Charmin Carmen

This page is about a woman, and could be titled; Why I would make a lousy Muslim. Racing at the level that we did it is a family affair. I had many close friends among our competitors and worked on their cars as much as my own. The reason was simple. If my guy, or in this case gal was going to win, I wanted her to beat you at your best. On any given Saturday night I would work on between five and ten cars. If Bill V was there he would work on an additional three or four, in addition to helping me. One day Greg V decided to sponsor a woman that had no money, and a very old beat to hell racecar. We put something together for her, and got her out for the last biggest race of the year. She passed two thirds of the field on the first lap. As she got to turn four, she got wrecked by someone not wanting to give up the spot. Over the winter one of our people that we helped with tech stuff approached me about making Carmen a winner. We agreed to work together on this project, thus giving the lady the resources that only the guys with ten or twenty thou a year had to play with. We took the engine out of my wife's old station wagon and tried to race that! It was a little low on breath in the straightaways so we tore it down and rebuilt it over a Monday through Wednesday. During that time Bill V spent many hours trying to get more breath out of a set of heads that were just too damn short of breath. Thanks to his efforts we got about an other fivehundred rpms down the straightaways. Made practice on Thursday and raced on Friday. We wrecked on Friday and spent all night getting ready for Saturday. Saturday was a big track with lots of banking, we knew we were going to run out of breath about half way down the straightaways. On the other hand we could out pull anyone coming out of the corners. All we needed was for Carmen to be able to put the power to the track. We had about five people working on the car that night, three of them drivers from cars she competed against. Everyone loves an underdog, even if it beats you. She beat dear friends that night. I thought Doug, her benefactor was going to throw me off the back of the stands he was so excited. We worked our asses off all year, and she gave us two track championships. We knew she would go out and win, or break the car trying. She, more then anyone else taught me that given a reasonable chance a woman could do anything she set her mind to. I remember one time we finished a race and I was in the pits getting the trailer ready, and packing our stuff to go home. The guy next to us had a bad night and was taking it out on everyone. The pits used to be a forty acre cornfield, so there's not much light. He came in hot, and did a doughnut and hit the trailer I was standing on. It knocked me to the ground, while taking a Lil bit of daylight and sense with it. That girl grabbed him by the face and helped him from his car and over to me. She read him from the book about what she would do to the man that hurt her engine builder or any of her crew. He apologized and walked off. I was looking at her kind of funny so she grabbed her breasts and said, " I've got a pair too! I just wear em a lil higher then you do!"