Fruitland's J.R. Cox stays focused on racing
Monday, October 2, 2006 10:21 AM PDT
Jennifer Colton | Argus Observer
Ontario
While many high school juniors play sports like football, soccer or volleyball, Fruitland's J.R. Cox, 16, is busy tearing up the racetrack.
“My dad, he started (drag racing) when he was younger,” Cox said. “He got out of it when me and my sister were born, and about five years ago we got involved in junior dragsters.”
Currently, Cox drives the quarter mile in a street-legal '73 Challenger that has not been off the race track in three years. Usually the car is towed on an open car trailer behind his sister's pickup, Cox said.
Cox's sister, Necia, 19, is also a race-car driver, but in a different class.
“She races my dad's rear-engine dragster,” Cox said. “I hope to race it soon, but he's changing the motor into the Demon.”
The Demon, the dragster and the Challenger are three of the family's four cars they are willing to race, and Cox said his favorite is the fourth, a 1974 Duster, because “it's one of the fastest cars we own.”
The Duster was also involved in one of Cox's scariest moments.
“At the beginning of this year, the transmission went out on the Duster, and the tires didn't have good traction,” he said. “Right when I lifted, it felt like the back end of the car was going to pass me.”
Luckily, Cox regained control. He said he has seen wrecks on the track before, but no one in his family has ever crashed.
Losing, not danger, is the worst part about racing, Cox said.
“This year I haven't been winning much except at Nightfire,” he said. “But the thrill of going fast and the burnouts are the funest of it all.”
A burnout is when the car drives through a water box into a designated spot for burnouts.
“You mash the throttle, spin the tires,” he said. “It gets the tires sticky and cleans off all the stuff from driving through the pits.”
Cox said he is in the Sportsman class.
“We're still getting used to racing and don't have the money or want to go faster yet,” Cox said of the class.
He said he will probably move up to the Pro class next year, and then eventually into Super Pro.
“Pro is faster, ” Cox said. “The only real difference is the cars are putting out more power.”
In the fast divisions, most of the cars are not street legal, having slick tires with no tread, burning racing gas instead of pump gas and getting rid of accessories like license plates that add extra weight.
After graduating from high school, Cox said he plans to go to Wyoming Tech to learn how to work with cars professionally, if not as a driver, then as a designer building a better race car or a technician or mechanic traveling with a professional racer.
“I hope to be doing it (racing) the rest of my life,” he said.
mike may wrote on Oct 28, 2009 12:47 AM: