While the big league NASCAR world travels south to Homestead, Florida, from Charlotte to crown a national champion, the stock car short trackers are migrating east. From all corners of the grassroots racing world, trailers and tow trucks pulling late-model race cars are headed to Myrtle Beach Speedway for the annual Myrtle Beach 400 in South Carolina. It's an event that signifies the end of the season for many of NASCAR's home track racers.
Among those pilgrims will be the racer with the Kid 'N Play fade and his friend with the partially shaved head. Their trip to Myrtle Beach started more than a year ago, a road that's carried them around bullring racetracks, through cancer wards and, they hope, ultimately into Victory Lane.
"I'm so excited about this weekend I can't hardly stand it," Erika Newcome said Tuesday evening.
The 21-year-old had just walked out of class at Akron University in Ohio, where she's a fourth-year public relations major. She was heading home to pack, load her car, and make the seven-hour drive to Mooresville, North Carolina, There she'd meet up with her friend to carry on toward Myrtle Beach.
"I can't believe everything that Dylan has done for me since we first met," she said. "And I can't wait to get back to a racetrack with him."
Dylan is Dylan Smith, aka Black Mamba, the 24-year-old racer who most recently created a social media buzz among NASCAR fans by winning the highly coveted Best Costume honors at Tony Stewart's annual Halloween party.
He was dressed as Halle Barry's Catwoman.
I told y'all I wasn't messing around this year, and that trophy looks oh so good on my mantel. @halleberry ���� #HappyHalloween pic.twitter.com/OEuGiddQrP
- Black Mamba (@DylanSmith34) October 27, 2016
Erika and Dylan met on Oct. 21, 2015 -- at a racetrack, naturally.
Newcome was a late-model racer from Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of a short tracker who, inspired by her trips to Columbus Motor Speedway, started driving her own racing machines at the age of 8. By 2015 she was voted that speedway's Most Popular Driver.
Smith was a resident of Concord, North Carolina, by way of Randolph, Vermont, where he landed after being adopted out of his native Haiti. He too loved his local racetrack, Thunder Road SpeedBowl in Barre, Vermont, and convinced his adopted father to buy him a go-kart at the age of 4.
After wins at tracks scattered all over the American map, Newcome and Smith met in a hotel lobby in southeastern Virginia. Both were there as invited participants in NASCAR's Drive For Diversity Combine, an annual talent-scouting event held at the legendary Langley Speedway, a four-tenths mile oval strikingly similar to Newcome's Columbus track.
"It was the night before we went to the track and there were 23 of us there. A lot of them had been to the combine before. I hadn't and I was really nervous," Newcome recalls. "Dylan had done it before and he noticed I was being kind of quiet, and he immediately started talking to me. I was so relieved."
At that combine orientation meeting, she was equally relieved to see that the nameplates for the assigned seats in the classroom had her sitting next to Smith. What she didn't know at the time was that he'd switched those plates around to ensure that they'd be paired up.
"We just hit it off immediately," Smith says. "I think what we know now is that our instant friendship wasn't just a coincidence."
Racers are driven people by nature, but their business is one built on rejection; no is a constant answer, whether from a potential sponsor, a car owner, a would-be car owner or even a loan officer. The Drive For Diversity program is designed to help young racers step out of the shadows, but what happens past that initial push is up to the individual.
Smith finished out 2015 but had trouble landing a ride for '16. He's taken jobs working with other teams, doing everything from building race cars for other drivers to using his significant social media skills to help those teams with their PR efforts.
Newcome went back to Ohio and resumed racing, but she couldn't shake a nagging pain in her shoulders. In August 2015 she had crashed into a wall at Columbus, dislocating her right shoulder and tearing her labrum. It seemed odd, though, because the wreck wasn't that hard. In fact, she'd kept running and finished the race. And why was her left shoulder hurting, too? The next spring, during a visit to her orthopedist, she was about to leave but asked one last question about an odd-looking blood vessel in her neck. He sent her to have it checked out via ultrasound. On May 18, it was identified as a blood clot, odd for a just-turned 21-year-old.
On June 2, 2016, Newcome was told that she had masses in almost every organ of her body. She was suffering from Stage 4 sarcoma, a cancer that aggressively attacks the body's soft tissues.
"Now that we're looking back on it, what sarcoma damages are things like your muscles," Newcome explains. "So that's why my labrum tore so easily. I had been weakened and didn't know."
She immediately began treatments that have continued to this day: chemotherapy, an immunotherapy drip and blood thinners to battle the clot. She's doing it all while also being a full-time college student. When the chemo started thinning her hair on one side, she shaved only that side, leaving longer blonde locks on the other. But it's the blood thinners that don't allow her to race, as thinned, freer-flowing blood makes racing too risky. For a moment last month it appeared as through that might no longer be an issue, but the clot returned and so did the thinner.
"Being in school gives me normalcy," she says. "I really feel pretty normal. But cancer is all anyone can talk about. It's all anyone can see when they look at me. That's hard. But I've come to peace with it. Still, that's what makes encouraging talks and phone calls and texts so important. At my low points, I always hear from Dylan and he always knows just what to say. He always says 'we' because we're in this together."
Really excited for this weekend, @dylonwilson really hooked it up with the @AmericanCancer & @WendellScott_34! #FearTheFade #CancerSucks pic.twitter.com/XAC508wmEO
- Black Mamba (@DylanSmith34) November 16, 2016
Last month Smith's call was even more enthusiastic than normal. He'd been kicking around an idea for a while and it was starting to come together. While Dylan had been encouraging Erika during her treatment, she'd been returning the favor, pumping him up during a summer when he hadn't turned a single competitive lap on the racetrack.
"I haven't raced all year and it's driven me crazy," Smith said earlier this week, en route to work. "So I thought, if I'm going to race only once this season, then I'm going to make it count."
He secured a late-model car he could race from one of his employers, racer Travis Miller's father Matt and team co-owner Chris Florian. Then he went looking for support. He used LinkedIn to track down the national marketing director of the American Cancer Society, who just so happened to be looking for ways to reach out to blue-collar cancer victims about services such as its transportation-to-appointments program.
Smith also reached out to the Wendell Scott Foundation, run by the family of the late NASCAR Hall of Famer. Wendell Scott, the only African-American to win a NASCAR Cup Series event, is Smith's hero and the family has become one of his biggest supporters. Scott died in 1990, killed by cancer.
Smith set up a GoFundMe page titled "Beating Cancer 1 Lap At A Time," promising donors that any money raised and all winnings from the Myrtle Beach 400 would be split between the American Cancer Society and an account to help pay Newcome's mounting medical bills.
"I couldn't believe it when he told me what he was doing," she said Tuesday night. "But that's Dylan. That's the kind of person he is. He's so unselfish and he's so positive. I knew I had to go with him this weekend. Just being back at a racetrack again, there's no more positive atmosphere than the racetrack. And working with the American Cancer Society to let people know about sarcoma. This is all the best medicine I could possibly think of."
On Thursday, the dude with the fade and the girl with the half-shaved head traveled east toward Myrtle Beach on a mission. In the front seat were two reunited friends. Behind them was a towed late-model race car, painted baby blue with a big white "34" on the side. It's modeled after the rides of Wendell Scott. The duo racing it will do so fueled by one of Scott's favorite sayings.
"Wendell always said, 'When it gets too tough for everyone else, it's just right for me,'" Smith explained. "That sounds like my friend Erika right there."