Eight-year-old Erikia Oliver-Herrmann sat strapped into her race car, perched atop two pillows so she could see out the front.
Ground-hugging, needle-nosed, half-size dragsters droned like high-performance dragonflies around her. Parents scurried about with gas containers and battery-operated starter packs.
Her mother inserted a starter pack into Erikia’s car, “Double Trouble.” At her back, the engine roared to life. Above her head, a Beanie Baby–Bongo the monkey–was tied to the roll cage for luck.
The 3rd-grader drove up to the staging area behind the starting line, next to her competition. Yellow lights on a tall pole counted down to the green light, and then she was off down the strip, reaching a top speed of 52 miles per hour and finishing the 1/8 mile in 12.5 seconds.
But Beanie Baby luck was not enough. She was eliminated from the race.
But not from fun. Erikia took off her helmet and, transformed from a serious dragster into a little girl with long brown hair and baby-faced dimples, headed straight for the grandstand, where the supports under the seats made a fabulous jungle gym.
For hours, the whine of engines rolled across Wisconsin farmland as kids years away from getting their driver’s licenses hurtled down the track of Great Lakes Dragaway.
There was 15-year-old Cory Bocik in the Barbie-aisle-colored car she designed: blazing purple with hot pink flowers and silver peace signs down the front.
Sara Stegall, 12, was strapped into the tauntingly named “My Sister’s Nightmare.” Erikia’s big sister, Rebecca, 15, was racing undaunted after an accident earlier in the year in Canada when her car rolled on its side.
They are among 3,500 kids between the ages of 8 and 17 who race in the National Hot Rod Association’s Junior Drag Racing League, which just finished its fifth year of competition.
And as girls, they are no rarity; about 25 percent of the league’s members are female. In California, for some reason, nearly half the junior dragsters are girls.
“They do as well as the boys, sometimes better,” said John Lorbiecki, director of the program at Great Lakes Dragaway, one of two Chicago-area tracks that offer the junior drag racing. (The other is Byron Dragway, near Rockford.)
Many parents would hesitate to enroll 8-year-olds in an activity that requires fire-resistant suits and the presence of paramedics. They might worry about sending children who have trouble remembering their backpacks down a straightaway at highway speed only inches from the ground.
The National Hot Rod Association does not keep statistics on injuries. But Marilyn Ablott, assistant to the program manager and mother of a junior dragster herself, says the organization has not heard of a single one.
Junior dragsters’ parents point out that the children wear fire-resistant suits and gloves, helmets, neck collars, five-point harnesses and arm restraints that keep their limbs inside the roll cage.
“This is safer than gymnastics or dancing,” said Terry Stegall, mother of two racing daughters. “They’re surrounded by steel tubing. If they roll over, they can walk away.”
For girls, one of the attractions is that drag racing is extremely hospitable to coed competition. Boys enjoy no advantages of physical size or strength.
Everyone is competing in half-scale dragsters powered by 5 horsepower derivatives of lawn mower engines that can reach speeds of 70 miles an hour. The cars act as equalizers, putting the slightest girl on an even basis with the beefiest boy.
The cars’ speed matters less than the drivers’ reaction time. Slower cars get a head start based on trial runs.
The winner of each two-car race is the one that finishes first without exceeding its dial-in time.
The presence of girls in the races goes remarkably unremarked, partly because it is so hard to detect. When the drivers are in their helmets and deep cockpits, all you see is the car, not whether the occupants are male or female.
Not that gender rivalry is completely absent. In fact, it is part of drag racing’s appeal for Cory, a self-assured 15-year-old from Long Grove who finished this year’s season with the second-best record at the track.
“It’s very competitive,” she said, then grinned. “And you get to beat the boys.”
(Sibling rivalry is not unheard of, either. “They can’t touch each other’s cars,” Beth Herrmann said of her daughters, Erikia and Becky. “They’re very protective of them.”)
The boy racers acknowledge the serious female competition. “They’re good,” said Ryan LaMont, 16, of Lake Villa, who finished ahead of Cory to become this year’s track champion.
And the girls are as passionate about racing as the boys. “It’s really fun,” said 14-year-old Nicole Stegall, of Muskego, Wis., “And I love the speed.”
Erikia, on the other hand, was so frightened her first time that “she cried before we got her in the car,” said her mother. “But now we can’t get her out of it.”
Sonya Shosie, an angelic-looking 9-year-old with corn-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes, was also scared, so her father let her try out her race car in front of the house.
“I floored it when I was on the street,” she said sweetly.
Most of these girls have been around automotive speed all their lives, through fathers or uncles who race cars. They become drag racers because they want to drive fast and they want to win — except when 10-year-old Kathryn Kaufman, of Niles, and her girlfriend are racing side by side.
“We don’t want to beat each other,” Kathryn confessed.
Then there is the coolness factor. A girl who has her own race car, and knows how to race and repair it, owns substantial bragging rights.
“It’s something other kids haven’t done,” said Nicole, who can remove her engine, take it apart and put it back together again.
“It’s not like school sports,” said Cory. “It’s the kids getting into it, not the parents.”
“When I tell people what she does, they’re like, `You’re kidding,’ ” said Cory’s mother, Sharon Bocik.
Parents must get into it as well as their kids. Hobbies don’t come much more expensive than this one.
The National Hot Rod Association estimates that a car and equipment can be had for $3,500. But Erikia and Rebecca’s racing costs include $8,000 for one car and $14,000 for the other and $9,000 for the trailer to transport them.
And that’s despite the fact that some work on the cars was done for free. (“Special thanks to Cousin Brad,” maker of the windscreen, the front of Erikia’s car acknowledges.)
“My wife thought this was kind of nuts,” acknowledged Mike Shosie, of Powers Lake, Wis., who took himself out of his own race car this year and put his 9-year-old daughter in one. “But you only go around, once, right?”
Becky and Erikia’s family is not deterred by either the cost or the fact that Becky’s car rolled onto its side at about 30 m.p.h. during a race in Ontario.
Little Erikia, who was racing against Becky at the time, was horrified as she watched her sister’s car roll.
She “was crying and everything as she went past her, but she was handling the car,” said the girls’ admiring grandmother, Joann Oliver, 66, a retired teacher and social worker.
Not only did the 8-year-old have the composure to finish the race, said Beth Herrmann, a schoolbus driver from Burlington, Wis., but “she moved all the way over to the guardrail to make enough room for her sister.”
Becky got out of the car, cried when she saw the damage, then got her car fixed and raced again.
“To prove that I could,” she explained, sitting in her car at Great Lakes underneath her good luck roll cage Beanie Baby, a turtle named Speedy. Her driving gloves were off, revealing alternating pink and blue nail polish.
And she did not replace the damaged wing that had come off the back of her car because, as she told her mother, “This rocket really flies now with the weight off it.”
Parents are pleased to see their children’s determination. Cory is so focused that she practices her reaction time at the starting line, a crucial skill in races that are won by thousandths of a second, at home with a miniature version of the light tree and a thumb toggle switch instead of a gas pedal.
That kind of discipline, parents say, spills over into schoolwork. And junior dragsters learn fractions and the effects of air density on motors, not to mention how to change tires.
“It really helps their self-esteem,” said Curt Oliver, Becky and Erikia’s father.
Seeing girls race makes adult women feel pretty good too.
“I like it when Cory wins,” said Carolyn LaMont, Ryan and Chad’s mother, and added a competitor’s compliment, “except when she races against my kids.”
