Despite her young age, Leah Brightwell knows the grim reality of cancer. She lost her friend Jayden Pratt, 16, to Ewing sarcoma, a bone cancer, last fall. On Saturday, the 13-year-old won her first hotmod feature on Giving Cancer the Black Flag night at Tyler County Speedway.
Jayden Pratt’s family attended the race that Brightwell scored her milestone victory.
“The race was special to me and I was grateful that Jayden’s family was in attendance to see the wrap on my car,” Brightwell, of Middlebourne, West Virginia, said. “The meaningfulness of the race and the wrap on my car was a driving force for me to do well.”
The win didn’t come easy. She passed not one, but two cars on the final lap of the feature.
“The night didn’t start so great — I qualified eighth,” said Brightwell. “I told myself I just would have to deal with it. I won my heat race and that put me in sixth starting spot for the feature.”
She held onto third from the second lap to the last.
“I was struggling — the track had lots of character,” Brightwell said. “When I saw the top two cars going low and fighting for the lead, I took the top of the track and passed them coming out of turn 4. I was in shock to see the checkered flag — I didn’t realize it was the last lap. I asked myself, ‘What just happened?’ Then I snapped out of it and said, ‘Holy cow, I just won my first hotmod race!’”
After arriving in victory lane, Leah Brightwell popped off the steering wheel and turned to the crowd.
“It was just natural instinct to wave the steering wheel,” said Brightwell. “The feeling was like nothing I had experienced. The crowd kept screaming, hollering, and whistling.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
