Women on Wheels
The dusty ground is being turned into mud by a truck designed for such a purpose. Strings of spit turned brown from chewing tobacco shoot from the mouths of several spectators. Methanol fumes fill the nostrils of everyone in the area. Wrenches clank and crank on cars. Engines crack and pop so loud you can feel it in your chest. This is what it's like in the pits at the Bloomington Speedway on a Friday night. This is also a place where two teenage girls prepare their sprint cars to race. Miranda Throckmorton, 14, races sprint cars against competition that is often more than twice her age. The age requirement for sprint cars is 16, but teenage drivers can be emancipated from their parents by a judge as young as 14. Throckmorton began racing when she was four and a half years old. She first raced quarter midgets, which is a racecar that is one fourth the size of a midget, with a midget being slightly smaller than a sprint car. Throckmorton has racing in her blood and began to race close to the time her father stopped racing. July 7 was her sixth sprint car race overall and first at the Bloomington Speedway. She felt nervous before her first race at Bloomington. "Bloomington is going to be a lot different for me," she said. "I think it's going to be a little bit faster and different to get used to," Throckmorton said. The Speedway continually wets down its quarter mile dirt track.
