The Grass and the Furious: Ladies… Start Your (Lawnmower) Engines!

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. The Lone Star Mower Racing Association (and that’s LSMRA for you fans) started in 1998, but the sport of lawnmower racing goes back to 1973, when an Irishman named Jim Gavin and a few of his mates were fed up with the hefty price tag that came with most motorsports and wanted to create a sport that was cheap and accessible to everyone. As the pints flowed, they looked out the window, and there was the groundsman mowing the grass. It was then that they realized, hey, everyone has a lawnmower. That’s when they decided to have a race. Eighty mowers showed up for the very first contest. Here’s Julie Tinman with her story about the greatest show on turf.

00:01:02
Speaker 2: Well, I think I’m pretty much a unique unicorn. I don’t know anybody in my family who is into lawnmower racing. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, on the southwest side of town. My parents worked, each worked two full-time jobs, so they were hardly at home because they were always working, you know, trying to provide for us. And I didn’t know it at the time, but we were poor, which was the best kind of poor, right? You didn’t know you were poor when you were a kid. You only figured it out when you got older, and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I didn’t get to do all those things,’ but I kept so active that I didn’t let any of that really bother me very much, you know. And after high school, I did go off to college. Unfortunately, I found myself in the same position my parents were in. I had to work two jobs just to take care of myself and pay for my apartment and where

00:01:54
Speaker 3: I lived, and food, and all that stuff.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: I think what minimum wage was, four bucks an hour at the time, so I was working 40 to 60 hours a week. So it took me eight years to graduate, but I did it. I kept my bachelor’s in accounting. And after that, instead of going to Europe with my friends, I decided to get married, and we would go kayaking, we would go fishing off the piers, and we also started cycling because basically, you know, I took the stress out of life because he and I both had full-time jobs that were very demanding and very stressful. So we found great, great pleasure in doing these these activities together, and it also, you know, created a bond between us. Uh.

00:02:42
Speaker 3: So we were doing that, we were doing our thing.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: And then I was blessed with some children, and he and I raised these two beautiful kids. So the kids are grown at they’re what, 12 and 14 now, and he and I are watching YouTube, and these lawnmower racing, uh, you know, men come up on the on the screen, and I’m looking at that, and I am like, ‘Wow, Rob, I think I would do that!’ And he’s like, ‘You would?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I would. I would race the lawnmower.’ And my husband, he is all into cars. Like, he didn’t do sports growing up. He built cars. That was his thing. So I don’t know what I

00:03:29
Speaker 3: unlocked there, but

00:03:32
Speaker 2: I definitely unlocked a piece of him. He has, you know, a piece of his, uh. They hadn’t been able to use, you know, the skills that you needed to build something. So he wanted to make sure that he and I both knew what we were getting into. So we looked up lawnmower racing in Texas, came across LSM Marie and found they were racing at a track called Camp Sila over Inhia, Texas. It’s kind of to the right of Fort Worth, and we visited the track, and it was just like I imagined everyone going fast to round a track on a lawnmower. Some of the faster ones looked like little go-karts. So he basically what he had to do is look up the rules for the US Lawnmower Racing Association to see, like, what did he need to do to build this lawnmower so I could race it. So we bought our property about 12 years ago. And when we bought our property, we had to buy a riding lawnmower because it was too much to do, you know, a push lawnmower.

00:04:39
Speaker 3: It’s been retired, ice.

00:04:41
Speaker 2: It’s sitting in our graveyard of stuff out back, so we decided to resurrect it. A fun fact about this lawnmower, that for me anyways, is that when we first bought our property, my husband would have me sit in the little trailer attachment the back of the riding lawnmower, and my kids were like one and

00:05:01
Speaker 3: three at the time, that he would put the kids in the

00:05:04
Speaker 2: trailer with me, and would do like little hay ride around our property with the kid, and that’s what we did entertain them in the evening. So I just find that it’s just cute that we are now using this lawnmower to, you know, go fast around a track. So one of the questions that I’m always asked, the very first question, is about the blades.

00:05:30
Speaker 3: Like everyone’s really worried about the lawnmower blades.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: And, yeah, I’m here to reassure everybody that the blade of the lawnmower are the first things that are, that it is removed. Like, you don’t race with lawnmower blades. I guess he reinforced the frame, lowered the chassis. He had to put a new steering system and any braking system system in. Oh, a new lawnmower tires, right? He had the darnedest time trying to put the tires on the wheel with axle. He, a new seven eight Predator engine that gives like 22 horsepower. We can go up to like 35 miles per hour. It can go pretty fast. I know, it kind of seems slow, but when you’re not wearing a seatbelt, it’s still a little scary. So he had lots of fun doing that. Like I said, when he was a kid, that’s what he did, and now he gets to use that skillset to build his wife a lawnmower racing. And we didn’t have a trailer, so we just had our Nissan truck, so he had to go buy some ramps, and we pushed the lawnmower up the up the ramps into the trailer, hoping to Jesus that it wouldn’t follow the ride or the left are on top of us. But that didn’t happen, you know, thank goodness. So now that I’ve been racing for a while, my husband, he’s decided to get on in on the action, and he bought himself an FXT lawnmower, and I actually have another lawnmower in FXS that I’m still learning how to drive. So I’m really comfortable and driving my GPT that goes about 35 miles an hour around the track, but I haven’t become 100 percent comfortable in the FXS, which probably goes between 45 to 50 miles an hour. It’s definitely dangerous, but that’s my next goal, is to be 100 percent comfortable driving that. The first time I ever raced, right, my husband was taking pictures of me, and he’s like, ‘Julie, I can see the fear in your eyes,’ and I’m like, ‘Yep, it was there.’

00:07:48
Speaker 3: The fear was there.

00:07:49
Speaker 2: So I, you know, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Have I’m about to go out on the track?’

00:07:56
Speaker 3: Is, you know, I have to put, what’s that word? Do you say?

00:08:00
Speaker 2: You have to put your mouth where your foot is, or your foot where your mouth is.

00:08:05
Speaker 3: So I’m like, ‘This is it? I am? I am, I’m gonna do this!’

00:08:11
Speaker 2: So, basically, you racing classes, they go from like JP is for the young kids, but the highest classes are FXS and FXT. And basically, when you see a ‘T’ at the end of any of our classes, that just means you’re racing an engine with twin twin cylinders. It’s supposed to go faster than a single cylinder engine. So lawnmower racing is a co-ed sport, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl. And basically, the person who wins is the person who brings the best riding lawnmower and has the best driving skills, because at the end of the day, you can have the best driving skills, but if you haven’t worked on your lawnmower, it’s going to break, you know, two, three laps in, and then you’re out of the count. And I see that happen a lot of times. People drive for hours, and then their lawnmowers aren’t working the night. That’s always disheartening, right? But basically, the person with the best equipment and the best driving skills wins because we’re all racing on the same track, and we all should be following the same rules.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Julie Tinman tell her story about the greatest show on turf, and that, of course, is lawnmower racing. And when we come back, more of her story and her husband’s, and millions of American hobbyists who do all kinds of fun and silly things with their time here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories and lawnmower racer Julie Tinman and her husband, who is the—let’s just say—pit boss, crew engineer, and everything else in between. We continue with this family story about a family hobby.

00:10:29
Speaker 3: Here’s Julie.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: Everybody, for the most part, is really nice and encouraging, you know. We take tips from each other. Mainly, the senior guys are telling us young’uns how it should be done. I have on occasion been able to keep out ahead of ahead of some of the gentlemen I race with, and afterwards, you know, they talk about cutting the wires on my engine or letting my gas out, you know, stuff like that.

00:10:57
Speaker 3: But they take it

00:10:58
Speaker 2: easy on me because I’m a girl, which I don’t know if I like or don’t like, but I’ll take it. You know, we all have to pick out a three-digit code to put on our lawnmower. And like some people race for Jesus; they race for cancer; they race for a family name.

00:11:22
Speaker 3: On my personal one,

00:11:24
Speaker 2: I, we don’t have a theme. We, I just chose the code ’45T’ because that meant a lot to me. For it means, it means. It’s double meaning, right? It’s kind of like it’s double meaning. But the first meaning is for our 45th president, and the second meaning is it’s basically basically about my A and T. You know, the first initial of my last name. You know, you have the inside track and you have the outside track. And my first lawnmower race, I rode the outside track the whole way through, and at the time there was this wonderful lady, Jennifer, and she would just, I’m like, ‘Oh, there goes Jennifer. There it goes, Jennifer. There goes Jennifer.’ I think she lapped me like three times. I’m so embarrassed. I was so embarrassed that that I wasn’t more brave. I didn’t have, you know, additional courage. But everybody was very complimentary and encouraging.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: You know.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: After I did the race, and every time I went out there, I just got faster and faster. And now my life’s mission is to never get lapped.

00:12:51
Speaker 3: That’s my life’s mission.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: I really, I want to win, you know, I want to place first, second, third. But at the end of the day, if I didn’t get lapped, I am doing good. So one of the things that I always wondered is, does it hurt when I see these, you know, guys fall over? I kept wondering that, and finally, you know, God answered my question because there—I guess it was a couple of months in—I was going too fast, and I got caught on the high side, and I flew off my lawnmower and ran over

00:13:27
Speaker 3: my foot. Landed on my back, but I was fine. It was fine.

00:13:33
Speaker 2: It was a little like you go in slow motion as you’re kind of flying through the air, and has you fill the lawnmower kind of going over your racing shoes.

00:13:42
Speaker 3: That’s why you wear racing shoes.

00:13:44
Speaker 2: So what I go out there in is a motorcycle racing jacket that has, you know, the paddings on the elbows and the shoulders and the back, and you have to wear long blue jeans or any jeans. It’s good if you in the upper classes, if you wear fire-resistant pants because sometimes you were engine does catch on fire, and you wear a neck brace and a helmet. One of the things that I find helpful for me as a racer to mentally prepare for

00:14:22
Speaker 3: this race so that I

00:14:25
Speaker 2: am competitive, because I can’t go out there like, you know, happy-go-lucky, right? Happy-go-lucky. It’s not going to win the race, so I kind of have to change my thought processes a little bit. And Curtis O’Brien, he’s one of our one of our guys, actually president of the Camp Shela Racing Association. He says, you know, ‘Just get angry,’ you know, ‘just pretend like you’re, you know, actually,’ I can’t really say what he said.

00:14:58
Speaker 4: But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the thought is just to just to row yourself up, to get angry, to pretend like you’re you’re driving like

00:15:09
Speaker 2: a bat out of hell, to get get out of a place you don’t want to be.

00:15:13
Speaker 3: Right.

00:15:15
Speaker 2: So there I am. That’s what I’m thinking about. I’m angry. I needed, you know, drive super fast and just do all the things I told you earlier that you shouldn’t do. Right. You think about the safety of others when you do, but at the same time, you have to make yourself a little bit angry so that it’s a different part of your brain you use. I guess the number one injury and lawnmower RAF scene is a broken collarbone.

00:15:43
Speaker 3: So I always want to go fast. But at the end of the day,

00:15:47
Speaker 2: one of the things that our track steward always says is, ‘We all have jobs to go home to on Monday. All right. We have jobs and we have families. So you’re out there, you’d be safe, and and if you can’t pass someone safely, then,’

00:16:02
Speaker 3: ‘You’re not passing them.’

00:16:05
Speaker 2: So we all try to remember that when we’re out there, but when you’re trying to win, sometimes it’s hard.

00:16:12
Speaker 3: But we have been very fortunate.

00:16:15
Speaker 2: We have have not had any racing injuries that you couldn’t recuperate from the next day. So we’ve been very fortunate. But those things happen. But I don’t let that fear take over me so much. I mean, it is there; it does exist. I mean, if you’re not afraid when you’re out there, at least a little bit, then there may be something wrong there.

00:16:39
Speaker 4: You know.

00:16:39
Speaker 2: It’s good to be afraid for your life and afraid for somebody else’s life. And we race for trophies. We don’t race for money most of the time. Sometimes they’ll have special events and they’ll put up some money, but at the end of the day’s for fun, to hang out with your friends, your family. I keep telling my husband that my dream is that one day that we’re, we’re retired, we both can retire, and all we do is drive around the United States racing at the different events. Because there’s events in Louisiana, and Alabama, and Georgia, and

00:17:14
Speaker 3: Missouri, and Illinois.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: They’re everywhere, and I would love, love to to go out and race, race everybody because normally you just race with your same group of people who have lawnmower racing unless they come out of town. So it’s great to race with other guys because you learn, I don’t know, they kind of push you a little bit, you know, especially if they’re faster.

00:17:36
Speaker 3: You kind of just want to

00:17:38
Speaker 2: keep up, so you can you push yourself even more. Now, I have to learn you, if you do start lawn more racing, one leads to two, two leads to four, four leads to eight. So it is very addicting because you do have so much fun driving them. You just want to drive them more, more and more, and you see all these coolawn mowers setups, and you just want to try it out. So there is my word of caution. So in a nutshell, that is what lawnmower racing is about. Really, is giving you adventure for the weekend and while you’re hanging out with your friends and your family and allowing you to enjoy

00:18:21
Speaker 1: life. And a great job, as always, by Greg Hangler on the storytelling, and a special thanks to Julie Tinman with sharing her story, her passion, her family passion. And that’s racing lawnmowers. ‘My life’s mission,’ she said, ‘never get left. I want to win, get second, even third, but I don’t want to get left.’ You gotta love it. ‘We race for trophy,’ she said. ‘It’s for fun and to hang out with friends and family.’ The professionalization of sport can actually ruin all the fun, and that’s what lawnmower racing brings to these folks who pursue the sport and so many other hobbies across this great country. Julie Tinman’s story, her husband’s, and her family’s here on Our American Stories.