The Black Tiger

by Patrick O'Connor

"Come on, baby," he said and urged the MG to more speed. Slowly he crept abreast of the first MG and was now fully in the gap. The car beside him started to slip behind. Woody felt a tinge of pleasure and triumph. He was now ahead of the first MG but not enough to swing over and pass the second. Suddenly he saw the brake light on the car ahead flash red for a second. He was braking for a bend. Woody made a split-second decision. If he braked now, he'd lose the ground he had made. If he speeded up, it would be to go into a corner again faster than he should. He hit the accelerator.

To the spectators it looked as if he were a bolt shot from a crossbow. His car leaped forward swiftly to pass the one ahead right on the curve. There was a cry of "Ooh," which Woody heard clearly above the roar of the engines.

He had to take a chance now. He was going much too fast. He had to step on the brakes and risk being hit by the car behind. It was either that or spin out on the corner. He hit the brakes hard—so hard he could hear his tires scream and feel the back of his car slew around. Then he stepped on the accelerator again and pulled the steering wheel over to the right. For a second it looked as if he was going to spin around completely on the track. Woody did indeed spin around at a right angle. But this served to help him around the corner and when he hit the gas again, he was safely on the straightaway and had passed three of the cars that had passed him in the early seconds of the race.

He hardly saw Rocky, Tom, and Steve as he flashed by the start-finish line. If he stopped for a second to think of what he was doing and the risks he was taking, the trembling and anxiety would return. Instead, he concentrated on urging the MG to even greater efforts.

On the next three laps he passed three more cars. A fourth dropped out for a pit stop, and that put Woody seventh from the end. Since he had started out fourth from last he was doing well. He began to feel much more confident of the MG's ability to stay on the track when other cars would have skidded off into the hay bales, and began also to enjoy himself.

The crisis of the race came at the beginning of the hairpin in the sixth lap. In the five times he had passed it previously he had noticed that there was a tendency for the cars to bunch up there. Everyone slowed down and concentrated more upon getting around the bend than in passing each other on it. There was a straightaway of about a quarter of a mile leading to the hairpin, and Woody tearing down this caught up with a huddle of five cars that had changed down to get around the hairpin. They were all hugging the inside to give themselves a chance to skid wide over to the far side of the track when they got around the hairpin.

Woody decided to reverse this process. He would start into the hairpin from the uncrowded far side of the track and try to cut the MG hard over to the inside when he was around. There would be great risk of a collision in doing this. But there was also the chance of passing two or three cars on the one bend if the maneuver came off.

He approached the hairpin then on the outside and picked a place on the inside as his target, toward which a red Porsche was speeding. If things went well the Porsche would be out of the way when he wanted to get in there. He changed down from fourth to third and third to second, and, with his engine roaring, cut hard over.

Then everything happened at once. There was a scream from behind, and a Singer squeaked by right under his front wheels. It went by as a black blur, and in so doing, trapped the driver of the Porsche so he had to step on his brakes to avoid a collision. The gap that Woody had expected to appear just wasn't there. The Porsche still half filled it. Woody glanced in his rear-vision mirror. There were two cars on his tail, the Porsche dead ahead, the Singer, and another car blocking him on the left.

His only chance was to cut off the track onto the dirt shoulder and make room for himself there. He headed the MG for the shoulder, picked up a skid, slewed sideways, straightened, caught a glimpse of a telephone pole, pulled his steering wheel hard over to the left, hit the gas, and then, to his astonishment, found himself around the hairpin with only the Porsche ahead.