It takes a lot of practice, a lot of luck, and a really good car to win a race.
Ellie Hughes has been racing since she was 8 years old. She started out in go-karts, worked her way up to Hot Shots, and has been racing Factory Stocks for the last two years. The 16-year-old has had to rebuild cars after wrecks, but after her latest crash totaled her car at Whynot Motorsports Park a few weeks ago, Hughes’ racing experience was tested unlike any other period.
Hughes didn’t have a car. She faced the possibility of missing last weekend’s Southern Street Stock Nationals at Whynot, a three-day event that featured a monster payday and a massive field of cars.
So she went to a friend’s house and pulled out an old Chevy Monte Carlo from the woods. Kevin Elfring last drove the car nearly 13 years ago.
“Biscuit (James Elfring) and Kevin told me, ‘We have an old car,’ ” Hughes said. “They’d raced it before, but they stripped everything off it to build another car. We had to start from the ground up on it.”
Hughes was up against the clock — two weeks until practice night and back-to-back days of heats and features. Hughes and her crew pieced together fenders, doors, and a roof post from her old car. She eventually raced the weekend without a hood on the car.
“I told them that if they would help me put a car together, I’d drive it,” Hughes said. “Biscuit was worried about getting it scaled and set up, but we went out there for practice and it handled OK. We moved a piece of lead the next day and changed some shims in the front end and went back out there.”
The car didn’t handle perfectly, but it was good enough that she could “compensate with driving experience.”
“And not just at (Whynot),” she said. “I’ve been racing for a while at different tracks, and you learn a lot.”
Hughes rode that experience to the biggest win of her racing career, a $1,500 payout in the Pure Stock/Factory Stock challenge, which featured a 26-car field.
“We started with a frame and half a roll cage,” Hughes said. “We didn’t know it was going to run. We worked on the front end all day Friday and didn’t have time to scale it. We wound up pretty fast.”
Hughes’ No. 25 car looks every bit of patched together, and she’s still missing a fender and a hood. As of Thursday, Hughes said she wouldn’t compete Saturday at Magnolia Motor Speedway unless she finds and attaches both pieces.
Hughes won’t rest in that search, either. She’s dedicated to the shop, where she spends most, if not all, of her free time.
“We’ve always worked on our own cars,” said Hughes, whose twin brother, Spencer, competes in various divisions. “We don’t have lives of normal teenagers, like going to football games. We work in the shop every night. We didn’t have anything handed to us.”
Ellie’s pride in her family’s hard work in racing is evident. She’s fiery and loyal, but the temper she “gets from her dad” was atop her list of improvements entering the 2017 season. She also had a tendency to overdrive the car, but it isn’t clear if there was a correlation between her temper and being “throttle happy.”
“The main thing I do is think about who is standing around,” Ellie said of her temper. “You never know, there may be someone who wants to put you in a car. And there’s always kids walking around those pits. You have to be mindful of that. You’re going to get aggravated, but it’s how you behave yourself.”
Ellie is eager to move into a higher division, either Street Stocks or 602 Sportsman. She anticipates making a move next year. If it’s Street Stocks, her team will likely build a new car.
“It’s always exciting to think about where you might go,” she said. “You work hard one way or another.”
Super Late Models return to The Mag
Magnolia Motor Speedway will play host to the Mississippi State Championship Challenge Series and a $2,500-to-win feature Saturday.
Brian Rickman won the last State Series race Aug. 12 at ECM Speedway in Alabama. He’s second in points behind Chad Thrash.
Spencer Hughes, who won his Super Late Model debut Aug. 12 at Magnolia, also will compete Saturday.
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