For Angelle Sampey, the change was refreshing.

None of her friends in Mathews, La., talked about drag racing or Pro Stock Motorcycles or what elapsed time she had or what crazy NHRA fan said what on the Internet. Folks around the Raceland/Mathews community recognized her as the owner of Ava Jane's Baby Boutique, on Highway 1 by the Walmart. It was as if she neatly had put her 15-year, three-time championship career in a box, closed the lid, put that box in a closet up on a high shelf, and then slammed and locked the closet door.

For Angelle Sampey, the change was refreshing.

None of her friends in Mathews, La., talked about drag racing or Pro Stock Motorcycles or what elapsed time she had or what crazy NHRA fan said what on the Internet. Folks around the Raceland/Mathews community recognized her as the owner of Ava Jane's Baby Boutique, on Highway 1 by the Walmart. It was as if she neatly had put her 15-year, three-time championship career in a box, closed the lid, put that box in a closet up on a high shelf, and then slammed and locked the closet door.

And she was content with that decision – more than content.

"When I left the sport, I didn’t look back. I completely just went away from drag racing. I didn’t watch. I didn’t ask. I didn’t wonder. I was completely done with it. I was done, and I said I would never go back to that," Sampey – now wife to business owner Seth Drago and mother to three-and-a-half-year-old Ava Jane – said.

But George Bryce pryed open that door a crack, the box fell off the shelf, and the magic spilled back out. And Angelle Sampey is back on the dragstrip with Star Racing. She and Bryce are seeking funding for a full 2015 season. At the least, they're ready for her to put in one more 2014 appearance for sure, this weekend at Reading, Pa.

"I kind of left with some resentment in my heart, because when I had my little girl, I was mad that I waited so long to have her. And I blamed my career. I was like,' I cannot believe I kept putting this off for all the years I did for that.' She is so much better than anything I've ever done in my life, and I was so mad that I waited as long as I did," she said. "I gave up so much time away from my family. I missed weddings and funerals and birthday parties and my class reunion. I missed so much stuff in my life so I could be at the races. And that was the stuff I was thinking about, what all I gave up for that."

Championship-eligible Michael Ray's sudden resignation from Star Racing in early September, just before the Countdown began, prompted Bryce to suggest a return to Sampey.

"When Michael Ray left, George called and said, 'Will you do this?' The pressure was on: ‘Oh my goodness – I have to make a decision right now.’ And I really didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. If I don’t take this now, it may never happen. So we both kind of just jumped on it."

Neither plunged haphazardly into the decision, although it meant a scramble in the shop for Bryce to cobble together a bike for Sampey and a complete upheaval for her.

Bryce had told her, "There's a lot of questions. There's a lot of what-ifs. Let's worry about any and all those if you drive the bike well, you have fun, you enjoy it, and you want to do this really bad. Let's get that out of the way first." He said they "really streamlined the whole process by taking all those questions out of the picture" and deciding to focus on her two days of re-orientation and licensing procedures at Valdosta, Ga. He told her, "You drive home and I'll drive home, and then we'll talk about it.

"She worked it all out. I wanted to hear it from Seth, her husband. I wanted to hear it from Abigail and David, Mom and Dad. I wanted to hear them say, 'Yes, we want her to do it. Yes, we will participate. Yes, we will help in every way we can.' I wanted to hear all of them say it before we made any decisions. Both of us have been doing it a long time, and I understand the bases that have to be covered."

So did Sampey.

She has been the business manager for Coral Fever, the salt-water-aquarium specialty retail store she and Drago have operated for about six years, and sole proprietor of the baby clothing store that this return to racing has forced her to shut down. "If I can't be there to see over things the way I want to be there, then I'm just not going to keep it," she said.

"I'm having to do it so quickly that I can't just even think," Sampey said last week as she prepared to travel to St. Louis for the AAA Insurance Midwest Nationals. "To try to take care of all those things at once has been a little overwhelming for the last week and a half, two weeks now."

With the store closure, she said that will "be one less thing on my plate and I can focus on racing. We don’t even know if we're going to do the last two races of the year. Once the end of the season gets here and we start preparing for next year – fingers crossed that we'll get some funding for next year – by that time, things will have smoothed out here at home and I can be right back into the groove."

She took heart at one aspect of all this madness: "If you remember my racing career in the past, I usually do my best when things are the hardest. It's kind of a good thing I'm a little overwhelmed right now, because when I get to the racetrack, it's an outlet for me. It's just the way it happened, because it happened so fast. I just didn't have a plan. It was such a sudden thing that there was nothing planned."

But all the pieces fell together so smoothly, if hectically – so much so that she half-joked, "Dang it, everybody's saying yes. I was kind of looking for somebody to tell me no so I didn’t have to worry about it."

She said, "Everything was happening way too easy. I was so scared. I was like, 'I don’t know if I should do this. I don’t know if this is the right decision. I'm a mommy now. What do I do?' I prayed on it, and I just kept thinking, 'If this isn’t supposed to happen, it wouldn’t be this easy. Things wouldn't be going as easy as they're going.' It was crazy, the amount of things we had to get done and just everything was happening and falling into place. We didn’t even have a sponsor, then David Ward stepped up with High Performance Lubricants and said, 'I want to make this happen. What do I have to do to get you guys at some races? So he funds us for three races. Then overnight – and I mean literally overnight – George had autograph cards produced, T-shirts produced. It was crazy.

"He tells me we're going to go to Dallas, and I literally lost five pounds in a week," Sampey said. "I'm not exaggerating. I was averaging 117 when George asked me to ride the bike. When we got to Dallas I was weighing 112. I guess it was nervous energy and stress from trying to get everything done. That was crazy. I told him, 'I've got a new crash diet. You want to lose five pounds? Just go race a Pro Stock Motorcycle.' "

Just before the trip to Gateway Motorsports Park, she stopped for a second to reflect: "It's been pretty amazing at what we've accomplished in two weeks."

Part of the reason the reunion has progressed so well is the level of comfort among George and Jackie Bryce and Sampey and her family. Just as Sampey said she plans to approach her racing career a little differently, Bryce also understands how to gear their relationship differently.

In the past, Bryce said, "Angelle and I were so overdosed with each other and each other's willpower and ability that we burned out in about eight years, the intensity we both have. And she had to go. And I had to go. In about three or four years, we were both pretty sorry. It was one of those cases that we didn’t know what we had until it was gone. Now, we're like, "Wow – this is great!"

But they have a lot of work to do – much of it in the sponsorship-procurement vein.

"The main story is how to get funding for 2015," Bryce said. "We held each other's hand and looked in each other's eyes in Dallas and said, 'If we can’t put the funding together to do this, we're not going to race.' We both agreed. If we can't put the funding together for me and her to do it, we're just going to go do something else. That's a true statement right there."

Sampey said to him, "If we can’t get funding, drag racing is in big trouble."

Bryce said, "It's not big money, and it's a couple of great opportunities to come back together where she's going to get a lot of attention. And whoever signs up to do that deal is going to take advantage of all that attention, because she will focus on them like crazy. That's the way she does it."

Sampey had a salient point. Surely three-time top Fuel champion Larry Dixon, who has gained a seat with Bob Vandergriff Racing, and more recently 16-time Funny Car champion John Force have concluded the same. Bryce had an idea.

"If I was NHRA right now, I would share something with John Force and Angelle. If I was NHRA, that's what I would do. Make those two deals come true, because I'm going to tell you something: We moved the needle at Dallas. She and I moved the needle at Dallas, because the news got people out there. We can prove it. We haven't proved anything, except for I've been racing for a long time and she's popular. That's the only thing we've proved."

He said, "We both believe her comeback can be successful, because of the direction we’re going with it. We're only going to do it if we can. There are a lot of definitions to 'if we can.' We have to have the support team. We have to have the machine. We have to have her capability and dedication. We have to have the money. We have to have me and my support group. All of those pieces have to line up to turn on the green light. We're not going to go just to go. If we were, we'd go to Vegas and Pomona, just because we want to go racing. We want to campaign in an effort to get some more Wallys and get another championship. We want to campaign a full effort, and full effort has a lot of definition to it."

With her husband and daughter and her racing career, Sampey might think she has the best of both worlds. To her, they key is enjoying it all.

"That's why I think this time around is going to be even more fun for me. The pressure's off. I've accomplished just about everything I wanted to accomplish, except for that 'winningest rider' [label]. I'd like to do that. Whether or not that happens, I don’t know," she said. "But I'm definitely going to stand back more this time around and enjoy what's happened.

"I was so worried about my performance and winning that I didn’t even enjoy the ride most of the time," Sampey said. "I went to so many places in the country and I didn’t see anything. That's one thing I thought about: You know how many times I've been to Las Vegas and never went to see the Grand Canyon? How stupid was I? There were so many places I went and didn’t enjoy the scenery, because I was 100-percent about winning. That's all I thought about. We're so busy and so consumed with what we're doing at the racetrack, so worried about getting there and getting back home that we don’t stop and smell the roses. I just never did it. But this time around, I'm going to have my family with me when I can and maybe take an extra day or two and do something before or after and just have fun rather than put so much pressure on myself. I think George is in the same place, too."

The drag-racing world has evolved into an environment today where the media no longer point out a female racer's or female winner's gender. Just about all of the gender barriers have been broken, professional women have won more than 100 races, sportsman-class female racers have won dozens of events, and, as Bryce put it, "That novelty is gone. That's just not the impact it had back in the '90s, when Angelle and I did it with Team Winston. That was just such a huge surprise to everybody."

Nevertheless, he said of her caliber of racer, "There's one and only that I know of that God created, and that's Angelle. That's why she is a 41-time event winner. And there aren't very many guys out here that are. It's not because she's a special girl. It's because she's a special person.

"She was the only girl at the time, and they made it pretty tough on her," Bryce said. "She did blaze a trail. Shirley [Muldowney] went in there and cleared the woods out, and Angelle went in and made a driveway for all the women in the sport."

Of course, Sampey is an emotional racer (just as the far-less criticized other male and female drivers have been). Wearing her heart on her sleeve, after all, is what all racers have been encouraged to do recently to drum up excitement for the sport. Yet Sampey was worried that she'll encounter criticism still. Bryce put it in perspective, telling her, "You win and you’re happy. You get teared up and you’re emotional. You lose because you feel you let everybody down and you cry. Everybody else wants to, but they just fight it. And you can't. It's a trait in you that should be treasured and appreciated.

"Embrace it, deal with it," he told her. "The haters are going to hate and you got 99 percent of [the fans] with you so keep diggin'."

He's diggin' working with her again, saying, "She is a walking data recorder. She is making hundreds of decisions in six seconds. She comes back and tells me about 'em. I'm looking forward to that connection she has."

Sampey has another special connection: Erica Enders-Stevens. The Pro Stock headliner, who also lives in the New Orleans area, exchanges text messages with Sampey. And they plan to hang out together as they travel and at the racetrack.

"She and I kind of lean on each other. I told her, 'Oh, man, that's so awesome. You don’t even know how much that means to me.' It's hard to be on the road alone. My team is awesome. I love 'em. But it’s not the same as having a girl to talk to when you need it," Sampey said. "She understands if Richie [husband Richie Stevens] can't be there how she feels. I said, 'Let's show our faces together a lot more. Let's do some things together.' She said she knows I'm going to miss Ava so she welcomed me over to her pits as often as I need to be there. She said, 'We'll do whatever we need to do to keep your mind occupied so you don’t miss that little girl.' That kind of support from a female who understands things more than a guy does is going to be so much better. I didn’t have that the first time around."

Undoubtedly racing will be different for Sampey the second time around. She still will find life a bit hectic. Some uncompassionate individuals with access to a computer might continue to criticize her, although more will support her. Friends in Mathews will transition from talking about the adorable tutus and dresses and even LSU football clothes they found for their little daughters at Ava Jane's Baby Boutique to how Sampey qualified No. 1 or won a race or kicked some tutus on her Pro Stock Motorcycle some weekend. And she still will wonder about the mysteries of her timing versus God's.

Sampey said, "I start thinking about how much better a mom I am today because I waited so long. I had to do all the things I wanted to do. It was God's plan. It was just the way it was meant to be. And I still regret a little bit that I was 40 years old when she was born. I'm still sad when I think about I may never see, especially if she waits as long as I did, grandkids. I don’t know how old she's going to be when she loses me. I'm hoping it won’t be very young, but I kind of feel bad, like I should've . . . kind of like I did something wrong to her, because I waited too long. That's the only regret I have. But I accept the fact it happened when it was supposed to. There's nothing I can do to change that."

And her Pro Stock Motorcycle colleagues have nothing they can use to squelch that competitive urge in her that George Bryce has reawakened.

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