined faces and plump bodies testified to a lifetime of hard work, starchy food, and infinite patience with race-crazed husbands. Grace, who was pleased that her initials also stood for Grievous Bodily Harm, but who preferred simply to be known as Tuggle, did not hold with fad diets and plastic surgery. In her opinion, if being a willowy size two got you a race car driver for a husband, then they ought to put warning labels on Slim-Fast.
Wheel men! Lawn jockeys with 800-horsepower egos. Fortunately, she was past the age to confuse foolhardy with sexy, which was just as well, because no driver worth his salt would listen to a pretty girl giving him orders over the head set anyhow. They’d listen to her, though. If they had any sense they would.
Her daddy had been a force to be reckoned with on the racing circuit, back in the days when North Carolina was the hub of the world—Hickory, Asheville, Wilkesboro, Winston-Salem. She often said that her blood type was Hi-Test . And then there were her two husbands—the driving one from her wild younger days, who had put her heart so far into the wall that she thought she’d never get over him. Well, she hadn’t really, that was the truth of it. But at least she had learned from that experience that restrictor plates were not a bad thing for the human heart. Her second husband, Doyle, was a mechanic, and she claimed that she’d married him “for entertainment.” He didn’t take your breath away like the first one did, but he didn’t make you want to put a hose to the exhaust pipe, either, so she reckoned it evened out—less joy, less sorrow. That’s what getting older mostly meant anyhow.
Drivers. Like tigers. A lot of fun to look at, maybe even okay for a brief, wary encounter, but try to hold on to one and he will rip you to shreds. Well, maybe times had changed with all these West Coast pretty boys coming into the sport, but Tuggle didn’t think so, and she rejoiced in the fact that she was too old to care.
She wondered if she ought to offer the benefit of her wisdom to this charmed circle of designer-clad ladies, but she decided against it. They were too old to care, too, whether they knew it or not. And maybe they were into the sport for philosophical reasons. An all-woman team. Well, whatever kept the sponsors happy.
She assumed an expression of polite interest, which on her bulldog features looked like a double-dog-dare, as she waited for the questioning to commence.
The regal one they called Christine began by saying, “Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about yourself, Grace.”
Tuggle winced at the sound of her given name, sounding like a sermon title in the precise diction of this high-maintenance woman. “It’s Tuggle, if it’s all the same to you,” she corrected her. “As for my qualifications, my daddy ran dirt track and Late Model Stocks around the region—wherever he could afford to go and still keep his day job. Back