Quarter Midgets: The Beginning

(Note: I love you guys so I'm going to try and find as many of my own photos as I can to help explain. Even if it means taking pictures of pictures because we don't have a functioning scanner. They're limited right now, b/c my mom is being a butt and isn't letting me search for old photos, but we'll make do. And if you're curious for more, you can check back later when I do get photos.)

I ice skated before I raced. Let's just get that out in the open right there. I started ice skating when I was 3. I started racing when I was 9.

My brother is two years younger than I am. When he was a couple months past 3, my parents took us to the county fair. They had those silly two-seater go-karts you could drive around the little track they set up in an unused parking lot. My brother rode with my dad, I with my mom. He fell in love with it and would not stop talking about racing. He wanted to race. Right at that moment. After a little bit of research, my dad figured out you could start racing these things called quarter midgets at 4 and a half. Well, start training to race them. You couldn't race anything besides a novice class until you turned 5 or, for those of us who joined after we were 5, until you had run 3 races in a novice class. We had my brother signed up for training when he was 4 and not long after his half birthday, he was being trained to race quarter midgets.

My family didn't go to our first national event until the summer my brother was 7 years old. I had a regional ice skating competition in the middle of the week long race. I didn't place, for the third competition in a row. I wasn't getting anywhere in ice skating, forced to make a decision to make it a hobby or truly pursue skating as a career. I quit and was in training for racing that fall.

My first quarter midget race was the Winter Nationals in Las Vegas. It's not actually a national event, as it mainly draws a specific group from CA, with a few friends from the surrounding states, but we call it such just the same. There's no actual track. The race is held in a parking lot, a track outlined by hay bales. It's moved casinos over the years, and it's not actually held in Vegas, but in Primm, about 30 minutes West, just inside of Nevada on I-15.

(This photo was taken 7 months later, but everything looks the same.) Anyway, that was my first race. There was only one other person in the Senior Novice class (you had to be 9 to race and senior class, he was 10). I qualified fast time (I was very good at qualifying) but was second in the heat and main. It's okay. I didn't know how to pass. They teach you that in training, but it's much different when the person doesn't actually want to be passed, you know? Just like with anything in sports. You can practice a move against your teammates, but it's always that much harder against someone who doesn't actually want the move to work.

By the time the above photo was taken, I had graduated novice and moved into Sr. Honda. That's when the real fun began.