At the very next round, in Las Vegas, she won. Even after a scary brush with the wall in Brainerd, Minnesota, when her rear tire blew out at mph, Seeling was unflappable. She piled on the wins, piled on the points and watched as her competition self-destructed. Today [in ], Seeling, now Angelle Savoie, is still racing and still as popular as ever. Army racing team, where she has never fallen out of the hunt for another World title.
Hell hath no fury like an Angelle scorned. But after surgery and five months of rehab, Sampey, 44, with Ava Jane and parents David and Gail in tow, is back for her division's season opener at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Florida, this weekend. In Friday afternoon's first-round qualifying, she was No. She finds herself grateful both for another go-round with Bryce's Georgia-based team in its 35th anniversary season and for "the unanswered prayers" that kept her on the sideline while she was trying to find sponsorship for a Funny Car ride with veteran Antron Brown and, later, a Top Fuel dragster with driving legend Shirley Muldowney.
Ava is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I would trade all 13 years, all three championships and all 41 wins to have her instead of what I've done. But, fortunately, I've been blessed having both, the career and the child. The significance of Sampey's return to a division she once owned leaps out through a current poll on the website of National Dragster, the NHRA's official publication.
Fans were asked to name their favorite current Pro Stock Motorcycle driver, and as of Friday morning, 0. The No. Sampey -- all 5-foot-1 and pounds of her, and away for quite some time -- was the runaway leader with Part of the appeal is how she got here.
Fans who have been around for a while know the story of how a teenage Sampey was thrust into beauty pageants after dad came home one day and found her caked in mud after an afternoon of unauthorized four-wheeling. Mom would make a girl out of her or else, and Sampey went kicking and screaming until she figured out pageants were just another form of competition. Her brother Rickie was supposed to have been the motorcycle racer. Dad sent him to motocross school in California and he was good, but he never had Angelle's obsessive nature.
She was supposed to run the engine once in a while and wipe the fingerprints off the gas tank. Seeling had never specifically said she couldn't take the bike to the local drag strip to see what it could do. Sampey did, and she was hooked. She and a friend of the couple stripped the bike of all its street-legal parts, put a wheelie bar on the back, and a racer was born. Seeling returned to find his once-pristine Kawasaki Ninja turned into a drag bike.
She was three days shy of graduating from nursing school a few years later when a storm parked over New Orleans for 13 hours and flooded her house, ruining every possession she had except her drag bike. A backup plan? There wasn't one.
That's where she met Bryce, an instructor at the school who had won championships with Star Racing. She made him focus on her talent, showing up with a Batman hat pulled down over her face and in an unflattering T-shirt. She did well in the drag minor leagues, but even her good friends told her the next step was out of the question. Then Angelle saw the movie "Rudy," about the obsessed nerd who dreams of playing football for Notre Dame, and instantly she was inspired to write a letter to the director of a drag-bike school, pleading for a shot.
He saw in her a passion and a feel for the sport that nobody can teach. Then he wouldn't let her quit when she was too frightened to ride the big snorting horse down the quarter-mile asphalt strip at mph. Some muttered that her weight gave her an unfair advantage, like Sammy's corked bat. One foe, during a televised interview, accused her of hiding illegal nitrous oxide fuel in her helmet.
It was sad, because Angelle just wanted to be buddies with all the riders she had always admired. The guy who is now her crew chief finally explained, "If you want friends at the race track, you need to bring your own. So she does. He is roughly three times her size and maybe just as tough. Angelle almost retired recently because of lack of sponsorship; then the U. Army signed her to a three-year deal.
Which is sweet because now she has an answer if another rider says, "You're gonna beat me? You and whose army? Mom and Dad, by the way, finally came around. They are Angelle's biggest fans.
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