The Cot Stayed Folded

The cot was Hector's idea and it took up an absurd amount of room in the chase truck. He defended it for the entire drive down. Somebody was going to get four hours. They'd rotate. It was, he insisted, a system.

It came out of the truck at the staging area, still folded, and got leaned against the trailer where it stayed for the next thirty-one hours like a piece of art nobody had agreed to buy.

What happened instead was the night before the race. On the last shakedown run the gearbox started hanging up between second and third, which is not a thing you start Saturday on. That's a decision: run it and hope, or pull it out in a dirt lot at eight at night and put in the spare.

They pulled it. Four people, one droplight, a borrowed floor jack from a team two spots over who did not know them and did not ask for anything. Hector spent the first three hours on his back on flattened cardboard under the truck, which was about eighteen inches from a perfectly good cot he had personally hauled four hundred miles.

Around three in the morning it got genuinely cold and someone made coffee that was mostly grounds and everybody drank it anyway. Around four somebody's girlfriend showed up with a bag of tacos from a place that had no business being open and became, permanently, the most important person in the operation.

The spare box went in and the bellhousing bolts went back at five forty. It fired. Second gear held, then third. There was a lot of noise from four exhausted people at an hour when noise is rude and nobody nearby complained, because everybody nearby had done the same thing at some point.

The truck made the start. Hector slept in the passenger seat of the chase with his hat over his face, sitting up, for about ninety minutes, and he was awake again by the second pit. The cot rode home folded. He brought it again the next race, and the one after that.