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NASCAR it's not
Racing takes root in the
dirt
Just inside the bay
door at BC Auto Body in Wheaton on the hottest day of the year,
Josh Nelms and Joe Dynek are taking swings at the body of a car
with rubber mallets. It’s not a matter of poor service. This is Josh’s car. This is No.99, a canary-yellow monster. This is Big Bird. This is 115 decibels, a jet that never takes off. This is an aluminum can bolted onto a rocket. Josh and Joe are spending the hottest evening of the year making sure that it’s a few miles farther from the recycling heap at the end of the day than it was at the beginning. The speed limit in Wheaton goes anywhere from 15 to 45 mph on average. Josh’s car, on the straightway, can double that. So to avoid a suspended license and a return trip to driver’s ed, he and the rest of the crew take Big Bird west on Saturday nights to sycamore Speedway, pay their entry fee, and see what kind of dust they can stir up. Sycamore’s track is dark, thick mud at the start of the evening, a bare-bones representation of the same soil growing an ocean of corn head-high that surrounds this island. It was as though Kevin Costner tilled, packed and banked his ”Field of Dreams” and turned it into pit row. Not long after the speedway was built, The Nelms family came. First Mike, Josh’s father, in 1979,Then Josh, who at 23 has spent 15 years behind the wheel at Sycamore in some capacity. Both he and his family tell the story of how, when he was 8 years old and driving cars in the pits, Josh’s head would disappear under the steering column when he hit the brakes. Josh had to sneak into spectator races when he first started driving. Now he saunters in, proud as a peacock flaunting its feathers. He’s not at the top, but he’s close enough and so it’s time to move on. Ten years after making his racing debut here, Josh is jaded from coming home with dust in his plumage and his feathers ruffled. “I’m moving to asphalt - thank God,” Josh said. “I’m tired of getting dirty. I think Joe’s getting dirty too.’ Joe nods as he taps out enough dirt from the car’s undercarriage to pot a fern. Some hobbies can get to a point where they are becoming too expensive to classify as such, and this is where Josh finds himself. “ When you’re going too far sideways, you can’t go forward,” he said. |
Josh was
talking about the way the car handles around the turns, but it
could just as easily be said for a career in racing. Aside from
winning the point title, the youngest Nelms has achieved
everything he wanted in the super-late-model class. It is time
to accelerate through the learning curve. |