 |
| WHITNEY LAIL GOES AFTER THE FLAG AFTER HER FIRST WIN. (STEARNS PHOTO) |
Lail wants more time on track
By Tom Gillispie
Whitney
Lail’s been running Hickory Motor Speedway’s truck division since 2012, but
she’s planning a change this year.
She’s
still driving the truck division early in the season, but she hopes to be
racing Limited Late Models starting in July. She’s practiced with the Limited
car on occasion, and she figures she’ll be ready by July.
Why
move up to Limiteds? The truck division has regularly low truck counts, and it
only runs 10 races a year. She doesn’t have a lot of chance for seat time, and
she doesn’t face a lot of vehicles when she does race.
Lail
drives for car/truck owner Ashley Huffman, whose Dwight Huffman Racing also fields
cars for Huffman (Late Model), Travis Byrd (Limiteds) and Dillon Houser (also
Limiteds). She says that DHR has been in the Lail family for many years.
“He
(Jeff Lail) was a crewmember for Dwight’s car; Tony Warren was driving,” said
Lail, from Hildebran. “I wasn’t born yet. After Dad was married, he stopped
helping at the track.
“Then
after Dwight’s accident (in 2008), we started coming back.”
Ashley
Huffman says that he and Jeff Lail have a close relationship.
“We’re
like brothers, and he started sponsoring me in 2008,” Ashley Huffman said of
Lail’s wrecker business, Smokey’s, Inc. “When she turned 16, she started
running the trucks fulltime.
“She’ll
run a partial Limited schedule this year, probably five to eight races,
starting in June.”
He
says her racing is all about getting better.
“She’s
come a long way” since 2012, Ashley Huffman said. “She’s improved a lot. I look
for big things from her. She doesn’t have a lot of experience, and with Limited
Late Models she’ll get more experience, more seat time. In the first (truck)
race this year, it was night and day from last year.”
Lail
says DHR has been in her family as long as she can remember.
“My
dad was helping out with Dwight Huffman, and I sat around and watched my dad
have fun,” she said, who finished fourth and third, respectively, in the first
two truck races of the season.
“I
thought, ‘Now, it’s time for me to have
fun.’ ”
Jeff
Lail, 47, helped Whitney get started in ’08.
“He’s
the one actually kind of pushed it,” she said. “He loves it. He gets a lot of
enjoyment seeing me race. People ask him, ‘Do you get nervous when she races?’,
and he says, ‘No, it’s safer in a race car than in a regular vehicle.’ He’s my
biggest fan.”
Lail
graduated in 2013 from East Burke High, where she was involved in student
government and a nursing club called Health Occupation Students of America. Now,
she’s a freshman working on a neonatal nursing degree from Lenoir-Rhyne University,
and she hopes to work at Catawba Valley Medical Center after graduation.
It
would mean she could still race at HMS.
Still,
she sounds almost ambivalent when asked about possibly racing at a higher level
if the opportunity came along.
“I
wouldn’t be bashful to take it, but I love Dwight Huffman Racing,” she said.
She thought a bit, then added, “I love racing here, and I don’t plan to go
anywhere else but Hickory.”
Contact me at tgilli52@gmail.com or nc3022@yahoo.com. Also, my Twitter handle is EDITORatWORK.
More entries from TARJ
(a book of great stories about the Intimidator)
(the book of great NASCAR stories)
EDITOR@WORK blog entries
Entries from The Dog Blog
More blog entries by Tom Gillispie
Anecdotes by Tom Gillispie
No comments:
Post a Comment