 |
||||||||||||||||
|
Blazing Hot
Living in pursuit of ones dreams is often a challenging and even scary proposition. To stay focused and remain on course in obtaining a goal is often one of the hardest tasks one can endure. However, when the dream is achieved, life can present the best pleasure imaginable. If you believe in destiny then you could say Melanie Troxel is living out the role she was meant to play. Living a dream with each race weekend, Troxel can be considered the gal who has it all. Although she is enjoying the fruits of her labor, so to speak, she is grounded in where she came from and where she ultimately wants to be. Winning her first race at the CARQUEST Auto Parts NHRA Winternationals and finishing runner-up during the NHRA CSK Nationals two weeks later, Troxel knows it’s a great time to be her right now. Nothing spells success quite like leading in NHRA Top Fuel points.
Troxel remains unfazed by the wealth of competitive female drivers citing, the experience is very encouraging. “It’s great to see more women out here; in the last couple of years we have been moving in the right direction,” Troxel said. “I’m really glad to see Erica in Pro Stock because we haven’t had a woman in Pro Stock for a long-time. It’s definitely a step in the right direction and it’s a good thing to see more women in drag racing.” “I don’t worry about when people speculate that I will be the woman to win a Championship, I just worry about me. I don’t mean to be selfish with that; I am just doing the best I can with my team. I just want to go out and win races. Hopefully we’ve made a big step towards that last weekend. Really when you think about it, I’m just a little part of a big team. I happen to be one female that is part of a big team of people who work very hard to make the car go down the track. I guess that is part of the reason why it doesn’t strike me as a big deal, because I just happen to be one female who is part of a lot of other people who make up our team.” a
d v e r t i s e m e n t
Although Troxel just obtained her first Top Fuel win, she is no stranger to drag racing competition. She has driven for a few teams over the years, but received her “big break” in 2005 when Don Schumacher Racing hired her to drive the team's much anticipated second Top Fuel car. “There is more pressure that comes along with being on a successful team, but at the same time there are a lot more opportunities available to me," Troxel said. "So, it kind of goes hand in hand. When you have the equipment and technology to go out and win races, then it puts more on you to live up to that potential. So, that is just part of the deal and we welcome it. That is what we want, we want that opportunity to actually go out and win races. I’ve loved every opportunity I’ve had to drive with the smaller teams. I wouldn’t trade any of it. But, really the long-term goal is to run the full season with a team that can go out and win races. This is it, this is my opportunity.” Troxel was bitten by the racing bug at an early age. The competitive edge and passion for racing is most certainly in her genes. Troxel can credit her parents for her inspiration. “My dad raced Top Alcohol Dragster, along with a lot of other classes, but mostly Top Alcohol Dragster when I was growing up. The race track is where we spent our weekends when I was a kid. I literally grew-up around the sport. I didn’t really have a lot of interest in the cars until my early teens. But I grew-up around it and when I hit my early teens I started paying more attention to the car. They would let me take a valve cover off and that kind of led to me taking auto shop in high school. I wanted to understand more about the mechanics behind it, what was happening in the car. It all just took off from there. In fact I ended up rebuilding engines my senior year of high school. I had taken all the levels of auto shop you could take, so another female in auto shop and I went to my counselors and talked them into letting us have an independent study credit for rebuilding a small block Chevy that my mom had actually given me for Christmas. She was rebuilding a corvette and was putting in an original big block, so she gave me the small block. We rebuilt that and got an independent study credit in high school. I had that in my first actual race car.” “My parents didn’t encourage me to do it and but then again they didn’t tell me not to. They just wanted to let me make my own decisions about racing. My mom had been around with my dad for so long, she was used to staying back and watching and being around the sport. But my dad had never had to do that. He was a bit of a nervous wreck for a while when I started. But once I decided to that this is what I wanted to do they were really supportive of it. My mom was always a very critical part of my dad’s race team; she has worked on the car and definitely knew what is going on. It was a good thing. My dad actually got to see me in 2000 when I first started driving Top Fuel; he got to see that just before he passed away that year. But my mom was actually out in Pomona and got to see me win my first race. Hopefully, my dad was looking down also.”
Most teenagers can barely determine what they want to wear to school, but Troxel knew what she wanted for the rest of her life. Getting serious and making decisions that greatly impacted her future was a lot for young Troxel, but she had the desire deep inside. “At 16 years old I knew this was it. I wanted to drive Top Fuel for a living and I may not have set out and said I want to win a championship or anything. But I knew that was the goal. This was it. I made a conscious decision not to follow other opportunities, not that I didn’t have any other goals or dreams, but that I was going after this one. I actually started college for a while and at that foolish age I didn’t think there was anything in college that pertained to what I was doing, so I decided I didn’t need to do that. I was going to focus on racing. And of course, now I see things that would have helped me over the years like public speaking and marketing and things along those lines. But I made that conscious decision that I was going to focus on racing; that is all I wanted to do with my life. It’s certainly taken a lot longer then I thought it would at that age, but when you are young you want everything now and I wasn’t any different. It’s just been a constant thing that I’ve been working towards all these years. When I first started racing Top Fuel in 2000 I thought I’ve made it, I’ve finally made it to Top Fuel. I’ve broken open the door and I’m finally here. Then that followed with five years of running partial schedules and running for teams that were under-funded and not really having a full-time opportunity to go out and win races like I had hoped. So even though I thought I had reached my goal at that point, it turns out I wasn’t quite there. I’m hoping this finally means that I’ve made it, I’ve got the job, I’ve won a race and hopefully that will allow me to be in the sport for many years.” Despite her initial struggle in Top Fuel, Troxel is now one of the most sought-after drivers in the NHRA. Being entertained with offers by the two prominent “Don’s” (Don Schumacher and Don “The Snake” Prudhomme) of drag racing, Troxel is well on her way to being in the history books. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t
“I really couldn’t believe the way the whole deal came together. It really did feel like a fairy tale. An opportunity like that does not come around very often. So, to work with Don Schumacher in the past and to have worked with Don Prudhomme, I really feel so fortunate to have those opportunities. It was really very tough for me to leave the agreement I had with Snake, but we talked about it and he is a driver and understands that drive within a driver and desire and need to get out on the track as soon as possible. Sometimes I still have to kind of step back, when the pressure is on and you are trying to do so much in the car, and just realize how incredibly lucky I am to have these opportunities to really race and live my dreams - dreams that I’ve had since I was 16. I have to step back and enjoy the moment that I’m finally here. With her career dreams set, Troxel knew she had other life dreams to fulfill. Her public marriage to Funny Car favorite Tommy Johnson Jr. has allowed Troxel to live out her dreams at levels she never imagined. Just last week, the couple fell one round win short of being the first husband and wife to win professional titles in the same weekend. “Tommy and I have known each other for better then 18 years. We’ve known each other for a long time. We both grew-up around racing, we have so many similarities that it’s not funny. That is really what works for us. We both understand that we are really committed to racing and to being successful at this and making this our life. That is one of the best parts of it. We know all the different demands on our time and travel schedule or different things going on, you don’t feel like you are being pulled away from your partner when you have to go out of town. We travel together; we spend almost 24-7 together. In fact, the race track is kind of our time apart. We spend more time apart when we are at the races then any other time. But we understand the passion to be out there doing this and the demands on our time and we support each other in that. “There is also another side to it, the mental side of it. It is really helpful that we know when to leave the other person alone, when they are trying to get in the zone, when they need a word of encouragement or when they just need to be left alone; we understand that, we’ve been in those same positions. It’s helpful to have somebody else that’s like that. I feel just so fortunate to have found that person that understands me completely towards whatever I want. “I’m sure we have a lot of the same struggles everyone else does. It might be a little different have a little different twist on it, but it can get hard sometimes. We come back to the motor home at night after the races and you are in the track in the middle of everything and it’s tough to let it go sometimes. It’s tough to turn off that competitive nature to still focus, you have to relax and enjoy each one another’s company back in the motorhome. It’s a tough deal and we struggle with that and struggle with our competitiveness even with each other. a
d v e r t i s e m e n t
“We joke around with people and say we have a little war going and Tommy has run one mile an hour quicker then me. It’s fun and it’s joking with everyone else but there is a little truth behind that. We are competitive with each other and it’s probably a good thing we’re not running in the same class right now. We have to take a step back sometimes and even though we are joking around about it we realize when one of us does really well one weekend and the other has a bad weekend we have to temper our emotions a little bit and keep the other person in-line and say 'hey - they has a bad weekend' and not make them feel any worse. “It’s been an interesting learning curve and we still learn new things about each other and how to handle situations every week.” What more could a person want? With a booming career, a loving marriage and the world at her feet, a family of her own may be the only thing to top all of that. “Tommy and I both love kids. We are certainly not against having kids by any means. We’ve just kind of taken the approach to it right now that we are staying focused. That is what we both really what we want to achieve at this point. We both think of ourselves as a little bit immature still anyway and we are just big kids right now. If it happens someday, that’s great; we would love to have kids but we are not making plans and we are not focusing on it or picking out a time for it. We want the racing to be our focus right now and we are just going to continue with that and we’ll see what happens in the future.” If Troxel could give any advice it would be to never give up on your dreams. “I think way too many people tell kids to be realistic on what
they can achieve in their life and to not push them to keep their dreams
alive. Dreams are obtainable and even if you don’t achieve
that, just going after that dream I think is worth it. I tell people
all the time if you find something you absolutely love doing in life and
you go after it you will find a way of making a living doing that.
Maybe if your goal is to go out and race cars and you don’t quite
make it to being a driver – if you’ve perused that your whole
life and you’ve found a way of making a living working in drag racing,
I’d still say that is a pretty good thing. Doing something
you love to do everyday – it doesn’t feel like a job. I think
it never hurts to persue those dreams.”
Got a comment? Drop us a line at comppluseditor@aol.com.
a
d v e r t i s e m e n t |
|
|||||||||||||||
© Competitionplus 2005
|
|