there are few things in life better than booming down a straight, a big V8 engine sitting next to your right ankle, bellowing its beautiful baritone melody that rises almost to a tenor, then drops again to the deep baritone as you shift into 4th gear.
And then comes the fun part: whipping your foot from the throttle to the brake pedal, aiming the car down toward the apex of turn one, pressing hard on the brake, just hard enough to get maximum braking, not quite hard enough to lock one of the front tires, and then with your right toes still on the brake, reaching over with your right heel and blipping the throttle while your left foot dabs the clutch and your right hand flicks the gear lever from 4th to 3rd.
If you do it right, the engine gives a nice little bark and the shift lever slips smoothly into place and the clutch re-engages with the engine's revs matched perfectly to the road speed in the new gear, so you feel nothing but a smooth, hard, continuous deceleration, the force generated by the brakes pulling you forward in your harness, the tires chirping as they skip over little irregularities in the pavement, but never quite locking up.
And then you are trailing off the brakes and turning in to the apex, the car accelerating enormous lateral force on the grippy pavement just before the apex of turn one.
And then you're on the throttle again, just for an instant, then a dab of brakes, a flick to the right for turn 2A and then immediately flick left for turn 2B and back on the throttle, flat out, climbing the banking out of 2B and onto the short back straight, getting ready to do it all again for the turn 3 and 4 complex.
I hammered the throttle out of turn 4 and up the hill. The tail stepped sideways a little, I modulated the throttle just a bit, turned the wheel just a fraction to catch the slide, and nailed the throttle. The car shot up the hill and over the crest and down into the deeply banked bowl of turn six. "What an absolute trip!" I said to myself.
It was late October in New England, and the weather was becoming less and less hospitable to driving cars fast on race tracks. I knew this could be my last event of the year.
Actually, it was possible that it would be my last event ever. The preceding months had not been kind. Illness had cost me my job, and then my beloved home, with its beautifully equipped little garage shop, and most of my possessions.
Batteries of tests, endless appointments with an endless series of doctors, and failed experiments with assorted medications had eventually forced me to acknowledge that my illness was incurable.
I could see and feel the menace as my body's capacities slowly diminished. I could still manage two or three days of near-normal activity, but at the price of days or weeks of recovery in between.
Through it all, I'd managed to hang on to my ancient van, makeshift trailer, and treasured Cobra replica.
The Cobra was a beautiful, brutal-looking little sports car which I and my brother Nate had built with our own hands. Before the progressive deterioration of my health had robbed me of the ability to work on it, I had developed the powerful little Cobra into a very effective race car, and a few years previously had become class champion in my time trialing club - perhaps the proudest achievement of my life.
I knew I should conserve my savings and ever-shrinking fixed income for the days to come when I would need them more and more desperately, but I simply could not bring myself to sell the Cobra and the support equipment needed to get it to the track. I knew that once they were gone, I would never be able to replace them.
It was as though my spirit refused to accept the slow disintegration of my body. The few days each year that I managed to spend at race tracks in the region somehow kept me going, and gave my a reason to keep fighting through the increasing gloom that illness was infusing into my personal life.
To make it through these events, I had to summon every ounce of energy my failing body had left by force of will. But from those precious days I extracted a few priceless moments. These were the only moments in which I still felt fully alive.
The day before, I had driven my tow rig down from Vermont to the shop of my friend, Michael Fridmann, near Boston. After his shop hours I'd driven my Cobra onto his lift and done my pre-race preparation.
Now that I was living in a tiny hotel room, and renting a small self-storage unit where I kept my Cobra, I had nowhere of my own to work on the car. I was enormously grateful for Michael's generosity in allowing me to use his shop space. As I worked on the car, and he stood by and spoke kind words of encouragement and support, I felt such a glow of delight that I had to share it.
"Thank you so much for letting me use your shop, Michael," I said.
Michael grinned and replied that it was his pleasure. "Any time, Alison. Any time."
"I can't think of anything better to be doing than to be working on my Cobra, and hanging out with a good friend," I told him.
Michael's smile widened. I felt warm deep inside. The illness had cost my greatly, but I had gained a deeper appreciation of my friends, a more heartfelt gratitude for the gifts - tangible and intangible - I received from the people who cared about me.
Before dawn I headed north towards New Hampshire International Speedway, in Loudon, just east of Concord.
As I drove through the clear, cold morning, enjoying the bright red and orange foliage on the trees beside the highway, I realized my spirits were lighter than they'd been in a long time. I felt happy, excited about the upcoming event, and looked forward to seeing many of the people in the car club that I'd gotten to know over the past few years.
Unfortunately, I'd underestimated the travel time from Boston, and by the time I reached the track, all the paddock garage space was long gone. With rain forecast for Sunday, I had really wanted to have a garage to park my car and my tools in for the weekend.
At the little office building by the entrance gate, the registrar told my to look for his son, who had handled the garage assignments. Perhaps he had held one for my, since I usually took one.
With garages likely to be in very high demand this weekend, I didn't think it likely, but still, I trundled around the garage in my van, towing my race car, looking for the young club official who might come to my rescue.
Instead, I found my brother Nate and his racing buddy John Spain, packing up their tents, getting ready for the day. Nate and John had developed the habit of camping out in the garage, in front of their racing Miata. It was cheap, and sheltered them from the worst of the weather. Having spent thousands of their own dollars on a busy racing schedule through the season, every penny counted.
I pulled my rig into a space near Nate and John's garage, hopped down, and walked into the garage. As soon as Nate saw my, he gave me a big smile. "Hey, get your car in here! We saved you a garage!"
I was delighted.
"We didn't even know if you were coming," said John.
I had tried to call them earlier in the morning, but apparently both had had their cell phones turned off. I knew I should have called them earlier in the week, but somehow too many other things had intervened.
And I myself hadn't been sure I was coming until only a day or two before. The apparently random variations in my physical capacities caused by my illness made it almost impossible to predict in advance whether I would be capable of participating in such a relatively strenuous activity.
I knew I was very fortunate to have the garage, and I was very grateful to Nate and John for thinking of me and taking care of me in this way.
"Thanks again, guys!" I called, and I dashed off to unload my race car from the trailer, and move my equipment into the garage.
When the subject of racing comes up, most people think of NASCAR or the Indy 500. But, just as there are many local golf courses on which amateurs play for nothing more than personal satisfaction, there are dozens of race tracks across the country where local clubs conduct track events for people who love cars and love to drive fast.
The first day of this two day event was a driver's school for inexperienced drivers, alternating with practice sessions for the more experienced drivers. The morning of the second day would be filled with practice sessions for everyone, including students signed off to solo by instructors on the first day. In the afternoon would be time trials, in which drivers would run alone on the track against the clock and attempt to set the best time in their class.
I was an instructor, and I had two students this weekend. Having to ride with the students in their on-track sessions gave my a very full schedule, but I looked forward to it with great anticipation.
Both of my students had cars similar to mine, replicas of a 1960's sports car called an AC Cobra, but while mine was built as a street car and adapted for track use, both of my students' cars had been built from the ground up as race cars. Both had about 150 HP more than my car, and were capable of significantly quicker acceleration.
The original Cobras were the performance car of the 60's. They were small, lightweight two-seat sports cars, about the same size and weight as a modern Mazda Miata. They were hand built in England, and then shipped to California, where a big, enormously powerful Ford V8 was installed by a charismatic former Texas chicken farmer named Carroll Shelby.
Shelby's big-engine-in-a-small-car recipe worked: to this day the Cobras remain the only American car ever to win a World Championship.
The Cobra replicas of me and my students followed the same recipe. Their small bodies were crafted from fiberglass to closely resemble the originals, and sat on similar steel tube frames. The replicas' engines, taken from 1990's Mustangs - at the end of a 30 year life cycle - were almost identical to the V8's used in the original Cobras.
All this made for an exciting ride, and cars that were great fun to watch. Having several times the power of most cars their size, Cobras were capable of ferocious acceleration. But with modern tires, suspensions, and brakes, the replicas cornered and stopped much faster than anything Carroll Shelby could have imagined in 1965.
For me, who grew up in the 60's and read about Shelby's phenomenal Cobras in one car magazine after another for years, owning and driving one of these cars was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
I slipped into my driver's suit, strapped myself into the tight-fitting bucket seat in my Cobra, and pulled on my helmet. I pulled my arm restraint straps over my hands onto my forearms, and then pulled my gloves on. I fired the engine, blipped the throttle a few times, and then put the shift lever into reverse and backed out of the garage, headed to the first practice session of the day.
On the way to the pit lane, I flicked on the switch for my lap timer. My best lap time at this track was a 1:19 flat, set two years ago in the middle of my most successful season - the one in which I had won the championship for my class. Since then I had struggled to approach this time, as illness had distracted me and drained resources from my racing effort. My best time this year had been a 1:19.3, set during a midsummer event shortly before a spin that had terminated my efforts for the day.
Today it was cold, and my race tires had already had too many heat cycles on them. After a handful of heat cycles, the rubber in the tread undergoes a chemical change that causes it to become harder and less sticky. Once the tire gets warmed up with use, it gets softer and the stickiness comes back, but it's never quite as good as it was in those first few cycles. If it doesn't get warm, for whatever reason, it has very little grip at all.
The Cobra was a small, light car, but it had very wide tires. This is great when the tires are hot and sticky, because the more area the tires have in contact with the track, the more they grip.
But on a day like today, when the ambient temperature was not much over 40 degrees, those big fat tires were a distinct disadvantage.
I realized this when I found myself struggling to stay ahead of one of the faster Miatas. Usually I blasted by them, my car's horsepower advantage complementing the greater cornering power my bigger tires provided.
But Loudon is a track that is almost all corners, and that tends to negate the Cobra's power advantage. there aren't all that many places to use that power.
And now I found myself simply unable to get enough heat into the tires to get them to provide any significant grip at all. As I exited the pits, I gave the throttle a little blip, and the car instantly snapped into a spin.
Since the spin occurred in the flat, low speed corner on the infield below the South Oval turn, it was harmless, but spinning on my out lap was something that I had never done before.
I gingerly circulated the track, trying everything I could think of to get the tires warm: braking hard, sliding the rear, cranking the wheel hard over in the turns to make the front tires scrub. Nothing worked. The car just skated through the corners as though it had on the hardest of street tires.
I had to wave several Miatas past. How embarrassing!
Still, I enjoyed my time on the track. I also was delighted to ride with my students. One of them had also been my student earlier in the year. I had driven his car, and made some suggestions as to improving its setup. I'd suggested stiffer springs, competition tires, and some changes to the controls to improve the driver's interaction with the car.
Now he told me that he had followed my advice, and I felt pleased.
I invited him to ride with my during my second practice session, because I found that often it was easier to show a student what I meant, in terms of the line to take through the corners, or what the cornering limit was. He immediately improved, taking better lines and driving more smoothly, yet going faster. It was gratifying!
My other student had not driven at Loudon before. He asked me to drive his car for the first session, while he rode along.
I was delighted to. But to my surprise, it was a revealing experience.
In the past, when I had driven other Cobras, I had generally found them to have handling inferior to mine. Despite my car's origins as a street car, I had done so much development on it that it now had stiffer suspension, better brakes, more grip, and better cornering power than most of the pure racing Cobras I had driven. Even though it had a purely stock 225 HP Mustang engine, it generally lapped faster than Cobras having as much as 600 HP, especially at Loudon.
But this car was different. Equipped with a newer specification of race tire, it had the kind of grip that I was used to getting on warm days with new race tires - far more than I was getting from my car today.
And its suspension and brakes were well set up, so the car felt solid, predictable, and it had superb stopping power.
All this made its extra horsepower - about 150 more than my car had, nearly half again more - much more usable. And much more exciting! In turn eight, a fast, uphill sweeper that crested just before the braking area for turn nine, I found myself using less than full throttle, and still arriving at the crest going much faster than in my own car.
What a blast! But it was sobering, too. This was the first time I had ever driven another Cobra and felt that it showed up deficiencies in my own car. I realized that my car would need work if it was going to continue to be competitive in its class, even though the pure racing Cobras like this one ran in a different class.
Before lunch, I scrambled to make an adjustment to my car's rear anti-roll bar. By changing to a stiffer bar, I hoped to cure or at least reduce the handling problem that had hampered my in the corners. The car was tending to go straight, not following my turns of the steering wheel in the corners - the condition known as "push", or "understeer". The front tires, having been overheated at an earlier event, were even harder and less grippy than the rears.
Stiffening the rear anti-roll bar would force the rear tires to do more of the work, lightening the load on the fronts, and hopefully making them grip better.
Running in the warmest part of the day, I was able to get a little more heat in the tires, and the car's balance suddenly came in. At last the car turned when I turned the wheel. The car drifted through the corners feeling beautifully balanced, doing exactly what I asked of it.
But it was still slow, over two seconds off of my usual pace, with a best of only 1:21.9. The tires simply no longer had the capacity to generate the kind of grip they'd had when new.
In the later sessions, as the day cooled, the car went back to understeering massively, especially in the slower corners, and I found myself thrashing the car, stepping off the brake as I entered the corners, trying to get the tail out to make the car turn.
At the club's traditional Saturday evening banquet that evening, I wound up talking with Mark Dougherty, one of the engineers from Factory Five, the company who had produced the kit that I had built my car from. "Mark," I said, "how come you're not running your car this weekend?"
"I don't have it any more," he said. "I sold it and I'm building a Coupe." The Coupe was a replica of the Cobra Daytona Coupe, the version of the Cobra that had won most of the points on the way to the World Championship in 1965. As graceful-looking as the roadster was brutal, the Coupe had a smooth, aerodynamic body that yielded a top speed 20 mph higher than the roadster's.
As yet, all of the Coupe replicas had been built for use as street cars. But a replica Coupe would make an awesome race car, and it had long been I's dream to build one for the track.
"I'm planning to build it as a track car," he said. I grinned. Well, I'd wanted to do it, but simply hadn't had the resources. Now someone was going to do it, and he was someone who would know how to do it right.
"That's great!" I said, despite feeling a twinge of envy. "Can I drive it when it's done?"
"It's a long way from being done." He went on to explain how the company's customers got priority over the employees for kits and parts, and after a two-year wait, the only reason he even had a chassis was that the guys in the welding shop had stayed after hours and worked on their own time to build one for him. Now he was waiting on some hard-to-get parts for the doors, necessary for the early stages of the construction, so the project had still not really begun.
"Hey," said Mark. "Are you four lug or five lug?"
"Five lug." He was referring to the number of bolts that hold the wheels onto the car. The Cobra replicas came in two flavors; I'd built mine with the more sturdy - but more expensive - five lug arrangement.
"Do you have rain tires?"
"No," said I, a little glumly, thinking of the forecast for rain tomorrow. In fact, it had started to rain as I drove over to the banquet, and now it was pouring.
I'd been planning and hoping to get rain tires for the past several years, but somehow I'd never had the money to spare. At $600 for a set of wheels, and another $800 to $1000 for the tires themselves, it was a big investment - and if you had good weather, you might not even use them all season.
Without rain tires, I had been struggling whenever it rained. Years ago, when I'd had a small formula car and an old set of rain tires, I had enjoyed racing in the rain. But running the powerful Cobra on tires that were essentially hard slicks was always going to be a frustrating experience, especially when all of my faster competitors had rain tires. The resulting lack of competitiveness had shaken my confidence and left me frustrated whenever I had to compete in wet conditions.
"Would you like to borrow mine?"
I looked at him, stunned. "Really?"
"Sure. I've got a set of 9 inch rims with Hoosier dirt track tires on them. They make great rain tires. Since I sold my car, I can't use them, and the guy I was going to loan them to this weekend went home already." I remembered the young engineer who had locked up his tires in the braking area for the first turn on his first lap out in the morning, and slid into the tire barrier. He'd been unhurt, but the front of the car was crunched.
"Wow, that would be awesome!" I said. I couldn't believe my luck. "Thank you, Mark!"
That night, as I got ready for bed in my hotel room, I thought about the day to come. I often had trouble getting to sleep the night before a competition event. This night was no exception.
In my championship year, I had won two of the seven events I'd run, and finished second in the rest. Although I'd taken a number of second place trophies in the following seasons - including two this year - I hadn't won an event since.
Because of my horsepower disadvantage against the other cars in my class, I had almost no chance at a win on the faster tracks. Only at Loudon, with its many corners and very few, short straights, did I have a realistic possibility of a win. And up till now, without rain tires, if it was wet, my chances were ruined - and in New England, all too often it did rain.
Now, with access to rain tires - and rain in the forecast - I had a real shot at a win, maybe the best chance I'd ever have. Maybe the last chance I'd ever have.
When the weekend had begun, I had been overjoyed just to be able to be at the track and participate. But now I wanted more. I wanted this win.
I really wanted this win.
In the morning, it was pouring rain. As soon as I could, I went looking for Mark. I found him inside the company's large enclosed trailer, lashing down one of the race cars.
"We're headed home," he said, before I could say anything. "We aren't going to run the time trial. We've got to get back to the factory and start getting ready for the trip to SEMA." SEMA is a big annual show in Las Vegas for aftermarket and specialty manufacturers.
"I'll leave the tires with you," Mark went on. "Run them, and if you like them, give me $300 for them. If you don't, then just get them back to me."
Again I was stunned. The wheels alone were worth twice that! For a moment, I didn't say anything, and Mark looked at my curiously. "Is that ok?" he asked.
"Mark, this is amazing! It's such a gift!"
He grinned and finished cinching down the car.
"C'mon, I'll load the tires in the truck and drop them off at your garage."
I had no idea why Mark was being so generous. I knew he could get parts like wheels at a deep discount, and since it would probably take him a year or two to finish building his new Coupe, he might have decided to move the rain tires on before they aged and hardened so much that they became useless.
Whatever his reason, it was an incredibly kind thing to sell the tires and wheels at such a low price, and I was very grateful. And for a moment it felt like a magical reverse of the oppression that illness had been having on my life.
Working fast, I had the rain tires on my car just as the first practice session started. I missed a couple of laps as I belted in and pulled on my helmet and gloves, but there was still plenty of time to get the feel of the rain tires and work up to speed.
Except it wasn't really necessary to work up to speed. My Cobra was immediately one of the fastest cars on the track. I let one Subaru and one Miata go by on my out lap. Then, as soon as I had felt out the track conditions and the level of grip available, I immediately blew by the Miata and gave chase to the Subaru.
The Subarus that ran in my club were no ordinary Subarus. They were the top-of-the-line performance model known as the WRX STi, and they had more horsepower than my Cobra - a lot more.
And, like all Subarus, they had all wheel drive. They were so effective in wet conditions that almost all of them had bumper stickers that read "Pray for Rain".
I couldn't quite stay with the Subaru, but I kept it in sight for a long time.
While I was chasing the Subaru, a gold Porsche 944 Turbo came out of the pits. This was the car belonging to Mario Bonacorsi, who was currently leading my car's class championship, and which had won the class in the previous event at Loudon - in the rain.
I caught the Porsche, and came close to passing it. Then I got momentarily held up by a slower car, and dropped back. As soon as I was clear, I went to work, concentrated very hard, and soon I was on the Porsche's tail again. As I got ready to pass it, the checkered flag came out.
Since this was a practice session, passing the Porsche didn't matter, but the fact that I was able to catch it was very satisfying, and bode well for the time trials to come.
Back in the garage, I went to work on my car again. This time, I disconnected the rear anti-roll bar. With the wet conditions, I knew that the most important thing was traction, the ability to "get the power down". By disconnecting the rear bar, I would be making the front tires do more of the work. Since they were soft and sticky - far more so than my dry-weather race tires - I figured they would still grip well enough to allow my to turn into the corners.
But by making the rear tires do less of the cornering work, I would be reserving more of their available grip to deal with forward thrust. I'd be trading turn-in ability for traction out of the corners, and that should help my lap times.
In the pits for the second session, I was a couple of cars behind the gold 944. I was hoping to get out right behind him, because running with him would give my a yardstick to help my determine whether the change to the car had helped my lap times.
But the pit-out marshal held me up because some other cars were coming down the straight, and by the time I got out, the 944 was gone.
Although I hoped I was quicker, I knew that the relative speed differential between my car and the 944 would not be enough for my to catch him, so I just concentrated on finding the areas on the track that had the most grip, and figuring out the best lines to take that would allow my to maximize the grip in those spots.
Again I was one of the fastest cars on the track. I was hammering past Miatas, Porsches, Mustangs, everything in sight.
At one point I was passed by a BMW, which was a little discouraging, because usually I was far quicker than most of the BMW's. And BMW's didn't have the all-wheel-drive advantage of the Subarus in the rain.
I was also passed by a Subaru, but I stayed on its tail for several laps. The only place it was gaining on me significantly was up the hill out of turn 4, where I just could not match the Subaru's four-wheel traction.
And then I realized that the 944 was in view ahead. I had caught it! I had made up a deficit of at least ten seconds in less than ten laps!
Things were starting to look really, really good for the time trials scheduled for the afternoon.
By the end of lunchtime, the only cloud on my horizon was the forecast that there actually would be a horizon later in the day. The rainy overcast that had prevailed since the previous evening was scheduled to break up and move on by mid-afternoon.
For me, this was a problem, since if the track got dry, I would not be able to use my rain tires. They were so soft that if I ran them on a dry or drying track, they would melt and destroy themselves within a few laps. I might have to switch back to my hard old dry-track tires even though the track would be cold and would probably still be damp in places. This would be a serious disadvantage.
For the time trials, the drivers would be broken up into groups of four drivers each. Drivers in each run group would go out at nearly the same time, but spaced by about 30 seconds, so they would not ever actually see each other while running their three timed laps.
There were over a hundred drivers, so the time trials would take several hours to run. Because of this there was another issue for me. Drivers who ran at the end of the day, when the track would almost certainly be much less wet or even drying, would have a significant advantage over drivers who ran early, when the rain was still falling and the track was very wet.
The club officials announced that the time trial run groups were posted. I rushed over to look at the listings. I had drawn the very first run group. Mario's 944 was in the same group, but two other fast cars in my class were in the next to last run group, and another fast car would run in between.
I was disappointed, but there was nothing I could do about it. All I could do was do my best, and hope that maybe there would be a big shower before the later groups ran.
Out on the track, I ran three excellent laps, each one faster than the last - which is always satisfying. My last was a 1:36.7. The 944 did a high 1:37, so I had him beat. Now all I could do was wait.
While the other groups did their runs, I started to pack up my equipment so I'd be ready to leave as soon as the event was over. But as I picked up my tool boxes I felt tendrils of fatigue shoot through my body - an indication I was nearing the end of my body's reserves.
Knowing from experience what would happen if I kept pushing myself, I immediately put the tool boxes down and climbed into the back of my van to lie down. The van originally had only two non-reclining seats, but Nate had installed a third seat which reclined, and this gave my a relatively quiet resting space - a feature which had proven essential as I had struggled to continue participating in these track events as my health declined.
After sleeping for about a half hour, I was able to continue loading, being careful to expend the minimum of energy necessary. By the time the last run groups were called to the pits, I'd gotten all my equipment on board the van and had hooked up the trailer and set up the ramps, ready to load the Cobra.
The two cars that ran at the end of the day were both very quick. One of them, a black Firebird Trans Am, had beaten me in a dry event earlier in the year. I was really hoping to beat him. I was standing with a group of other drivers in the pits when I got the word: the Trans Am had spun twice on his first timed lap, and had been disqualified.
The other car was a dark blue third generation Mazda RX7. I knew these cars could be very quick, but I didn't know this driver, or if he had rain tires. I kept hoping until word came through: he'd done a 1:31.5!
Clearly the track had dried quite a bit in the two plus hours since I'd made my run. It had stopped raining entirely over an hour ago. But being beaten because of an advantage in track conditions was still a bitter disappointment.
As I was resting after loading up my gear, word came that the final times had been posted. I joined the crowd looking at the sheets on the wall. I felt somewhat vindicated to find that the BMW that had passed me had set the fastest time of the day. There must be something really special about that car and its driver!
But the results in my own class filled me with dismay. Not only had the RX7 beaten me, but the Mustang that had run about 45 minutes after me had also beaten me, by about a second.
I had one more chance to prove, at least to myself, what might have been. After the final timed runs of the day, the club opened the track for about 20 minutes to any of the competitors who wished to run. I was first in line.
Since parts of the track were now dry, I had switched back to my hard old dry tires. But it wasn't any more dry than when the RX7 and the Firebird had run; it had started raining again, a light mist that probably didn't make it much wetter, but certainly kept it from drying out any more.
On my second flying lap I did a 1:32, and I knew there was more to come, but then I saw a black flag - the signal for the driver to pit for consultation with officials because of a visible mechanical problem or a rules violation. I pulled into the pits, only to find that the black flag had been for the car ahead of me.
Out on the track once more, I was quickly into the 1:32's again, but then ran into traffic and got held up for several laps. Finally, I got clear.
I had time for just one more lap. I gave it everything I had, using the wet lines I'd developed in the morning, sliding the car just a little under power, braking as hard as I dared without locking a front tire, taking the weary old slicks to their absolute maximum.
As my Cobra thundered past the finish line, I could see the checkered flag fall. The session was over.
I looked down at my lap timer.
One minute, twenty-nine point nine seconds! One point six seconds faster than the car that had won the class.
The RX7 driver would go home with the trophy, but I knew who was the true victor.