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Tracy Gaudu’s Feet Are Firmly Planted as She Eyes the Clouds

“I’ve wanted a Corvette since I was a little girl,” Tracy Gaudu says. A shy teenager who struggled to speak up in class, Gaudu never fit the mold as a shoe-in for motorsports success. Hers was not a motorsports household, either. “I didn’t grow up around sports cars. My folks only thought cars were for transportation.”

Wherever it came from, however, she had an affinity for low-slung Corvettes. “I remember seeing a C3 when I was six—I knew I’d have one eventually. It’s easy to think that when you’re a kid, but it took a while.”

After high school, Gaudu spent six formative years in the U.S. Air Force, an experience that gave her the confidence to take bolder leaps later in life.

Decades later, that boldness included realizing her Corvette dream, when she bought a 2005 Corvette—a C6 with an automatic transmission. Following the first few payments, she decided to dip her toes in the racing pool with local autocrosses. One run along the cone course revealed all that had been missing from life. Emboldened by this discovery relatively late in life, Gaudu decided she’d become a racer, and within a year of starting, she clinched tenth in the National Council of Corvette Clubs (NCCC) National Championship.

After two years of finding her feet with a slushbox, she realized she’d need more to compete on a national level, so she traded in her base C6 for a 2008 Z06.

“I was worried I might have bitten off more than I could chew,” she says, recalling her wild drive home from the dealer as she spun the wheels and the car bucked beneath her. “When I brought it home from the dealership, I nearly launched it through my garage wall.” Only through a lot of awkward late-night lurching around her neighborhood was she able to get the hang of it. Shifting was one thing, though – making the payments was another.

Adding to the stress was the frailty of the factory powerplant. The Z06’s 505-horsepower LS7 is a fantastic but flawed motor, and with the earlier cars, lifter issues and oil starvation burdened their owners with big bills. After blowing one LS7 and rebuilding another early on, Gaudu believes she spent more on the high-revving LS7 than she spent on her first Corvette.

Whatever stress the Z06 brought with it, however, she couldn’t deny the fun, and her success in NCCC autocross—in the 1ML class, the quick woman’s group—proved her talent.

By this stage, the costs of competition had begun to change the way she worked. Gaudu is a physician’s assistant in vascular surgery who takes part-time hours in the trauma center on weekends. The long hours paid for her climbing weekend costs and also toughened her up for the challenge of motorsport. “The stress of working in the trauma center makes racing pretty relaxing, actually,” she says.

New Life in a New Town

When work relocation took Gaudu from Austin, Texas, to Johnson City, Tennessee, she decided to explore the bustling world of motorsport there. Though she had her doubts about stepping into time trials, Johnny Miller, a former Trans Am driver, convinced her she had the right stuff. “His opinion meant a lot. I knew he wouldn’t bullshit me,” she says. She still had to convince herself, though. “I’d say ‘Think of this as an HPDE on steroids’. Telling myself those things helps me get through new challenges.”

This helped pave the way for another bold leap into wheel-to-wheel racing, where she found the social connection surprisingly absent. “There’s real camaraderie in time trials, and everything’s a little at arm’s length in wheel-to-wheel. I was going to miss the camaraderie, but I’m the kind of person who has to try new things. That’s who I am. I started to think, it’ll only make me better.”

It Takes a Village

During her foray onto the race track, Gaudu took a stab at some wonderful hill climbs in the Southeast. “It’s just you, the mountain, and the clock. There’s nobody to point fingers at, and that’s freeing. I know it’s dangerous, but it’s worth the risk.”

The challenge of having one run to secure her finish and the price of a potential accident being so high make hill climbing an unusually unadulterated and mentally demanding form of motorsport. The one time she let her attention slip, Gaudu launched off the road and bounced down a line of downed trees.

The greatest of all American hill climbs, Pikes Peak—the “Race to the Clouds”—had always piqued her curiosity, but the challenge seemed insurmountable. “‘I don’t have enough hill climbing experience,’” I’d tell myself. “‘I’m just a small team and they prefer the big teams’. That critical voice was loud, so I kept the dream to myself until late last year.”

Eventually, the quieter voice in the back of Gaudu’s mind found a soapbox to stand on. “‘What if I could?’” I thought.

Her period of indecision came to an end at the annual Performance Racing Industry (PRI) tradeshow in Indianapolis, when her sponsor and longtime associate Ken Lingenfelter listened to her talk about her dreams of running at Pikes Peak. His interest and enthusiasm were the bit of encouragement Gaudu needed to get started, and with precious months to plan, she started hustling.

So much of preparation was finding the funding, since the cost of a local hill climb is negligible compared to the cost of running Pikes Peak. Travel, entry, accommodations, odd practice schedules, and the numerous modifications her car required for the event weighed heavily on her shoulders.

She found significant support from Anderson Composites and the Longhorn Corvette Club—the club where she’d began her autocrossing journey. With the little extra she found from friends and supporters, she could take a cost-conscious stab, though not without digging deep into her personal coffers.

Understanding and supportive, Gaudu’s crew—Scott Michael, Randy Adkins, Ted Visscher, and Taylor Shead—were willing to help for nothing but room and board in return.Thankfully, the only damage was to the splitter—and her pride.

The Corvette needed several changes before it could make a practice run up the 14,115-foot peak, so Gaudu put together a list: replace the roll cage’s crossbars with NASCAR-style door bars; install a dash bar; mount an oxygen canister; add door pulls; install a Radium Engineering 14-gallon fuel cell. That last item is to help prevent starting a forest fire in the event of a crash, as stock fuel tanks aren’t always able to withstand a tumble down the side of a mountain…

With her team and the car ready for an adventure, Gaudu loaded up and headed west.

Immediately, she felt the altitude. “I had this low-grade headache when I drove into Colorado Springs for the first time that practice weekend. If you walked real fast or did a lot of work around the car, you’d feel it,” she says.

The atmosphere, however, was encouraging. Though the crowds hadn’t swelled to their biggest just yet, the people she met were receptive. Being the first woman to hustle a Corvette up Pikes Peak is reason enough for strangers to reach for a handshake. That adulation put a little pep in Gaudu’s step, which would come in handy when dealing with sleep deprivation.

For all but graveyard shifters, the Pikes Peak practice schedule is a nightmare. “You get up at 2 a.m., because the gate opens at 3:30,” she says. “You begin your practice runs right after the 5 a.m. drivers’ meeting, when the sun comes up—it seems to come up early on the mountain—and you’re off before eight. It’s still a public road during practice week.”

Adding to the challenge is the limited access to the course; drivers can only run one third of it at a time. The lower section is like a road course: fast and flowing. The second section is full of switchbacks and steep inclines, and it’s where the climb begins. Eventually, you rise above the tree line and begin the third section, where things get really hairy. There, it’s wide open, and in the middle of some of the sweepers you can encounter big bumps that have thrown the best off many times.

It was the last third which caused Gaudu the most consternation. “When the mountain freezes and thaws, it causes undulations in the pavement. There’s a part near the top called Boulder Park where it’s real bumpy—you really gotta hang onto the car. The problem is if you set the car up soft for that section, you’re off in the first section, which really needs a stiffer car that’ll corner flat.”
After a week to practice the three stages, Gaudu packed up and flew home. It would be another few weeks before she’d get to test all she’d learned against the clock.

Return to Mars

During the interim, Mike Maroone Chevrolet North in Colorado Springs stored her car, trailer, and truck. The Colorado Springs Corvette Club also pointed her to Under Pressure Performance, which replaced the Corvette’s lifters and changed the cam. “In the middle section,” she says, “the climb was challenging with a normally aspirated motor, so I had them replace the COMP cam for Brian Tooley Stage 4 camshaft for more low-end torque to help with the steep inclines.”

When she returned to Colorado Springs in late June, Gaudu came back to a party. “Friday night was a blast! Downtown Colorado Springs had its Fan Fest with thousands of fans in the streets. I got to sign hero cards, gave an interview on a live radio broadcast, and joined a Women in Motorsports panel sponsored by Mobil 1 and Porsche of Colorado Springs. Michèle Mouton, Lyn St. James, Lonnie Unser, Emelia Hartford, and Burcu Cetinkaya Bonnet were all sitting there with me,” she says.

Sitting in the limelight bolstered her confidence, which made her a little contrarian the following morning when gridding up. “A few folks said, ‘Be realistic, just try to finish the race.’ And I see the sense in that, but when I got there and gridded up, I wanted more. The racer in me took over, and more than justifying all the time and money spent, I wanted more than anything to not suck.”

Sadly, the elements got in the way of Gaudu proving herself this year. “It was blowing 80–100 miles per hour on top of the mountain, which was throwing rocks all over the place. Some porta-johns had even been knocked over—and they’d been strapped down!

In the end, officials decided to end the race prematurely, at Glen Cove, the start of the second section. “I was shocked,” Gaudu says. “I think it’s the third time in history that the hill climb has been cut that short. It’s a shame, not just because it cost so damn much, but going by my practice times, I was looking to beat Robb Holland’s Corvette record. That would’ve made my day.”

There was some consolation, though, when she got special recognition from an unlikely source. “Being awarded the Be All You Can Be award from the U.S. Army 10th Special Forces Group meant a lot to me for all my military background—something the SFG had no idea about until I received it,” she says.

“It was a bittersweet ride home, that’s for sure. That week was a whirlwind, and I was happy to be done, but at the same time, I didn’t want to leave the mountain. Funny thing is, every hill climb seems pretty mild after Pikes Peak now.”

Since her experience at the Race to the Clouds earlier this summer, local hill climbs keep Gaudu motivated to get back there. And she knows that when she returns to Colorado Springs next year, she’ll be better prepared. Hopefully, the weather will be on her side.

In the meantime, she’ll keep working at a feverish pace to keep her backside in the seat. “I have a lot of receipts, but I choose not to look at them. Part of the secret to my stamina is that I lie to myself a lot.”

No matter how draining the week or weekend might be, she stays motivated by the belief that good fortune is just around the corner. “Whenever I’m exhausted and feeling low, some help seems to come along in the nick of time.” Such optimism, work ethic, and dedication have made it possible for Tracy Gaudu to begin a successful racing career at a time in life when many people are thinking of hanging up their helmet. “I’m proof it’s never too late to start.”

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