What's driving Tricia Jean Smyrski?

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 7, 2001

Maybe it's the speed. Maybe it's her dad's ambition for her. Maybe it's those few seconds on the race track when the rest of the world falls away.

PINELLAS PARK -- Tricia Jean Smyrski steers her silver-blue dragster to the starting line and squints into the gasoline haze.

Her dad is spraying water on the strip, waving a hose, shouting.

More than 3,000 race fans line this 1/8 mile of asphalt -- on truck hoods, lawn chairs, trailers and bleachers. Clouds the color of cigarette butts hover over the horizon. The air tastes like exhaust.

It's 11:05 a.m. on a sweltering Saturday in December.

Mustangs and Monte Carlos and Camaros are growling around Sunshine Speedway, gearing up for the biggest race this track has ever held. More than 300 drivers from across the South have come to compete for a $2,500 purse -- plus bragging rights.

[Times photos: Bill Serne] Tricia Smyrski, 16, tries to cool off before starting her second time-trial at the Sunshine Speedway in Pinel las Park. Even on the hottest days, she has to wear a fireproof jumpsuit, gloves and a helmet and a cush ioned harness around her neck. She has never flipped her dragster but, in November, it caught fire during a race. She escaped unscathed, and her dad rebuilt the car.

Tricia's head is humming.

She can't hear a word her dad is saying. She tries to read his lips, but heat waves and high-octane emissions are wrinkling the sky. She lowers the visor, pushes a button on the dashboard.

Blasts off.

Smoke belches from both tailpipes. Rear wheels spin and shake. Chunks of tire shear off, pelting people in the front rows.

"Awesome burn-out!" booms a big-bellied man in a Jeff Gordon ballcap.

"That little girl is brutal!" the guy's buddy agrees.

"So she heard me!" her dad screams.

For six months, Tricia's dad has been telling her: "Smoke the tires, Honey! Get their skin crawling! Give 'em a show!"

Tricia never has. Until now.

She's 16. This is her first big race.

He's 51. She's his last chance.

Most drivers here at HEADS UP MADNESS are men twice Tricia's age. She's the youngest woman ever to compete in Super Pro Bracket racing at Sunshine Speedway.

Tricia Smyrski steers her dragster toward the starting line at Sunshine Speedway before the first heat in the HEADS UP MADNESS race. At 16, she's the youngest ever to race at the track, competing mostly against men twice her age. The car has a glamorous past. It was the one Keanu Reaves raced against in the movie Parenthood. Tricia's dad, who is her biggest booster, bought it for her.

"She went straight from juniors to beating the big boys this season," track owner Todd Dickinson says. "She's good and calm and she's winning Quick 8s.

"There's guys go their whole lives and don't get that!"

Tricia never wanted to drive. She was in three auto accidents before she turned 12. She's terrified of cars.

She's so freaked out behind the wheel that she pins a golden angel on her racing harness for protection, begs her dead grandmother to watch over her, sees herself dying in fiery crashes.

Drag racing is one of the world's fastest, most dangerous sports. Punching the accelerator on a dragster is like launching a rocket down an alley. The cars fly side by side down a strip the length of two football fields. The race is over in less than seven seconds.

Most races are won or lost at the start -- sometimes by less than a hundredth of a second. If you peel out before the light blinks, you're out. If you don't get off the line fast enough, forget it. There's no time to catch up.

And there's always the chance a car might flip. Tricia has met men who've shattered their legs, guys who've crushed their arms, a woman who lost her thumb to the sport.

Yet two nights a week, ever since summer, she's been tearing down this track at 130 mph.

She says she wants to race dragsters for a living.

What's driving her?

She has thick, straight brown hair, slightly slouched shoulders, sleepy brown eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. She's 5 feet 2, 116 pounds.

She owns two dresses. (Her school, First Baptist Christian in Pinellas Park, made her buy a plaid skirt, but she doesn't count that one.) She wears big T-shirts and baggy sweatpants, gym socks, Adidas sneakers. No jewelry. No makeup or nail polish. No headbands or barrettes.

She likes rap music and pizza and Mountain Dew. She collects angels and candles. She has 27 'N Sync posters taped around her bedroom. But she doesn't think Justin is as cool as she used to. Not since she met Dan at the dragstrip.

She hates history and algebra and science. She has been held back twice in school, which is why, at 16, she's in ninth grade. She despises reading so much she makes her mom read the directions on frozen pizza boxes.

She failed the written part of the driver's license test four times. In July, she finally passed.

She seldom speaks unprompted. Gives short answers:

What does it take to be a good racer? "I don't know. Anything."

Why don't dragsters have alternators? "I don't know. Ask my dad."

Why do you want to be a pro driver? "It's not hard. I can make more money than playing softball. I want to buy stuff."

She wants new sneakers. A big pool and basketball court for the back yard. She promised her mom a new house.

Her dad moved out two years ago. He lives in a loft above his Camaro parts store.

Tricia takes care of her mom, Patty, in a three-bedroom ranch on 57th Street N. Her mom had a stroke five years ago. Can't move her right side or walk. Tricia gets her glasses of water, carries the phone to her, brings her books.

Most evenings, Tricia drives her mom to Boston Market for takeout. They eat in front of the TV.

Twice a week, she sees her dad. They go to the dragstrip.

"It's our thing," he says. "My visiting rights. Her future."

Tricia says nothing excites her. Her cousins bug her because she never cries. Maybe everything rolls off her. Maybe it all sinks in.

Steve Smyrski has thin, straight brown hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, brown eyes behind mirrored shades. When he was Tricia's age, he street-raced. Lost his license a few times. He took his first trophy here at Sunshine, in a '57 Ford.

He doesn't race anymore. He'd rather rebuild cars.

He owns a '55 Chevy, '67 Camaro, '88 Chevy crew cab, two Harleys and a speedboat. He wears Dodge baseball caps and Levi's. He's taught automotive classes at Pinellas Tech for 21 years.

Melting in 90-degree heat, Tricia Smyrski sits behind the steering wheel in her dragster and waits for her turn at the first time-trial. With her are, from left, her nieces, Saundra, 11, and Cierra, 8, and her boyfriend, Dan. Tricia has two half-sisters and a half-brother who are much older. They are her dad's children from his first marriage.

When Patty got pregnant, Steve told the guys at the garage he wanted a son. He wanted to share his Hot Wheels with someone, watch NASCAR with someone, teach someone how to thread a spark plug. He wanted someone to talk to under the hood.

He built Tricia's first dragster around a lawnmower engine, around the time he moved out. She wouldn't drive it.

"I just didn't want to," she says.

"I pushed the car. She went two feet and stopped," he says. "Then I got mad."

"I really didn't care."

"I made her get back behind the wheel."

"He made me."

She pushed the button. Started zipping down the driveway. Steered straight into the concrete block garage.

"She did it on purpose so she wouldn't have to race it."

"I was still playing softball."

"Took me a few weeks, but I fixed it."

The next time, Steve took Tricia to the track. In the chaos and combustion, amid the deafening din, he taught her life lessons: Keep the wheels straight. Don't be afraid. Keep your eye on the finish line.

"I'll take care of the rest," he promised. "I'll be your pit crew. That's what dads are for."

Tricia doesn't know how to replace a fuse or charge the battery or add oil.

Her dad doesn't know the name of her teachers or even her school.

In the gravel ring around this dragstrip, they're getting to know each other.

About 1:15 p.m., while her dad funnels 106 octane fuel into the dragster, Tricia shuffles from the shade of her trailer twisting her hair into a scrunchee.

She aced her first time-trial today. Now, it's almost time for her second. She folds her ponytail into her helmet. Zips the jumpsuit to her chin. It's 90 degrees. She's moving listlessly for someone who's about to harness 650 horsepower.

She buckles the six-way belt across her lap, around her thighs, over each wrist, around her chest. She slides her fingers into fireproof gloves.

Drops her head into her hands.

"I'm not okay," she says softly.

Her dad hears her, somehow, above the metallic roar. He whips off his T-shirt, drapes it over the rollbars. Bathes her in shade.

He presses a sweating Pepsi can against the back of her neck.

"You'll be up there soon," he says. "Don't worry."

He flips a switch, trying to turn on the fan. Nothing. He flips the ignition switch, trying to start the engine. Nothing. Wiggles some wires, checks the motor, jiggles the battery. Nothing.

So now Steve's got a sick driver and a dead car.

This was supposed to be their big day. In the half-year since Tricia has been racing with the big boys, she has won $150. Not even enough to cover race fees. If she wins tonight, her dad said, she gets the $2,500.

Steve has invested $80,000 in his daughter's racing. He bought this car when Tricia outgrew her junior dragster. It has a modified 427 big block Chevrolet engine, a parachute tucked between the thick tires. Steve rewired the switches, changed the plate battery to a gel cell, replaced the transmission, torque converter, brakes.

Tricia's hands were too small to reach the ignition. So he built a new dashboard, moved the transbrake button to the right. She couldn't work a stickshift. He converted the car to automatic. Her job is to push a button and step on the gas.

He repainted the ebony exterior her favorite color: silver blue. Stenciled the name Strike Zone Too on the side because she used to pitch before she gave it up to drive the dragster. He even bought her a set of practice lights wired with a button so she could work on timing back in her bedroom.

He's not about to give up now.

He sends Tricia to his truck to wait in the air conditioning. Rips the battery out of the dragster, hooks it to a generator, reconnects the cables. Tries again. Nothing. Checks the exhaust. Fine. Unscrews the hood. Starts pushing fuses.

Finally, in a nest of wires, he finds the 1/4-inch culprit. "That burn-out must've rattled it lose," he says, snapping in the fuse.

This time, when he flips the switch, the engine erupts.

Tricia returns, pouring a bottle of Aquafina down her back.

She reacts to the light in .506 seconds, an almost perfect score. Does the 1/8-mile in 5.38 seconds.

Now, if she can just do that in the race.

Steve knows Tricia won't go to college. She doesn't have much ambition, many interests. He doesn't want her to wind up working at McDonald's.

So he's trying to give her the future he wanted for himself, to share the one world he knows.

He's staging her to take off, as they say at the strip.

A couple of months ago, at the Bradenton speedway, Steve made Tricia meet famous drag racers "Big Daddy" Don Garlits and Shirley Muldowney -- the only woman ever to win three world championships. Steve prodded Tricia to get their autographs, asked them to pose for pictures with her. Bragged about how his little girl was tearing up the track, turning heads and taking heats up at Sunshine.

After he'd talked to Muldowney for 10 minutes, Tricia finally spoke. "Oh stop, Dad!" she pleaded, rolling her eyes. "That's annoying."

By the next afternoon, Steve had processed the pictures and pasted them in Tricia's scrapbook. The 3-inch-thick binder has photos from every race Tricia has been in. A couple of timeslips from the track are in the scrapbook too. But Steve keeps most of them in a red rubber band inside the glovebox of his pickup.

Without racing, he doesn't know what he and Tricia would have.

"I know this is a fairy tale we're doing here. But wishes come true sometimes," he says. "We're just holding on. And if it puts Tricia in the spotlight for a short time in her life, she'll always have that -- that and her scrapbook. And she'll always have racing as a hobby, at least. As long as she has that, there's happiness."

Two weeks before HEADS UP MADNESS, Steve came up with a way to find Tricia a following. He decided to forge her future in 100 percent cotton.

He designed a T-shirt with Strike Zone Too printed on back. He had a guy stencil the dragster in full-color, copy Tricia's signature beneath the fat wheels. He ordered 48 -- at $5 apiece.

Steve wanted the shirts in time for this race. He wanted Tricia to throw them into the stands, so everyone would know a 16-year-old girl was inside that helmet, behind the wheel of that super-fast car. He knew the track wouldn't get a crowd like this for a while.

The shirts never showed.

All morning, Steve kept calling the printer on his cell phone. No one answered. And now Steve can't find those 8-by-10 publicity photos he had printed for Tricia to sign.

Not that she minds.

"She doesn't know how important it is to promote yourself," Steve says.

"He's always bugging people," she says. "I don't want to talk to them."

Steve Smyrski gives his daughter a hug and tries to pump her up for the race. "With Tricia, I can still be the top dog,'' he says. "When she qualifies No. 1, I'm still the mechanic, the pit crew, the winner. Not to mention the proud dad.''

He's constantly cooking up new schemes. He paid $400 to have Tricia's name painted on the front bumper of the world's fastest limo. It's going to charge 300 mph down the dragstrip after the time-trials. The owner promised Tricia could stand beside him at the starting line, hear her name over the loudspeakers.

When Jim "Jet" Neilson calls Tricia to the limo, her dad is as excited as she is annoyed. "Take your hair down, honey," Steve says. "Let them know you're a girl."

She untwists her ponytail, walks away. When she gets to the limo, she ties up her hair again.

Four other women are waiting on the track. Clearly, they're not drivers.

Wearing halter dresses, platform sandals, scarlet lipstick, melon manicures and enough hairspray to ignite in the engines' backfire, they're smiling and waving beauty pageant waves. They're about Tricia's age. They seem a different species.

This morning, Tricia got up at 6, stripped her mom's sheets, ran three loads of laundry. Fed her chihuahua, Susanna, breakfast, made her mom's lunch. Grabbed an Egg McMuffin on the way to the dragstrip.

Now, she's being upstaged on her own piece of asphalt, by the same sort of girls she didn't fit in with in middle school.

She dives into the limo's back seat, anxious to escape.

In the stands, Steve keeps his camcorder rolling.

Tricia Smyrski waits for the first heat to start with her boyfriend, Dan. Lately, he has been helping to push her dragster to the starting line and recharging the battery. Tricia's dad likes him; he's a good mechanic.

An orange '67 Camaro is coughing at the gate when Tricia steers to the starting line for her first heat.

It's 4:10 p.m., a little cooler now. She ate a turkey sandwich and she's feeling better.

She sat in the shade with her new boyfriend, Dan, for almost an hour, wearing headphones and drinking Mountain Dew. Dan is 18. He's her first real boyfriend.

He's tall and blond and has three rhinestones in his left ear. He wears a red Budweiser racing cap and a Bill Elliott jacket. He's rebuilding a 1981 El Camino.

He hangs out with Tricia at the dragstrip, holding hands and kissing between the trailers. For his birthday, he wants to drive her dragster. When his car is ready, he wants to take her on a real date.

Before Tricia started going to the strip, she didn't talk to her dad much, didn't tell him when she liked a boy, didn't share secrets. "Now I do," she says. "Some things."

Steve pushes the dragster past the stands. He's on the left side. Dan is helping on rear right.

"This is it!" Steve yells.

Tricia looks back at Dan and smiles. She turns over the other shoulder and squeezes her dad's hand.

Steve flips the fan switch. He hoses down the track. Tricia watches the lights: yellow, green . . .

She shoots down the track.

From inside the cockpit, she sees only smoke and lights. Hears only engines. She can't even feel her own body. She's 2 inches above the ground, in a metal cage in front of the engine. The vibration is numbing.

She scores her best reaction time ever. Crosses the finish in 5.35 seconds. Makes it to the second round.

"One down," her dad says.

Tricia Smyrski checks the air in her dragster's tires before each trip down the track. It's the only automotive maintenance her dad makes her do. In the background, he unhooks the battery from a generator. Dragsters don't have alternators because that would add more weight. So the battery has to be recharged for every run. Note the parachute between the tires.

Before her second race, Steve recharges the dragster's battery and checks the fuses. Tricia is leaning against Dan, wearing her headphones. At the track, she listens to Eminem -- cranked.

"That can't help," Dan shouts, lifting her left earpiece. "It's too hard and angry. You should be trying to relax."

"I am," Tricia says. "I'm singing in my head. That way I can't think."

The sun drops behind the concrete block snack bar, painting the sky bruise-purple. Tricia drinks another Mountain Dew. Answers one last question.

Why does she like drag racing?

"A-drel-li-an," she says, sounding out the syllables. "You know, speed. The rush."

At 7:15 p.m., Steve and Dan push Strike Zone Too down the tower lane. A black Vega is waiting at the line. Steve punches some numbers into the computer, flips the switch.

"You can do this," he says.

She drops her visor. The men back away.

All this time, Tricia's dad has been driving her toward his goal.

And she has been driving . . . away from boredom, loneliness, responsibility, home, school, pressure to fit in. For six seconds, while she's flying down the strip, she doesn't think about flunking math or making the beds or taking her mom to the grocery. She can't. There's too much racket.

So she does what her dad tells her: holds the wheels straight, keeps her eyes on the finish line.

Sometimes, the best you can do is hold on.

The Vega revs its engine. The light turns yellow. Tricia pushes the button. Peels off, spewing enough rubber to make any dad proud.

Then the light blinks green.

She started too soon. Disqualified. Her dad slaps his baseball cap on his Levi's.

She steers through the gasoline haze.

Back at the trailer, a man is waiting. He hands Steve a stack of freshly printed T-shirts. Steve hands them to Tricia.

"We still got work to do," he says.

She groans.

She and Dan walk through the stands, hurling the shirts at kids.

"Can we go home now?" she asks after a half-hour. Her dad is still packing tools and the generator. There's another race next week. She unzips her jumpsuit, reaches for her headphones.

A skinny teenager walks toward her, waving a Strike Zone Too T-shirt over his head.

"Hey! Tricia! Can I have an autograph?" he shouts.

"Don't have a pen!" she shouts back.

"Wait!" Steve calls. "I do!"

Tricia's racing schedule

Tricia Smyrski's next race is Jan. 17 at Sunshine Speedway in Pinellas Park. Qualifying rounds start at 6 p.m. The race begins at 8. Admission is $5.

Starting Feb. 2, she'll race every Friday night through November. Same times, same place. Admission is $10.

Sunshine Speedway is on 126th Avenue, heading east off 49th Street.

For more information, call Team Backstreet at (727) 541-3087 or e-mail Steve Smyrski at SSmy417149@aol.com.

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