Drag Illustrated Issue 158, July 2020 | Page 39

Special Section car. He also won the North-South Shootout at Maryland International Raceway, where Terry accepted the Best Appearing Car award. “We all wanted [Terry] to drive the car, but I think he was having just as much fun being on the outside and getting to watch it go down the racetrack,” Glenn III says. “It was my favorite season of racing. Especially with Terry’s diagnosis that we all knew about coming into the year, just having him be able to go to the races with us and to spend that extra time with him was awesome. It was a really fun year.” As the family tries to forge ahead with the 2020 season after Terry’s passing, they’re working to debut a brand-new car later in the season. Glenn III’s new Jerry Haas-built, Buck 872ci-powered ’68 Firebird is almost ready to hit the track. But the family plans to run Terry’s GTO at the upcoming Pro Line Racing Mid-Atlantic Showdown presented by Frederick Line-X at Virginia Motorsports Park, largely as a tribute to him. As for Mandy, she’ll continue to run her Buck-powered Race Tech dragster in Top Dragster 32, though she has her mind on a potential move to Top Sportsman in the near future. “I would love to race Top Sportsman,” Mandy says. “It’s my ultimate goal. It would be the pinnacle of my racing career to get to jump into a Top Sportsman car, just like the rest of my family, and do well. One of my uncle’s wishes was for me to get to drive his car. So we’ll see what the future holds. But this year I’m going to finish out the year Top Dragster, and next year you might see me in a really pretty, orange GTO.” Going racing without Terry will be hard, but going racing is what the Teets family does. Even if it’s without one of the team’s founding members. “I can’t imagine going to the racetrack and not feeling like he’s with us,” Mandy says. “One of my biggest fans in my racing career has been my uncle. Very encouraging, very loving, very positive, and I’m really, really going to miss that about him. I’m going to miss having that thousand-kilowatt smile slapping me on the back and saying, ‘Way to go.’ I’m going to miss that.” “Everything we do is family,” Glenn III adds. “It’s me and my dad, my sister, my mom. My wife pitches in and my brother-in-law and others pitch in when they can, but we’re a family operation. We don’t have a crew of five or six guys tuning on stuff. We kind of like it that way. It’s how we grew up. My parents met at the racetrack and we grew up at the racetrack. That’s why it means so much to us. It’s going to be hard, but I’m looking forward to it. We belong at the racetrack. When we get back out there, I think we’ll feel a lot better.” PDRA660.com 39