Lady race car driver is speeding through midlife

HAMPTON

Debbie Biesecker's truck is smoking. A gasket is leaking. And she still has to qualify.

Anything can go wrong, she says. She could lead the pack one minute and slam into a wall the next.

She walks around her blue-and-gold truck covered with sponsor names and parked beneath a tent at Langley Speedway on this breezy afternoon in late summer.

"It's a little bit tricky to drive," Debbie says, "but I'm learning."

Debbie is 52, a born saleswoman who sold makeup and wood crafts before becoming manager of a Portsmouth sign company.

But when she slides into her No. 14 Chevy S10, she is none of that. Debbie Biesecker is a race-truck driver.

This is her third season competing in the supertruck class at Langley, which makes Debbie a novice since most of the other guys have been at it their whole lives. She is a rarity, too - one of just two women out here.

But she has earned enough points so far to rank fifth out of at least 10 drivers, and she is determined to finish the season this way.

Debbie and her husband, Chuck, who's 57, call their team Mid Life Crisis Racing. Debbie says the midlife crisis was Chuck's and racing was what kept her from killing him. Chuck, team owner and crew chief, says it was hers.

The couple married nearly 28 years ago. Debbie says it was love at first sight. Chuck says she found out he could turn wrenches. They live in Suffolk with two dogs and no children, and they give each other gifts like engines and tire warmers.

With truck racing costing about $15,000 a year, Debbie says they are spending their dogs' inheritance. About half comes from sponsors.

Before the trucks it was go-carts. Chuck had been racing cars since he was old enough to drive. Then in the summer of 1994, the couple was in New York selling crafts for their Suffolk woodworking business - tables and clocks and things made from slices of cypress trunks - when Chuck met a flagman from a go-cart track.

He started helping out at the track when business was slow. Debbie decided she better check it out, too, if she ever wanted to see him again. She entered a race and nearly led on the 10th lap before crashing. It was both terrifying and thrilling, racing around the dirt in a sea of little vehicles, and she couldn't remember ever doing something that felt that way.

She and Chuck raced go-carts all over the East Coast for a decade, until gas for travel got too expensive and Chuck started worrying about them getting hurt. The go-carts were low to the ground, like bumper cars. It didn't take much to send them flying.

"He wanted to buckle me in," she said.

Debbie stands on a step stool and climbs into her truck Bo Duke-style. There is no glass in the windows, the doors do not open and the steering wheel twists on and off. There's a safety seat with head and neck restraints.

She puts the wheel into place, pulls a helmet over her short, spiky, blond hair.

"I'm not Danica Patrick," she says, referring to the brunette bombshell Indy driver. "I'm not gonna shake my hair out and look like that."

Nor will she wear a one-piece driving suit to make her 5-foot-2 frame look longer. "I'm over 50. I have to pee."

There is a box on the truck's gas pedal, welded there so Debbie can reach it. There's a shiny, blue elephant god called Ganesh on the dashboard for luck, a gift from her Hindu friend, Mark Samtani.

Chuck and Debbie are believers in luck. After a tumultuous first and second season - engines kept blowing up, the truck wasn't handling right - Debbie changed her number from 56 to 14.

Four was supposed to be good luck in Hindu, and so was one, so she put them together. Her friends pointed out that it actually made five, which isn't necessarily lucky.

Samtani said prayers over the truck, and Chuck repainted everything. Things went better after that.

Debbie drives off toward the track for a warm-up and then a qualifying lap. She's back in minutes, pulling off her helmet, climbing out through the window.

More than a dozen of Debbie's friends show up, disembarking from a big van. Debbie talks loud and fast, tells them about the day's problems, that she was fifth in the qualifying round. She shows them her truck, and the men peer beneath the hood.

Chuck wipes down the truck windows. Debbie paces, sits for a moment, drinks a Slim Fast and then paces again. She won't eat real food until after the race. Too nervous.

The afternoon wanes. The air, which smells of gasoline and kettle corn, grows cooler. Debbie is supposed to be thinking. Visualizing. She chats with a reporter instead.

Chuck wishes she'd relax a little, but she's always on. She wakes up thinking about what needs to be done next.

It's a shame, he says, that Debbie didn't discover racing sooner.

There are NASCAR books plopped on tables around their house and a framed article about "NASCAR Girls."

It's hard sometimes, being a female racer. Chuck says some of the guys tried to push her out of the way in the go-cart races, a practice that didn't let up until Debbie proved she was as good or better. When she started racing trucks, some of the men expected her to move over for them. Now that she's holding her own, Chuck says, some still expect it.

But Debbie doesn't.

Race time nears. People fill the stands. When the national anthem follows a prayer, Debbie hops up and puts her hand over her chest.

"Play ball!" she shouts when it is finished.

Debbie instructs Chuck to don a bright gold shirt with the team name on the front and a checkered pattern around the sleeves, then disappears to change into her racing suit. She looks like she's ready to jump out of an airplane when she's finished.

Chuck tells her it's time to get into the truck and stop talking. Debbie's adrenaline surges. She asks Ganesh for luck and prays that God will drive with her. The trucks line up on the track in twos.

The race will not be fun for Debbie. At no point will she lead or expect to. She will stay the course and wait for others to make mistakes and try to take advantage. She will feel a rush, and she will learn how to handle the truck a little bit better, and that will make the long day and the racked nerves and the precarious laps worth it.

This is what she loves, even as she spins out at the start, then speeds along amid a mass of trucks so close they look connected, around a truck shooting sparks like a comet.

Debbie will love it even after crashing the blue-and-gold truck in the next week's race, forcing her and Chuck to borrow one so she can finish out the season - still in fifth.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5555, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com