In Climbing Gear : Ferber Gradually Moves Up in Ranks as She Circulates in Fast Company

The plan was to hang back, take it easy and keep the ’79 Chevy Camaro and driver in one piece during the season’s first race.

Like doctors attending a patient, a team of mechanics stabbed a pyrometer into a tire to gauge the amount of heat Christine Ferber seared into the tread during her last practice spin around the track. Ferber gulped a few pills to relieve some back pain that lingered from last year’s crash and climbed in.

Fifteen minutes later she emerged the first-place winner as she pulled her helmet off, splashing strawberry blonde hair in all directions.

“I told her to hang back,” said Al Shearman, her mechanic, after the race. “Al told her, that guy told her. Everyone heard it but her.” But Ferber’s father, Al, had only words of praise: “You’re all right Chrissy, you know that?” he said, giving his daughter a hug.

Ferber, a 22-year old Cal State Northridge liberal studies major, said her instinct is to “go for the opening” when racing in the street stock division at the Mesa Marin track in Bakersfield. “I’m not going to sit back and see what happens,” she said. “Sometimes that backfires because I might get smushed in-between.”

Ferber’s interest in racing was ignited nine years ago while helping her father and a friend build a car. Three years later, she began racing at Saugus Speedway near her Canyon Country home and now consistently places in the top 10 at Mesa Marin.

“The fans are there for the crashes,” Ferber said, recalling her former days driving a “square beat up old clunker” at Saugus. “If someone hits you, they think that’s great because that’s what the fans want.”

But Al Ferber said it was Saugus Speedway that gave his daughter the leading edge she uses in racing today. “If there was any place for her to learn, that was the place,” Ferber, 51, said. “Now she’s not coerced no matter where she goes.”

And his daughter makes the rounds. Instead of dwelling on the possible disadvantages of being a woman in a male-dominated sport, Ferber insists on turning the tables. “I went up last Saturday to Mesa Marin kind of as a spy to see who was doing what,” she said. “I snooped. I just walked around in shorts and they probably just figured I was one of the girlfriends.”

But Ferber said she prefers to communicate eye to eye with most of the male drivers. “I just go introduce myself and say, ‘Hey, I’m so and so, the one you smacked into.’ I get into arguments with them. They’ll come over and cuss me out and I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much’ and just walk away.”

Because of her insistence on equality, most who know Ferber say she has gained the respect of male drivers in the field.

But when asked what kind of driver Ferber is, racer Jack Carpenter and his team unanimously replied, “a woman driver.” The pit is rife with such comments, but Carpenter’s mechanics grudgingly admitted that Ferber has “been around.”

“She really came into her own last year,” Carpenter said as he eyed Ferber’s white, gold and blue Camaro with a streamlined No. 6 on the side and the message, “Little Girls Have Fun Too!” painted on the back. “She drove her heart out and really put on a show. She’s aggressive but knows how to stay out of trouble.”

“She was wild” during her first year, said Marion Collins, owner of the Mesa Marin track. “She could bend sheet metal with the best of them. The men hate like hell to get beat by a woman.”

Ferber said it is essential to know the driving habits of other racers. “I’ll say to myself, ‘Well, that’s number 44, now let me think, he normally goes in a little deeper, he comes out a little slower, he’s a little squirrelly, or he’ll try to cut you off at the corner.’ That’s where a lot of the competition comes in, knowing what to do with each car.

“Sometimes you want to be a little sneaky. They’ll start going up to the wall and just as they think you’re following them, you dive under them. You have to know tricks like that.”

After five years of racing street stock, Ferber said next year she plans to move up to the Sportsman class, which races faster cars with fiberglass bodies and slick tires.

Street stock cars look like passenger cars but must be built of stock parts such as sheet metal, frames, suspension systems, engine blocks and street-legal tires. The engines are modified for increased speeds. Roll cages and five-point harnesses are installed for safety.

“The faster you go, the more money it costs,” Al Ferber said. Ferber sponsors his daughter through his Coast to Coast Glass Tinting business in Van Nuys where he and a team of mechanics work on the Camaro.

Sportsmen cars are about double the $10,000 to $15,000 price tag for street stock cars. The high cost of gasoline, new tires for each race and routine maintenance add about $10,000 to a car’s upkeep during the season, Al Ferber said. Last year Ferber’s racing costs were somewhat offset by her $3,500 winnings at Mesa Marin.

Ferber’s goal is to place among the top-five finishers this year and possibly win the Mesa Marin championship with the help of a new 500-horsepower engine she will use in her next race April 23. “If you only go so fast, there’s no way you can win,” Ferber said of her present 400-horsepower engine. “You have to have endless power to get there.”

Getting there means accumulating more points than other drivers before the October close of the season. The champion typically attracts big-name sponsors, the kind Ferber seeks to eventually help get her to tracks such as the Daytona 500.

But until then, she plans to graduate from CSUN in December and teach grade school in the public school system next year. “We’ve brought her along very slowly,” Al Ferber said. “I think we’re her biggest critics. We always insist that she drive a clean race. When she does something wrong, we tell her.”

Because of her excellent opening race (she placed first in the opening heat and fourth in the main event April 2), Ferber said upcoming races only will become more challenging. “They’re going to put a lot more pressure on me,” she said. “You lose some friends and you make some friends in the process because they get angry that you’re doing better.”

But the fan club is never far from the pit. “Kids come up, grandmas, old men, everybody,” Ferber said. “I sign a lot of autographs.”

Al Ferber said he no longer fears for his daughter’s safety as he did at Saugus Speedway. “She has an incredible ability to avoid accidents,” he said. “I don’t know how she does it. I’ve seen cars scattered all over the turn and she weaves her way through it and comes out.”

But last May, Ferber took advantage of an ambulance, fire truck and two tow trucks stationed ominously at the east turn of the Mesa Marin track. After hitting the wall at 60 m.p.h., Ferber’s back still aches on occasion, but a pinched nerve that temporarily caused numbness along her left side was her primary injury. “My dad builds a hell of a car,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t let me set foot in it if it wasn’t safe, so I don’t have to worry.”

Although the pressures of racing quickly accumulate, Ferber said she tries to avoid taking the sport too seriously.

“I’m pretty relaxed out there,” she said, adding that she sometimes chews bubble gum while speeding down the back chute. “Once in a while, I catch myself blowing bubbles and they’ll pop and I’m thinking, ‘Chris, you’re not supposed to be blowing bubbles, you should be racing.’ ”