“And if I crash?”
Janet scowled. “You already tried that.” She pulled on her headset and leaped onto the team’s timing booth, leaving Mack to climb in the car and start connecting her cords.
Several stalls away, Mack could see Roethlisberger’s team scrambling to get on track, and on her other side, the scoring pylon showed eight minutes exactly left in qualification. A race to line up was on.
Before she’d even finished buckling in, Mack felt the engine roar to life behind her. She was struggling to pull her glove over her mangled hand when the crew chief motioned his thumb in the universal signal forGo!Forgoing the glove, Mack peeled out of her pit stall at the same time she saw the black of Roethlisberger’s car in her peripheral vision. He whizzed past her pit box and pulled into the qualifying lane two car lengths ahead of her.
Except he pulled into the slow lane.
What the hell?He had no time to forfeit, nothing to lose from using the fast lane.
Mack didn’t think. She didn’t calculate time or have a strategy or even know why she swerved around him and pulled into the fast lane.
And instantly lost her previous qualification time.
In the turn of a wheel, she’d gone from an Indianapolis 500 qualifier to quite possibly the dumbest person who ever lived.
She’d given up a spot in the field—a precarious one, but a spot—in order to play a game of time and speed. She could have stayed safe, crossed her fingers that Roethlisberger didn’t have the pace. She should have followed him into the slow lane and prayed that there’d be enough time. She should not have taken the risk.
“Williams, do I see you in the priority lane or am I having an episode of what-the-actual-fuck?”
Over the radio, Janet continued her diatribe, but Mack tuned her out. She’d made a choice, possibly a terrible one, but there was no going back now. Janet said a woman in motorsports had to be sexy or have a good story, and Mack supposed she’d made her own legend.
She wrestled her glove over her sore fingers, timidly tucking it down as far as she could, muffling her yelp on the radio. In the afternoon sun, the internal temperature of the car was over one hundred degrees, and Mack felt sweat trickle down the length of her back while she waited for the signal to take to the track. Her hand throbbed at the bare touch of the wheel.
What the hell had she done?
She flicked a glance at Roethlisberger, and realized every second they sat on pit lane was one second less he had to qualify. In the past, she’d been ruthless and willing to do whatever it took to win. She hadn’t been afraid to take chances. She’d fought for the win even if she started dead last.
She’d refused to quit.
Maybe pulling into the fast lane wasn’t an error in judgment, an impulse, or a stupid mistake.
Maybe the deepest core of her, the part that loved a battle, had done it on purpose.
There are a dozen ways to win a race, Williams. You have to find the right lane.
She was deep in her head when she saw the track official wave her out. There was nothing to do but put the pedal on the floor.
Mack gasped at the ache in her hand as she grabbed the wheel. She reminded herself that she could push through anything for four minutes, that she had to, that she’d pushed through worse. She’d had her fair share of wrecks in life: never knowing her mother, giving up a normal adolescence to chase races, Laurie leaving, unplanned pregnancy, Shaw’s colic, Wes’s accident, almost losing the family business during 2020. Yesterday, she’d crashed out and lost the Indy 500, then her house and the only job she’d ever had. Kelley threatened to take Shaw. She’d even lost her dad, in a way, as he steered toward new adventures. But she’d managed to still be here, still fighting. She could handle a little pain.
Upshifting, she sped onto the main track, careful not to hit the throttle too hard on cool tires, and did a little zigzag down the backstretch before accelerating into the final turns before her qualification run officially started.
Maybe it wasn’t that Mackcouldsurvive something, but that she got the chance. She had the choice to take risks and go for broke. Mack couldn’t control Kelley, or Laurie or Leo or Wes, and not even Shaw, who was her child but not her pawn to maneuver. But Mack could choose her own path, her own attitude, her own destiny. She’d let the past and setbacks and excuses and other people define her instead of taking charge of her own life. If Mack stayed in Haubstadt, or moved to Indianapolis, or went back to racing sprints and chased checkered flags around the country, there would always be something that could go wrong, a reason to stop trying. If Mack wanted to live a big damn life, she had to stop hiding behind her shame and fear, had to stop taking herself off the roster before the race even started.
She had to let go of what had happened and embrace what could be. And the time to do that was right now.
She drove under the green flag and her mind and body clicked into place as her qualification run officially started. She tuned out the pain in her arm and the radio in her ears. The high whine of the engine became the white noise behind her focus, and as she steered into turn one, brain, body, and car melded into one machine. She approached turntwo and considered Janet’s suggestion about holding out for the turns. It was pure folly; she was already driving on the razor’s edge of control and her hand was growing weaker by the second. One small distraction, or debris, or miscalculation would have her back end spinning around and into the wall again.
Yet she knew, felt it down in her toes and up through her spine, that she had more to lose from playing it safe than going for glory. She’d told Shaw that sometimes taking a risk was worth the possibility of getting hurt, and today, Mack would make the field or go out on her own terms.
On her next pass down the front stretch, she prepared herself for how she would take the turn. She thought about the reality of a quarter of a second, the mere millimeters she would move her hands to make a ninety-degree turn, how low she could let her left tire drop below the inside white line without hitting grass.
And then she did it.
It was terrifying at first. She entered the first turn of her second lap sure she’d barrel straight into the wall instead of gliding through the long, acute angle that made up the corners of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but she swooped through the turn with only the tiniest wiggle. She caught the back end and popped onto the short chute on an entirely different line, this time so close to the exterior wall that a quarter could not fit between her right tire and the painted concrete. She forced herself to take turn two the same way, once again driving down so low on the bottom of the track that she flirted with the grass and exited on a trajectory that would end in a tank slapper if she wasn’t careful.
For four laps, she held the car on the edge, dipping her left wheels low as she entered the turns and pushing her right wheels high when she exited. Through the laps, she held the throttle down, never lifting even for a fraction of a second. The pain of her hand had morphed into a numb, unfeeling grip.
