Krista Baldwin can remember the carpets.

The 28-year-old Top Fuel rookie and third-generation driver – who happens to co-own her car and equipment with 90-year-old grandfather, Chris Karamesines – recalled her earliest memory. And naturally, it involved drag racing. After all, her father was Top Fuel racer Bobby Baldwin and her mother’s father was the legend known fondly to fans as “The Golden Greek.”

Baldwin said, “I remember when I was a kid that I can go to either pit. I could go hang out in my dad’s pit or I could go hang out in my grandpa’s pit, because I had different toys in different trailers. In my grandpa's trailer, it's like a short carpet. The wheels of my toy dragsters would glide across the carpet a lot easier than in my dad's trailer, because my dad’s carpet, or rug or whatever it was, was a little bit longer. So the wheels would get stuck. I still had the babies and the Barbies and all that kind of stuff, too. But I just remember rolling the dragsters on the ground. I remember the two different lounges on how different they were.”

She put the dolls and toy dragster away and is a race-car driver like her grandpa and dad, and she isn’t playing. The Pittsboro, Ind., resident, a graduate of Northern Arizona University has no time for that. Outside the race car, when she isn’t preparing herself to take the reins of the race team solely or serving as General Manager of Paul Lee’s Funny Car team, she works as Creative Director for McLeod Clutches and the other companies in Lee’s Wharton Automotive Group.

“I'm on adrenaline kick the whole race weekend. When I get home Sunday night or Monday morning I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I'm exhausted,’ because I'm going a million miles a minute. A thousand things are going through my head. But I wouldn't change it for the world, that's for sure,” Baldwin said.

“It's this unique situation that we put ourselves into. But in order for me to be successful at this, with the multiple hats I wear at the racetrack, I have to have  really good time management, like really, really good time management. Make sure that my team on the Top Fuel car is good. Make sure Paul’s team on the Funny Car is good. Make sure the hospitality is running. I have my list of things to do every weekend. But every time you hit the gas, though, in one of these cars, it all goes away,” she said.

“It's definitely interesting,” Baldwin said. “But the way I look at it is as long as I keep my head down and I keep working and I just keep hustling the way that I do, eventually it's going to come out in the end, and my hard work is going to pay off in some way that will make me drive this Top Fuel car more times throughout the year.”

She said her work ethic comes from her father: “It goes back to, probably seeing my dad had his own Top Fuel car. I remember seeing him working every day up until he leaves for an event. I mean, shoot, I've only had eight short years with him. But I remember the hustle he to do to get that race car on the track.”

And she shows his enthusiasm, just like he did.

“When he gets to the racetrack, he's just so excited to be there. He's so excited to be with his friends and so excited to drive a Top Fuel car. That's what I had growing up. That's what I saw. I take what he did, and now I'm just trying to translate it into the skill set and the knowledge that I have. It's work, and it'll come.”

She’s excited every race to be around her racing team members, as well as her close friends.

Baldwin has a reliable core of crew members.

“We do have outside help, but we have outside help from a lot of people. I say, I have a lot of friends. No – Grandpa has a lot of friends out here. The cool part is a lot of friends help us make this car go down that racetrack. One big thing is that Dom Lagana took a lot of time to make this car right, in the sense of he pulled everything off the car and put it all back on the car. He just made sure everything was right for me to get in the car. Just that alone has increased our potential of consistency, and we have been very consistent since I've been driving. We have a lot of good friends that helped us tune this car. We couldn't get by without them. Now, a lot of the time they don't want to be mentioned. It’s a collaborative effort across our friends of drag racing.”

She said she has the same crew members at each race and that “it’s a mix between my grandpa's crew and my crew with Anthony Dicero and Jake Sanders. Then my grandpa brings in his crew, and we all work together, and we're all learning how each other services the motor or services just during rounds.

“It's a wonderful chaos,” Baldwin said. “We have so much fun now. Everything is so right. We all joke with each other. It's a really cool mood that me and my grandpa have put together this group of men and ladies. Katie Buttera is one of my crew ladies, and she's also my backup girl. She owns Apple Girl Art. She's the granddaughter of Little John Buttera.”

Putting up shiny elapsed times and speeds are fun, satisfying, desirable, and surely in Baldwin’s future. But for right now, she’s in her comfort zone.  

“That's pretty cool that I get to do this with my best friends and my family. I mean, me and Katie, we're best friends, and we're both third-gen babies out here. So it's pretty fun. Our grandpas and her grandma and my grandpa were good friends. Our moms are friends, and then we're friends. So it's pretty fun,” she said.

One key person in Baldwin’s life is mom Paula Baldwin-Flanagan.

“Every time I go up to the line, she's scared. That’s just being a mom,” Baldwin said. “But she's so proud, and she tells me a lot. She’s like, ‘You’re doing it. You’re actually doing it. I'm so proud of how you hold yourself in different situations.’ It's not easy working with my grandpa, but she's like, ‘Just keep your head on your shoulders and just remember to make the smart decision, because you are the team owner with him. You have to realize that it's just you and him now.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

Team-owner status is growing on her, she said.

“It’s definitely taking that mentality into the race car. It's literally my right foot is connected to my wallet. So whenever I feel something go wrong with the car on a run, in three seconds I have to make that decision: ‘OK, do I battle it? Do I leg it out? What do I do?’ So I usually try to not throw caution to the wind and I make a good decision in the race car just because it is me and him. It’s me and him putting all our money into this. So I can't afford to blow up anything right now.

“But my mom is super, super proud. She loves it. She loves being a Top Fuel mom,” Baldwin said. “She and Jill Prock are best friends. They're having the time of their life, especially when Austin and I raced each other in Norwalk. It was pretty funny between our moms. We have this picture, Austin and I were standing there, staring at each other like, ‘You're going down.’ And our moms are on the other side of the picture, sitting there, ready to punch each other out. It’s a lot of fun. Lining up against Austin, lining up with someone that I know, that I'm friends with, that I hang out with normally, it's fun. I mean, it's so cool that we get to be in this little gang together, and we get to drive 330 miles an hour.”

Baldwin’s “gang” is reminiscent of the close-knit bunch of drag-racing friends – Ashley Force [Hood], Brandon Bernstein, Eric Medlen, Morgan Lucas, and JR Todd. They called their clique the “Gen2Cru,” occasionally the “Brat Pack,” styling themselves after Hollywood’s mid-century “Rat Pack” that included Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr.

She said her group includes such racers as Justin Ashley, Jordan Vandergriff, and Ashley Sanford, among others. “Actually, almost every person that came from the alcohol ranks into Top Fuel has raced with me in my car at the Nitro University with Anthony Dicero. It's kind of funny that I was on the sidelines teaching them how to drive the A-fuel car and now we're competing together in the Top Fuel level,” she said.

She said she and Justin Ashley have “been friends ever since he came into the alcohol ranks. So to see him with his success has been really inspiring.” As for Vandergriff, she said, “I miss hanging out with Jordan [who’s in attendance this weekend at Indianapolis], especially since he moved away from Indy. But he'll come out in due time. He’ll find something.”

Meanwhile, Baldwin already is starting to find that ‘something’ she’s looking for.