STANWOOD – Will Fletcher openly admits to some nervousness in his first-ever drag race.
After all, it was the All-High School Drags last Wednesday at Pacific Raceways in Kent, a Mecca for teen hot-rodders in this state. And he was behind the wheel of a borrowed 1998 Dodge Ram diesel three-quarter-ton 4×4. He was one of more than 300 racers, some of whom were veterans at this sort of thing.
A rank rookie, Fletcher surely didn’t have a chance.
But that wasn’t why Fletcher, a 17-year-old junior at Stanwood High School, felt butterflies as the starting lights flickered.
“I was afraid the owner would yell at me if I didn’t do it all right,” he said.
As a reward for Fletcher’s work on her race truck, drag-racing veteran Rhonda Kelly let Fletcher drive her electric blue Pavement Princess in the All-High School Drags. Nice thought, certainly. After all, what harm could the kid do with a pass or, at the very most, two passes down the quarter-mile drag strip?
So before the race, Kelly and Fletcher conversed. They talked strategy. They talked game plan. But the truth is, Fletcher knew much by watching Kelly and others over the years.
“We went through the sequences, but he brought it together himself,” Kelly said. “(Before his first race), he said, ‘I’m gonna win the cell phone.’”
Fletcher motored the Pavement Princess at an average speed of about 98 mph, or 13.55 seconds for a quarter mile. It is believed to be the first time a driver navigating a diesel-powered vehicle has won the event.
Pass after pass, Fletcher nailed victory after victory, including one against a convertible Porsche in the semifinals. Fletcher took home the cell phone (“They said it was top of the line. I don’t find anything too impressive about it. I can fit it into my wallet, but that’s about it.”), a professional photograph and a trophy (“It’s not small, but it’s also not huge.”).
Fletcher also won what’s called a Gold Card, which lets him into every 2005 event at Pacific Raceways.
“It really didn’t hit me until dinner,” said Fletcher, who had a celebratory Hawaiian teriyaki chicken sandwich at Billy McHale’s that night. “There were a lot of people there.”
To be candid, Fletcher isn’t completely new to the sport. His father, William, owns a hot diesel truck of his own, one timed at 10.5 seconds. And, William said, they haven’t even really dialed it in yet.
“It’s the fastest one in the nation right now,” the junior Fletcher said. “And it’s still street-legal, too. Every sunny day, we drive it in the streets.”
Compared to his dad’s truck, Kelly’s Pavement Princess, felt slow, Fletcher said, “so I just drove it in a straight line down the track. I wasn’t too afraid of it.”
Fletcher isn’t afraid of anything mechanical. He and his family moved to a farm the summer before the sixth grade.
“If a lawn mower breaks down, you just kind of take it apart and try to find out what’s wrong with it,” Fletcher said. “If you fix it, great. But then Dad got his truck. It was slow and we started putting little, tiny 30-horsepower chips in it that brought it up to over 500 horsepower in the rear wheels, where it could stick with brand-new Corvettes. Then we bought a two-wheel-drive automatic strictly for racing and we built the hell out of it.”
Fletcher has the bug now. And he doesn’t want to quit racing anytime soon. Although he professes interest in architecture and law, racing has him.
“I don’t ever want to work in my life,” he said, grinning. “I just want to screw off and have fun. I’m gonna ride it out as far as I can.”
Fletcher plans to defend his title next year. The problem: He won’t be a secret. Everybody takes his best shot at a defending champ.
“Probably, but next year, hopefully I’ll have an actual race truck,” Fletcher said. “Hopefully, my dad lets me loose with his.”
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