COVER STORY: Why do they race?

By Joe Scott, News & Record (GoTriad)
August 4, 2009

ALTAMAHAW — They call themselves the X-tremes, and their home is the Ace Motor Speedway, a three-eighths of a mile racetrack within a maze of back roads near Elon University.

The X-treme series is not the fastest or the most prestigious series at Ace. An eclectic rabble of used cars ranging from beat-up sedans to late-model sports cars hit the speedway every Friday night.

Drivers must meet only three qualifications to race: All vehicle glass must be replaced with Lexan windows, and their cars must include a stock dashboard and the original owner’s manual.

“It’s just a safety issue,” says Robert Turner, head steward at Ace Motor Speedway. “We try to keep the cars as close to the way they are on the street as possible, and up until a few years ago, even the radio had to be functional in it.”

He says that the reason the owner’s manual is required is in the event of a last-minute technical inspection.

On the track, they view each other as competitors. Off the track, they are a family.

It took a recent tragedy to bring that family closer together. Racer Tommy Price died unexpectedly before the races July 10. His death affected many of the X-treme drivers, including Keith Brame, a friend and fellow driver.

“He was a good dude. He helped me out, and I helped him out,” says Brame, who races at Ace and 311 Motor Speedway in Pine Hall. “He had been racing a lot longer than I had when I started racing, and he helped me out a lot.”

Most drivers painted tributes to Price on their rear side windows. They also followed the oldest of Price’s six children, age 15, as he drove his late father’s car around the track for two laps. Before another series started, the X-tremes walked among the crowd, driving helmets in hand, so they could collect the money needed to pay for Price’s funeral.

“That’s just the way it is here at Ace,” Floyd Edgley says. “If a friend from the track called me and he needed a motor and I had it, he could come and get it.”

Such an act of devotion to a fallen member could be part of the answer to the question: Why do they race?

It’s certainly not the money. Because of the economy, sponsorships for Ace drivers are at an all-time low. And the most an X-treme driver can make for winning an Ace competition is $65, a mere fraction of what it costs when one considers the oil, gas, tires and engine parts they must buy to stay competitive.

So, we entered the pit area and spoke to four drivers about what keeps them running in the X-tremes. They are Keith Brame, this year’s points leader; Edgley, and his wife, Sandy, who race in the X-tremes together; and Harold Jefferson, a pastor by day who uses his love of auto racing as an opportunity to share his love of God.

Their prospects might be different, but all of them have found something they enjoy in racing, and there’s no other dream they would rather chase in their free time.

Keith Brame

Car: No. 12, Pontiac Sunfire ’95

Rank: First place with 558 points

Trivia: His nickname on the track is “Boo-Boo.”

Keith Brame is the best kind of winner — the kind that doesn’t like to brag.

“I just try to keep quiet to myself,” says Brame, 28, with a voice that’s as soft as his eyes. “I don’t talk no junk to nobody, and that’s because I don’t like to hear no junk, either.”

Sitting in his Gibsonville living room, he enjoys his wife’s sweet iced tea. Brame keeps his hair short, and he is always grinning. And although there is a shelf towering with more than 50 of his racing trophies to the left of his couch, he never stops to look at them.

Brame is a second-generation driver; his father raced cars known as modifieds at Ace until the hobby became too expensive to maintain.

A welder by vocation, Brame has been racing in the X-tremes since 2006 and driving cars since he was 13. He started driving his family’s car around their home. It didn’t take long until his father recruited him to drive them to the grocery store. Brame drove four-wheelers and drag-raced dirt bikes throughout most of his adolescence and early adulthood. Then he finally traded up to race cars when a high school buddy stopped by Brame’s house en route to a race at Ace Motor Speedway.

“So, I rode over there with him to help him at the racetrack, and I’ve been over there ever since,” Brame says.

Brame found a Pontiac Sunfire much like the one he drives on the street in a junk yard. He fixed it up, revamped it with a new engine. And by June of his first racing season, he won first in two separate races –– called “twins” –– on the same night.

“I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it,” Brame says. “I had gotten second so many times, and it seemed like I was never going to get first.”

He has won countless races since then but still doubts his ability to win.

At Ace, the racers’ starting positions are determined through random drawing. Before the Aug. 7 races, Brame pulled a number that put him in sixth position at the green light, a fate the driver believed would keep him in third place at best.

But by lap 14, Brame was darting around the track in first place, using precise turns to keep his bumper directly in front of racer Michael Neal’s car to block him and secure the victory.

“He’s special,” Floyd Edgley says about Brame. “If I hit the lottery and could buy a good car, I would put him in the driver’s seat.”

A good car is exactly what Brame needs. His reason for driving at Ace, as well as at other similar tracks in North Carolina, is one day to become a full-time driver in bigger divisions, where scouts and potential sponsors are more likely to notice his talents. The only thing keeping him from doing that, Brame says, is money.

“I would definitely like to move up, but I don’t want to be put in the same situation that my dad was in,” Brame says. “So, I definitely have to have somebody to drive for or a sponsor or someone who will help me do it.”

Sandy & Floyd Edgley

Car: No. 94, Ford Escort ’92 (Sandy); No. 96, Mitsubishi Eclipse ’94 (Floyd)

Rank: Sixth place with 372 points (Sandy); eighth place with 258 points (Floyd)

Trivia: Both keep good-luck charms next to the passenger side window. Sandy’s is a plastic rose; Floyd’s is a rubber chicken.

Floyd Edgley says the only difference between his wife and the other X-treme drivers at Ace is that she has long, blond hair.

“I think she’s a natural,” says Edgley, 49, of Burlington. “And I’m not just saying that because I want supper tonight.”

The couple met while riding the school bus when Sandy Edgley was 12 and her future husband was 14. They got hitched four years later and have been married for more than 30 years.

They first lived in Florida, where they raced go-carts. Eventually, Sandy Edgley, 46, gave up racing so that her husband could compete in national competitions across the country. However, when they moved to North Carolina, they hoped to leave racing behind for good.

“It was too much like a full-time job,” Floyd Edgley said.

Then, when Sandy Edgley watched her female cousin race with the X-tremes at Ace, the racing bug bit her again. She wanted to drive, so her husband built a race car and gave her first dibs.

“I felt like we were hooked again,” Floyd Edgley says. “Where Florida was work, this was actually fun. So, to pay her back for all the years that she didn’t get to race, I built her the first car, and that’s where it went from there.”

When her cousin moved on, Sandy Edgley became the only female driver in the X-tremes at Ace. She says this never becomes an issue unless a new male driver starts racing at the track. The newcomers will try to bump her car, move it out of the way or sometimes spin it out, but she keeps an iron jaw and holds her line on the road.

“I don’t intimidate easily,” Sandy Edgley says. “So, once they try and it’s all done, then it’s over with.”

And at the race on Aug. 7, Sandy Edgley does pretty much what she thought she would. She nets seventh place, holding her position in the season (she has since advanced to sixth place).

Floyd Edgley, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. More than halfway through the race, the oil seating unit that screws in next to his oil filter fell off, causing his car to spew motor oil all over the track. Edgley detected the problem, cut the engine and got his car into the pit, a move that most likely kept his engine from exploding.

But when driver Matt Kirkman drove his Honda Prelude through the oil from Edgley’s car, he slid into a wall, totaling his vehicle. Fortunately, Kirkman was not injured.

“I think my racing career is probably over,” Kirkman says. “The axle is trashed, the engine is tore up, but that’s the chance you take when you race.”

Floyd Edgley is a little more hopeful about the situation.

“I was talking to him after the race about taking the car over to Mike Massey, who’s got an auto frame shop.” Floyd Edgley says. “I’ve had stuff over at Mike’s, and Mike can probably put it on that frame machine and pull it back out in about an hour.”

Harold Jefferson

Car: No. 55, Ford Escort ’91

Rank: 10th place with 230 points

Trivia: He has suffered three heart attacks, none of which happened while racing.

Matt Kirkman wasn’t the only driver affected by the oil that spilled from Floyd Edgley’s car on Aug. 7.

Harold Jefferson said when he ran over the slick, the oil splashed onto his transmission, slowing his car so that he finished the race dead last that evening.

“I think that’s the first time I ever finished last,” says Jefferson, 62, of Yanceyville.

His transmission was repaired three days after the incident, and he takes the loss in stride. Winning is not the biggest reason Jefferson drives at Ace. On Sundays, he works as an associate pastor at Pleasant View Assembly of God Church in Reidsville, a fact he believes is an asset to his fellow drivers off the track.

Before the races begin on Friday nights, Jefferson says a prayer or “invocation.” He also offers prayer and counsel to his fellow drivers who ask for it.

“About three weeks ago, I led a man and a woman to the Lord over there at the racetrack, and they’re going to church and doing good,” Jefferson says. “I’ve been knowing them for a while, and matter of fact, they came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been going to church every Sunday, and I’ve enjoyed it so much that I want to be saved. Will you lead me to the Lord?’

“So I took ’em around the side of a truck at the racetrack and led them to the Lord.”

And although most drivers at Ace believe in the unwritten proverb of driving around competitors as competitors drive around them, Jefferson adheres to the Golden Rule. He doesn’t drive aggressively “bump” other cars in retaliation or hold grudges. This has kept him from winning many races, but he feels to do otherwise would be the act of a poor Christian.

“Harold is one of the cleanest drivers out there,” Sandy Edgley says. “Harold’s my buddy.”

“Whatever I do, I have to do it in a Christian manner,” Jefferson says. “And if I want to keep God’s blessing on my life, I got to let people see him through me.”

During his seven-year stint at Ace, Jefferson almost won one race before the driver behind him knocked his car against the wall and took the victory.

“Most people say I owed him one, but I didn’t,” Jefferson says. “Even when we win, we only win 65 dollars, and it’s nothing there that should cause anybody to have a conflict with anybody.”

Want to go?

What: X-treme auto racing

When: 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11 and 18

Where: Ace Motor Speedway, 3401 Altamahaw Race Track Road, Elon

Tickets: $4-$11

Information: 585-1200 or www.acespeedway.com

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