Santa Maria High School’s race team is gearing up for an interesting season, with Crew Chief Chris Salce preparing younger teammates to replace him when he graduates at the end of the school year.
Salce, who began racing cars his freshman year of high school, moved into the leadership position after only one year on the team, which he said was “very unusual.” Now, after acting as crew chief for three years, he’s getting the younger racers ready for new management.
The toughest part of Salce’s job has been learning to work on cars and lead a team at the same time, he said.
“There’s a lot of different other dynamics you have to wrap your head around before you can even attempt to lead,” he told the Sun.
At the end of April, the race team made semifinals at a two-day elimination race at Famoso Raceway—and according to Salce, they did so under some crazy circumstances.
“We had to take a smaller amount of kids, for starters, and all the kids except for myself were inexperienced,” he said. “They were all brand new to the track, so it was really interesting and challenging on my part to attempt to lead them in a brand new environment.”
Still, Salce said, qualifying for the semifinal round of races that weekend was quite the feat.
“We did a lot better than we really should have, considering that we built the car in a few days, and the day before we left we were at the school until 11:30 at night working to put it together,” he said. “We never had any time to really test it or give the driver any real experience with it. That was all done at the track, and it was a very challenging experience.”
The race team will compete again over the summer. Until then, its members will work on polishing up the car and fundraising.
This article appears in May 11-18, 2017.