About three years ago I went to the MO-KAN raceway to race down the track in my junior dragster for the first time. The drive to the racetrack seemed to take forever; I was so nervous and the butterflies just would not go away. My dad just kept telling me that it was easy and that I would be great; looking back at it now I don’t even know why I was nervous, I wasn’t even racing anybody. Racing itself just makes my heart start pumping faster and my body start to shake; it’s not until I get in the car and burn out do I finally start to focus and become one with the car ( I know it sounds lame but that’s how it is for me).

I got even more nervous when we pulled into driveway and I saw Phil Magee’s racing trailer, and I knew that my dragster was in there. As I got out of the car I tried to act like I was not nervous, even though I felt like I was going to throw up. When I was putting on my racing suit, my nerves shifted drastically, I started feeling really excited and I just could not wait to get into the dragster. As I got strapped in and put on my helmet I knew that I wanted to race and I just couldn’t wait to go down the track. When the third yellow light went off I hit the gas and flew down the track; and instead of going the eighth-mile like I was supposed to I went the quarter-mile and thus got the nickname, lead foot. I just could not help but to keep going fast…it is just so much fun! While I sat waiting for someone to pick me up on the side rode by the track I was shaking because of the adrenaline rush. I could not wait to tell my friends about it, I never expected to fall in love with it at all. My parents were on the go-cart pulling me back to the parking lot and of course my mom had to take advantage of me being stuck in the dragster and took ten thousand pictures of me, but I had a good time either way.

Racing isn’t all fun and games though; some people just take racing way to serious. For instance, I my family and I were on our way to the Kansas City race track for the first time so we could see how it was all done on a professional track. We had problems right off the bat; a man loosened something on my car and it almost fell off when I was going down the track. The man also got my sister kicked off the track because she was going too fast and if the officials didn’t kick her off then he was going to write to some top officials and get the racetrack in trouble, so of course they kicked her off. The racetrack really didn’t have any food that we wanted to when I lost a round we decided to leave and get some food; so as I was walking to our trailer the same man came by in his go-cart and called me a loser! I could not believe that some forty year old man was calling me a loser it just seemed so ridiculous!

I am supposed to get my new junior comp dragster sometime; I don’t know when because I was supposed to get it in the summer and that did not happen at all. I don’t have my junior dragster anymore because we sold it, so I haven’t raced all year and I really miss it. We still go to the race track and my dad got his own dragster so I have fun watching him and others go down the track; but the smell always makes me want to kick someone out of their car and go down the track myself. I would actually like to see someone do that some time.

Racing gave me more confidence in myself and my actions. Racing also made me realize that some little children might look up to me because I race. I remember going down the side road and past the spectators and seeing a little girl wave at me and give me a thumbs up. I think about her when I am racing and just wondering what she was thinking; I don’t even know why I think about her so much but I do. Racing helped me to know how to focus when I need to because once I am in the dragster that is all I think about, the race ahead.