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Speed Isn't Enough

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The Sanders brothers lift off the entire front of the car, setting it down three feet away. The fiberglass is molded so thin, it wobbles in the breeze of a big box fan. They remove the doors and run a fat black accordion hose inside, hooking it to a yellow-gold Power Cat fan to cool off the clutch.

"Remember the '94 car we had?" Mike Sanders asks. "Sawed it down the middle and made it narrow, like an arrow. Aerodynamic." He turns to one of the onlookers who's wandered in to watch, part of drag racing's populist tradition of touring the pit area.

"Tim an' them can do anything," brags Mike. "Tim built one of our first cars, you know. And he was always straight and honest with us. So when he couldn't afford a car and we didn't want to drive, we called him."

Roger Sanders nods. He's the sterner of the two brothers; with his eyebrows knit low, his black beard and short, burly body, he looks ready to head back to a Tolkien mine. Mike's friendlier looking, pink-cheeked and bespectacled, his little mustache salt-and-pepper, his bald spot hidden under a blue ball cap. They come from Lenoir, North Carolina, "where all the furniture's made," and they live 45 minutes from a cluster of NASCAR teams and the Hickory oval track. Their dad drag-raced, though, and they helped him, and because motorsports fans always choose, they chose drag. Now they own a company that makes industrial and specialty motors, and they run a racecar for the fun of it.

Mike stands at the engine for twenty minutes, waiting, listening, cranking the belt around with a long wrench. Roger points what looks like a gun, flashing a light beam on the front of the engine to check the timing. Diane McAmis, neat in white leather tennies and navy shorts, chats over by the fan, telling somebody how she would've died if they'd told her, back at Buchanan High School in Troy, Missouri, that she was going to marry Tim McAmis.

"He was Mr. Future Farmers of America," she groans, "and I was on drill team -- I thought I was cooler than I was." Years later, she ran into him at his class reunion after breaking up with somebody else and deciding she didn't like guys very much. "He just kind of weaseled his way in there, asked me to a Sammy Hagar concert," she says, running a hand through deliberately shaggy blond hair. "We've been together for twelve years now." She laughs about how opposite they are, summing it up in shorthand:

"I smoke and drink, he never did."

Then she smiles, tilts her head.

"Tim's loosened up a lot."

In his version, she's settled down.

"I didn't think she was the type for me," he tells a friend later. "She's wild. She likes to have a good time. But she livened me up a bit, and I've kind of calmed her down." A grin sneaks over his even, sweet Christopher Robin features. "She'd probably be in a halfway house by now!"

A dad in a Budweiser Lawn Lizard tee stops to gawk. Acquaintances come by, and McAmis asks how they're doing.

"How are you doing?" they correct him, startled by his niceness. He's the hero -- he shouldn't be asking about them.

One woman pronounces him "calm as a cucumber."

"I've been doing this a long time," he says with a shrug. "On Sunday, it'll be more nerve-wracking. People will be throwing things in here, tearing the whole engine apart in 45 minutes. You might not want to hear the language."

He flashes back to Bristol, Tennessee, last fall, when they had to strip the car down to the frame rails and replace the engine, transmission and clutch before going into the final. Five people busting ass in 45 minutes, shoving on heat-resistant gloves to yank out the sizzling engine.

Hoelscher interrupts the memory, thrusting "hero cards" into his stepson's hands for autographs. They buy 10,000 at a time, and they last maybe five races. They're not cheap, either, McAmis thinks ruefully. But you've got to have them. People come around with bags and collect them.

He leans against the trailer, listening to his stepdad tell a fan how they started out doing tractor pulls when Tim was in high school and how Tim pulled that little tractor all the way to the state championship.

"He's long since passed me up," says Hoelscher. "Tim's real smart."

McAmis waves away the compliment and walks behind the car. He prefers work to praise, believes people make their own luck.

The rear right tire's flabby now, slumped against the wall, waiting to be pumped back to importance. McAmis glances at the eighth-inch dimples engineered into the $500 treadless tire, knowing its gummy-smooth surface will wear that far in just a few races. Then he frowns and crawls under the wheel well, not even noticing that he's kneeling on a wrench. He runs a finger over a spot worn white, palpating the metal like an ER doctor.

Wheel shake. Too much clutch.

How much can he get away with tonight?

He glances over to the shady patch where family members, in from out of town, sit on folding chairs, fan themselves, hold cold beer cans against their foreheads. Nice that they came, but he can feel the pressure building. When you're racing near home, people come and watch. They want to see you win.

At 7 p.m., the air's only marginally cooler, sticky with the day's $5 lemonades, corndogs and cotton candy. A kid has his head down on a picnic bench. Flushed vendors lean on their booths' counters, selling the gloves and helmets and wheel covers that turn the morning commute into fantasy.

The crowd's denser by the minute, people standing six deep at the rail.

On the way to line up for the evening race, McAmis passes the pro-stock bikers' rigs. Mike Phillips' tall, beautiful wife stands with her hands on her hips, already sick of the smell of motor oil on her clothes and hair. The couple's little girls sleep on a blanket, their African-American skin dark against its pink folds. McAmis thanks God one more time that drag racing's not lily-white.

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