It was, without question, the finest example of mental toughness you’ve ever heard of in motorsports history. Maybe in any sport’s history. For sheer gutty emotional discipline or cerebral strength, you might never see it’s equal.
In any walk of life.
The place was Tennessee’s Bristol Dragway, the beautiful drag strip known as Thunder Valley, and the year was 2008.
It was Sunday, eliminations day for the event, and we were struggling with rain. Not the hammering heavy kind that threatens to send you home in a canoe, but the hit-and-miss stuff that can dampen the track just enough to stop racing for an hour or so. We’d get hit for a time, then need to re-dry the track.
Funny Car driver Melanie Troxel, like many other drivers that day, was starting to feel like the clown in a Jack-In-The-Box kid’s toy. She’d get seated in her car, then have to pop out so the crew could cover her machine to protect it from rain. That happened five times before her first round race. Two other times, Troxel had her engine started and was going though her pre-race procedure, only to have to shut the engine off due to the reappearance of liquid sunshine. Troxel actually did a burnout and was staging the car for her race when rain came back on one occasion.
That is a significant moment in nitro class drag racing. The starting line stoppage forced the crew to take Troxel’s car back to the pits to service the engine and other systems on the car. You can’t just start one of those things and then turn it off.
Melanie Troxel climbed in and out of her race car eight times during the first round that day. The eighth time was a charm, obviously, because she won the race.
Then she went on to win the event.
If you don’t understand drag racing, you’ll never understand how hard it was to do what Troxel did that day. Drag racing is about building up to a specific instant, the single slice of time when the green light begins to glow. A driver must be perfectly ready to trigger the 9,000 horsepower monster that powers the car.
Once a drag racer puts that driver’s helmet on, she enters a little world where the smallest distraction means losing. You’re either perfectly ready or the other car beats you. The other car might beat you anyway, but that’s a different story.
Melanie Troxel put her helmet on and then took it off without racing seven times during that first round at Bristol. Read it again: Seven times. Then she went out and beat everyone.
Nowadays, if she sees rain in the forecast on race day, Troxel shrugs. She figures she has an advantage. She’s the toughest drag racer on the planet, mentally, and she knows it.
Thanks for reading.
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