Girls smash, boys crash!

Linda McAvoy

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

There's a guy swinging a pickaxe into a car's right rear quarter panel.

Another saws a chunk out of the hood of a vehicle while someone else – with no artistic ability whatsoever – wields a can of spray paint across the side of a dented auto.

It's all totally nuts.

But so is watching a herd of pickups smashing into each other until only one is left running.

Or how about a bunch of drivers, with bags over their heads, ramming their cars into each other based solely on directions given by their sighted front-seat passengers?

Insane?

Welcome to the world of the demolition derby.

Having never been to one before, I wasn't sure what to expect. What I found one recent summer night at the Tillsonburg Fair, I've been assured, was a bit more nuts than usual – but not by much.

I tagged along with a television crew filming the Tillsonburg derby for the second season of Crash Addicts. This series on the Outdoor Life Network profiles small-town demolition derby drivers smashing their way to national championships.

The antics of the show's cast, plus the commotion of the often-spontaneous film crew, added a whole other dimension to an already frenetic setting.

After witnessing the aforementioned "preparation" of the derby cars (all in compliance with strict safety rules), I met Tammy "Bubbles" Bruce of Campbellford, the lone female member of the Crash Addicts team.

The interview took place in my pickup as the outgoing blonde, 21, needed a place to hide out from fans. This was a mid-week event, but the grandstand was full and young autograph-seekers were on the prowl.

Ensconced in the back of my Lincoln Mark LT ("No, you cannot smoke in here!"), she said she's been driving demolition derbies for a year and a half. "My father, when I was 8 years old, put two Toronto telephone books under my butt and told me to drive home," Tammy recalls.

A self-confessed "crazy" driver, she decided to test her reflexes in a derby after the death of a friend in a car accident. "I did four derbies my first year, and I brought home a trophy in every derby."

When not stocking health and beauty products on the night shift at the Cobourg Wal-Mart, Tammy thrives on the excitement she generates driving four-cylinder cars in crasharamas across Ontario.

Eschewing all-female, "powder-puff" events, she dons her helmet and, along with a few other women, competes on an equal footing with the men.

"I have a bull's eye on my back, and everybody in the ring is after me," Tammy says (Crash Addicts team shirts actually do sport a bull's eye).

Not because she's female, but because "I always kick their ass! I am very aggressive. I'm not a female when I'm out there, I'm one of the men."

Male rivals, she adds, "know I'm a threat in the ring. I like it that way."

Asked about her best day behind the wheel, Tammy tells of a recent derby in which full-size buses tried to take out as many opponents as possible.

With a brief lesson from an uncle her only prior bus-driving experience, Tammy took to the track and wound up in the feature race.

"I took out four buses," she says proudly. "My lug nuts came off, though, when I cut off the one guy ... I made a bus tip over and I made one catch on fire when I took them out."

Though she's had several close calls with gasoline leaks and some severely bruised ribs, Tammy's worst moment came last year at the Tweed derby right after the "gentlemen's tap."

That's the sport's version of the opening handshake, where cars reverse and gently tap trunks together.

After the Tweed tap, "two cars that were on my bumper just ran me right over top of this big cement thing, so I was stuck in the air and my tires were just going like this in the air," explains Tammy, arms flailing.

Sounds a lot like what happened to one of the Crash Addicts teams that very night in Tillsonburg.

In the special heat where drivers wore bags over their heads and blindly depended on their passengers for directions, Tammy rode shotgun for Gary "Sweetleaf" Miller. They smashed their way to second place.

However, the other Crash Addicts team of driver Jamie "The Birminator" Birmingham and Richard "White Hot" Leighton ended their run stranded, with their front end rammed atop one of the huge cement blocks that encircle the ring.

The crowd loved it.

With the smell of burning rubber in the air, fans – many of them young families – cheered for their favourites throughout the dusty truck heat, the eight-cylinder stock car event and the figure-eight race (careening four-cylinder autos try to finish 15 laps without smashing into one another).

The drivers and their crews spend a great deal of time fixing up the cars and travelling to derbies.

They do it, not for the few hundred dollars in prize money, but because, as Tammy explains, "You got fans cheering for you ... It's fun when you're in there. The adrenalin that goes through you!"

Recalling the exhilaration she felt after receiving her first standing ovation, she lets out a whoop and exclaims Tammy-style: "Yeah! Girls smash. Boys crash. I'm going to take you all out!"

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