This Is the Way It Should Be

We went to West Virginia for the Pittsburgh Shootout expecting racing. What I came home thinking about had almost nothing to do with the race car.

For the record, the Michigan Tech Formula SAE car ran great. The team did well in their runs, the car behaved, and there were no major catastrophes. If you know anything about Formula SAE, you know that getting to say “the car ran great” is practically a luxury vacation.

But that’s not this story.

Friday night at the Shootout was loud. Really loud. A bunch of the teams were partying and playing something called Flunky Ball, which, based on what I could hear from inside my tent, is not a game designed with neighboring campers in mind.

Our team wasn’t participating. Michigan Tech has a pretty rigid culture about drinking if you’re planning to drive the next day. If you’re driving, you’re not drinking. Period. So while a good portion of the campground was still going strong, our group crashed relatively early.

Saturday night was supposed to be different. Racing would be over, our drivers wouldn’t have to worry about the next morning, and everyone was planning to finally join the fun.

Except a big storm was coming.

The storm basically killed whatever organized competition had been planned for Saturday night, and because lightning was the biggest concern, everyone was told to shelter in place. Hundreds of Formula SAE students ended up packed into a building and the attached pavilion areas that were considered safe.

And instead of ruining the night, the storm created something I don’t think anyone could have planned.

The teams brought beer. Someone had music. Games broke out. There was arm wrestling happening somewhere. Michigan Tech did the most Michigan thing possible and started playing Euchre, eventually teaching a young man from Clemson how to play.

At first it still felt competitive, just without race cars. Teams were challenging each other at different things and everybody was having fun.

But then the edges started to blur.

People wandered into different groups. Team shirts mixed together. The games became less important, and suddenly everywhere I looked there were conversations happening between students from different schools.

They talked about chassis setups and brakes and controls. Parts that worked. Parts that didn’t. Strategies. Design choices. Problems they’d fought all season. They talked about school and life and racing and everything in between.

These were the same people who had spent the weekend trying to beat each other.

Now they were helping each other.

My first emotional moment of the night happened in a bathroom stall.

Because apparently that’s where life’s profound moments happen.

I had gone to the bathroom and heard a few young women talking. They were from different Formula SAE teams, and when I realized what they were talking about, I just stayed in the stall for a minute.

I became a fly on the wall.

They were talking about chassis setups, brakes and their experiences on their respective teams. They were comparing notes and asking questions. More importantly, they were genuinely interested in what the other women had to say.

There was no posturing. Nobody was guarding information because the person standing next to her wore another school’s shirt. Nobody was trying to establish who belonged there more.

They were just women in motorsports talking to other women in motorsports.

And they were taking care of each other.

I’ve spent years with Throttle Gals telling the stories of women in the automotive world. I’ve watched women fight for their space in garages, shops, race teams and car culture. I’ve watched women be underestimated and watched them prove, repeatedly, that they belong there.

And here were these young women from competing universities, standing in a bathroom in West Virginia during a thunderstorm, talking brakes.

It was beautiful.

Eventually I realized I couldn’t hide in the stall forever without making this story substantially weirder.

So I came out and attempted to explain myself.

Basically: Hi. I’m Doni. I promise I’m not some bathroom creeper. I publish Throttle Gals Magazine and I just overheard your conversation and it was wonderful and would you please let me take your picture?

Thankfully, they said yes.

The photo of the girls from that night is the result. If you just look at the picture, it’s a few smiling young women together at a Formula SAE event.

But I know what happened before I took it.

And that’s why I love it.

When I came back out, I found Morgan talking to some guys from West Virginia and Clemson. Apparently there was some debate about which team should claim him in the future. Morgan was firmly defending his planned allegiance to Michigan Tech.

Meanwhile, Carter was apparently willing to negotiate.

He offered to sell Morgan to U of M in exchange for their car.

As one does with a younger brother.

Nobody cared that they were technically competitors. Morgan was getting recruited, Carter was attempting human-for-race-car transactions, people were laughing, and every school represented in those conversations was just another group of car people.

Then Josh S. from the Michigan Tech team said something that hit me harder than I expected.

He looked around at what was happening and pointed it out to me.

He saw it too.

That mattered.

It wasn’t just the mom standing on the sidelines getting sentimental about all these kids getting along. One of the students recognized that something special was happening around us.

Josh looked at all of these competitors hanging out, sharing ideas, helping each other and becoming friends and said:

“This is the way it should be.”

And he was 100 percent right.

I thought that was going to be the moment that broke me.

Nope.

Later I was standing with Carter when Take Me Home, Country Roads came over the speakers.

Everybody started singing.

And I mean everybody.

People threw their arms around each other. Students from different teams stood shoulder to shoulder singing at the top of their lungs. The same people who had been competing against each other all weekend were now one giant group.

My reaction was deeply touching and profound.

“Ugh. This song always comes on.”

Listen, I’m a Scout leader. I have heard Country Roads roughly eight billion times. Campfires, trips, events, wherever. At this point, John Denver follows me around personally.

Carter looked at me.

“Mom… we’re in WV!”

Well, shit.

The entire lens changed.

I looked around again.

We were in West Virginia.

There was a storm raging somewhere beyond our shelter. Around me were hundreds of young engineers who had come from different universities to race cars they had designed and built themselves. Their cars were different. Their engineering philosophies were different. Their team colors were different.

And right then none of it mattered.

They had their arms around each other singing Country Roads.

And I cried.

Of course I did.

Because suddenly the entire night came together.

The women in the bathroom weren’t strange competitors sharing too much information. Morgan wasn’t hanging out with “the other teams.” Michigan Tech wasn’t teaching Clemson Euchre. Nobody was fraternizing with the enemy.

There wasn’t an enemy.

There were just racers.

Josh was right.

This is the way it should be.

Competition is a wonderful thing. It pushes people. It makes engineers rethink ideas that were supposedly finished. It makes drivers search for another tenth. It makes teams innovate because someone else showed up with something better.

But somewhere along the way, I think we sometimes confuse competition with opposition.

You can desperately want to beat somebody and still want them to succeed.

You can want your car to cross the finish line first without wanting theirs to break.

You can share what you’ve learned without somehow making your own accomplishments smaller.

And when something really goes wrong, the competition suddenly doesn’t matter at all.

I was reminded of that again recently while watching an IMSA race from Indianapolis. During the broadcast they talked about an accident that had happened days earlier during the China GT Championship at Shanghai International Circuit.

Ollie Millroy’s Ferrari was involved in a horrific crash and caught fire. Millroy was trapped inside.

Another driver, Loek Hartog, stopped his Porsche.

Think about that for a second.

He was racing.

He stopped.

Hartog got out, grabbed a fire extinguisher, ran toward a burning competitor’s car and helped pull Millroy from the wreckage.

At that point nobody was Ferrari. Nobody was Porsche.

They were racers.

One of them needed help.

The other one helped him.

What happened under that pavilion in West Virginia wasn’t dramatic like that. Nobody was trapped in a burning car. Nobody was saving a life.

But maybe these smaller moments are where that culture begins.

It’s built when a Clemson student sits down at a Michigan Tech table and somebody teaches him Euchre.

It’s built when competitors openly discuss the parts that worked and the ones that didn’t.

It’s built when young women from different teams find each other in a bathroom and talk about chassis and brakes.

It’s built when students recognize something bigger than the competition happening around them.

It’s built when hundreds of people wearing different colors throw their arms around each other because Country Roads came on at exactly the right place and exactly the right time.

Eventually the storm passed.

The teams went back to being teams. Everyone packed up their cars, tools, tents and approximately seventeen thousand things Formula SAE apparently requires you to bring anywhere.

They went home to different universities.

They’ll redesign things. They’ll test. They’ll break things. They’ll fix them. They’ll argue over data and probably lose sleep over parts that weigh ounces.

And the next time they meet, I hope they race the hell out of each other.

I hope everybody wants to win.

But I also hope they remember that crazy Saturday night in West Virginia when the racing stopped and the competitors disappeared for a little while.

Because Josh was right.

This is the way it should be.