The Test
The tall, sandy-haired young man sat slouched in a heap in the private plane's stuffed-leather rear passenger seat. He appeared to be fast asleep, even though he was arranged in what might have been considered to be an awkward position for a catnap. But with his mouth open and his eyes tightly closed, he snored softly anyway. The kid was clearly oblivious to the awkward tilting of the King Air as it circled for its approach to the airport, to the bumpy air it chopped through as it descended, to the casual conversation between the plane's pilot and the other occupant who sat in the copilot's seat.
Rob Wilder had become a master at grabbing sleep wherever, whenever, he could manage it. The cabin of the King Air was downright luxurious compared to some of his more recent accommodations.
The other passenger, the older man who occupied the right seat up front, dropped his chat with the pilot when he got busy on the radio talking and responding to his landing instructions. He turned then to see how the kid was doing and was not at all surprised to see him still dozing peacefully.
Billy Winton smiled. It had been only a short time ago when the young man had been petrified at the very thought of flying, terrified most of takeoffs and landings. Now he was usually fast asleep on the taxi out to the runway and had to eventually be shaken awake when the plane had already been parked.
Then, as he watched the handsome youngster sleep, Winton noticed something else telling. The kid's right foot twitched slightly. So did his right hand, as if he was performing some sort of coordinated maneuver in his sleep.
Billy smiled even more broadly. He's dreaming of driving that race car, he thought. And likely of being first to the checkered flag.
That was a safe guess. That was about all Rob Wilder dreamed about, all he talked about, all he seemingly lived for. Driving Billy Winton's race cars as fast as he could until he could finally win his first big-time stock car race on the Grand National circuit.
Now they were on an approach to a legendary place where he might just do that very thing. It was a shrine to speed where, Billy suspected, young Rob Wilder would feel very much at home, though he had never been there before in his slightly less than twenty years on this planet. At least not while awake. And within an hour, they would not only be there but they would be testing one of the new cars they would soon use to start their first full season of serious racing together.
He hated to wake the kid from his dreams.
The last several days had no doubt been far more tiring for Wilder than driving a five-hundred-mile race in a day at Charlotte would have been. The young man had been pushed and shoved through a three-day series of promotional stops and special appearances on behalf of their team's major new sponsor. Billy had been his constant companion on the trip and he was admittedly sapped, bone-tired as well. But he had merely been along for the ride and had not had to shake hundreds of hands or sign all those autographs or answer all those silly questions with a good-humored smile and pretend it was the first time he had ever heard them.
Even now, this far down the road, Billy sometimes wondered why he had stepped back into the middle of the swirling tornado of serious stock car competition and dragged all these other lives along with him on his obsessive quest. As the chief mechanic of one of the most successful teams in the sport's history, he had gotten more than his fair share of the glamour and glory during the seventies and eighties. And the money, too. Enough of the spoils of victory that, well invested as it was, he could have lived comfortably for the rest of his days without ever having to do any more grueling personal appearances or gritty all-night work sessions, or brutal early morning track tests.
But the money and glory were not what had drawn him to the game in the first place. It was the winning. And Billy Winton had missed that one addictive element so badly he had willingly stepped back into the maelstrom. It had been on a limited basis at first, but he had soon realized that halfway didn't quite feed his habit. Then he took the plunge again big time when Rob Wilder had dropped into his world.
No, normally he would have let Rob sleep all the way to the terminal so he would be a few minutes better rested for the job ahead of him this day. But something was coming up he wanted the kid to see. The turboprop engines changed pitch again as the plane made another turn, a course that brought them perpendicular to the shimmering white-sand beaches and put the orange ball that was the morning sun directly behind them.
He touched the boy's sneaker with his own boot.
"Robbie! Wake up, son. You'll want to see this."
The youngster's eyes popped open and it was clear he was disoriented for a moment, maybe still chasing checkered flags in his sleep. Then he blinked in the bright sunlight that filled the cabin, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands much as a child might, and then leaned forward as much as the seat belt would allow to see what Billy was pointing at below.
A green carpet of pine and scrub oak and pasture stretched off into the far distance, while houses and streets and store parking lots claimed the foreground. The towering beachfront resorts and condos seemed to reach up toward them from directly below where they flew. The ocean was a cold slate gray behind them except for the fiery streak painted by the rising sun.
"Hey, kid," Billy shouted over the drone of the engines, and indicated he should be looking down and to the left. "There she is."
It took Rob a moment to see what Billy was pointing at. Then it emerged from beneath the plane's wing. Even then he had to look twice to make sure it was what he thought it was: a perfect replica of a big framed photo that hung on the wall in Billy Winton's office back in Chandler Cove, Tennessee.
And it was one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen. The gigantic speedway at Daytona Beach! He glanced over at Billy and there was a look on the young man's face that hinted he might think he was still dreaming.
"That's her, all right. Daytona. What you think?"
"Whoa! That is Daytona!"
"The grand old lady herself. The place where legends are born. Built for speed and nothing but speed. Beautiful, don't you think?"
Rob didn't answer as he stared out the plane's window, his nose against the glass, again almost kidlike. The stands were empty, the pits and garage almost deserted, but for an instant he thought he saw movement out there on the track. Petty and Pearson dueling for the checkered flag. Earnhardt nudging someone aside to take the lead. Bobby and Davey Allison, father and son, finishing one-two. Rob could almost see the highlight reels spinning in his mind as he stared at the hook of the tri-oval track down below, its famous tower overlooking the start/finish line.
"It's hard to believe we're looking down on the same place where all those great races were run," he said.
"I've been lucky enough to see a bunch of them from down there close at hand. I watched Richard Petty and Jodell Lee and the others come to the checkers at two hundred miles an hour. And even after five hundred miles of racing, they'd get to the finish and be so close that you still couldn't tell who crossed the line first. Lots of guys who can win races can't win on that track down there, Robbie. It's where they separate the car jockeys from the racers."
Billy left his next thought unsaid. That strip of track that was sliding beneath their airplane would be the next place this young driver would have a chance to prove his own mettle, too. So far, so good, in this young driver's career, but Rob Wilder had not yet faced Daytona.
"It is hard to imagine all that speed from up here," Rob was saying. "It almost looks like an interstate highway with sharper curves."
"Oh, she's plenty fast. Too fast sometimes."
Billy let the words hang as he allowed a whirlpool of memories to claim him. He had spent times both wonderful and tough down there when he had worked with Jodell Lee and his team. Lee had been one of the best the sport had seen, but Daytona had taken a bite out of him more than a time or two as well. Billy Winton and Jodell Lee, along with Jodell's engine builder and first cousin, Joe Banker, and their crew chief, Bubba Baxter, always came to this place fully expecting to win whatever race it was that had brought them here. They had cut their teeth on this track before Billy had joined them. Besides, most of the other teams readily acknowledged that Jodell knew the banks of Daytona even better than he did the mountain roads where he had once run illegal moonshine whiskey for his grandfather. Yessir, this place held special memories for Billy Winton, and now he had high hopes of adding some new ones with his fresh, young crew.
The King Air glided in low over turn three, making its final descent down along the track's long backstretch. For an instant Rob thought the pilot was going to set the plane right down in the racing groove itself, but then he remembered another detail from the picture on Billy's wall. The Daytona Beach airport was right next to the track.
The kid could not take his eyes off the place. That is, until it disappeared out of view as the plane's wheels finally touched down on the runway with a screech and a puff of blue smoke. And even as they taxied over to the flight service hangar, Rob replayed in his head the majestic view he had just commanded.
So this was it! He had finally seen the speedway he had every intention of conquering when they came back here to race in just a bit over a month. Today was to be only a test.
This was Daytona!
From the ground, as he hopped down from the plane's steps, he got a much better perspective of the actual size of the place. It was massive! There was no other way to describe it.
Will Hughes, their crew chief, was waiting for them at the door of the flight service building. He showed them his usual dour expres...
