The plush Big Bird doll strapped to the side of Nelms’ car looks a little shaken up and even dirtier than before. This is a replacement Big Bird that Josh had to bring out of retirement, after the first one this year – a “Tickle Me” Big Bird would shake and laugh of its own accord when the car really got going, lost a leg in the accident.
  “I didn’t think the kids would like that,” he said.
  When he began to get serious about racing, Josh made it a point to connect with fans this way. The Big Bird nickname is from six years ago, and has carried onto the helmet, a good-luck stuffed animal, even the color of the car. Big Bird is a name that the kids recognize, and Josh wouldn’t mind if they recognized him, either.
  “The fans make this entire sport,” he said. “Without them, there is nothing to race for.”
  Nothing, that is, except the feeling he gets when he drives, when Josh’s alter ego takes over.
  “It’s the funniest thing there is,” he says, “that adrenaline rush when you put the helmet on, wow. They tell me I put on a different brain when I put the helmet on.”
  But without the fans there’s not much of a following, and a following gets you noticed. A crowd gathered around your car after the race gets you out of the dirt and onto the hard stuff.
  Josh begins to pound out the sides of his $8,000 soda can, modifying his image, while Joe, Dave, Allen and Eddie go back to work on the engine. Two down, two to go.
  The heat race is quick and, all things considered, uneventful for Nelms Racing. A friend, Robert Smith, is not so lucky – his car (Nelms’ old car) gets railroaded to the inside and skips like a stone into the bog at the bottom of Turn 2. Smith has no real pit crew to speak of, save his two sons – both too young to be much in the way of emergency help. Joe leans over to one of them as their father is towed out of the swamp.
  “You’d better be ready and go clean that car,” he says, “because I’m not fixing it looking like that.”
 Regardless of the dirt, he and Dave get to work on Smith’s No. 51 car, though the jagged remains look ready to spill their contents at a moment‘s notice. Dave gets out a floodlight to deal with the darkness, as some of the lights in the pits have been snuffed out.

  Anyone can have an off night. Two weeks prior, Nelms Racing breezed through the whole evening and won the feature race. A week ago, Josh won a 250-lap endurance race – by 20 laps. According to fate, he was likely overdue.
  Barely into the feature race, with the car running better than it has all night and Big Bird getting up to such velocity that the plush toy is frantically waving to the crowd as it circles the track, Josh loses a tire to a crash. Once again pinned inside on the shorter turn that makes up the ¼ mile oval, he pulls himself out of the car through the window, and sits. A few minutes later, Josh is back in the car, brazenly crosses the track like a jaywalker before returning to the trailer. He screams, “flat tire,” to the crew, who are already poised for the situation.
  It’s not NASCAR, but the tire change isn’t a stranded Civic on the side of the Stevenson either, and Josh is able to re-enter the race just as several cars descend on the pits themselves. The warm, dry track, coupled with the large amount of shrapnel planted in it by the spectator cars is causing an inordinate number of flats this night. Still, it would take a wreck the magnitude of a Blues Brothers sequel to put Josh back into the hunt. There are simply too few laps to go around, and by the time Josh is up on the rear of a gaggle of three cars, the race is over. Big Bird ends up 11th fast enough to get back the entry fee, not fast enough to feed someone hungry for success.
  They move the car onto the trailer, then the whole package outside in the alleyway, so people can swing by and say hi. On a night like tonight, there are not many strangers looking for autographs or a peek inside the No. 99 car. Two weeks ago, when he took home the whole ball of wax, there were racing flags to be signed. Just because this wasn’t Josh’s best day, though, it doesn’t Kyle Rigler, 10, from West Chicago, from stepping up, pressing his stomach against the top of the door, and leaning over the window to get a look inside.
  One kid comes over, Joe points over to Josh, the one who should be signing the autographs. Josh gets a pen out.
  “ Where’s the No. 45 car?”
 Josh laughs. One of those nights. He points farther down the drive.
  “Not bad, Josh,” says one visitor.
  “Not good. But the car’s still in one piece, so I’m happy.”
  Josh hops into the cab of the converted Ryder truck they use to haul the car between Wheaton and Sycamore. He’s still driving. In the cab, on a headboard that leads to the back seat, reads a sign from when this was still a rental: Return clean or pay $25 for cleaning.” Next year, fingers crossed, Josh won’t have to worry about getting dirt in the truck.