After the engines shut down and 19-year-old Jerahleigh Johnson climbs out of her demolition derby car, people finally get a good look at the person who has been smashing them into oblivion.
Off comes the helmet and out falls her long blonde hair.
“I've had grown men say, ‘I haven't been hit that hard in years, let alone to have it be some little girl,’” said her dad, Jeremiah Johnson.
Jerahleigh lives in Saratoga and spends her summers fixing up old cars for the express purpose of busting the crap out of them in dirt arenas around the West.
Her latest machine is a hulking early-1980s Cadillac painted red, white and blue, with white stars scattered across its rear quarter panels and two exhaust stacks punching through the hood.
It started the season looking downright patriotic.
Today, the hood is buckled, the doors are cratered and the front end looks like it has been worked over with a giant sledgehammer, which is the whole point.
“You're going into a purposeful car wreck,” she said.
Then she grinned, because for Jerahleigh, the part most people would consider horrifying is the funnest.
She Wanted In
Jerahleigh grew up in the garage.
Her dad got into demolition derby about 20 years ago, so her childhood was surrounded by tools and old cars waiting to be torn apart and rebuilt, with nights and weekends spent turning ordinary automobiles into Mad Max machines.
One of her younger brothers started driving before she did, climbing behind the wheel around age 11 or 12. By about 15, Jerahleigh had watched enough.
She wanted in.
There was no grand rebellion involved, no moment when the sweet Saratoga girl shocked her horrified parents by announcing she wanted to smash automobiles for fun.
Her dad was already smashing automobiles for fun. Her brother was smashing automobiles for fun.
Some families play golf.
The Johnsons “do derby.”
Not Holding The Flashlight
Spend enough time talking to Jerahleigh about derby and it becomes clear the crashing is only half of it.
Long before No. 15 rolls onto the dirt, hundreds of hours of labor are invested in making sure it can survive once the smashing starts.
The Cadillac had to be gutted.
Glass came out. Seats came out. The dashboard and much of the interior disappeared.
A steel cage went in around the driver's compartment, and the car was rebuilt according to the rules of Jerahleigh's class.
The family has put about $15,000 into the smasher.
And Jerahleigh isn't just standing around holding the flashlight for Dad.
“The motor that she runs, she put it together herself,” Jeremiah said. “She can do it all.”
She can grind and prepare metal, change her own oil and spark plugs, do a tuneup, install an engine and weld in the roll cage that might ultimately be responsible for keeping her alive.
Jeremiah said her mechanical ability is “above most of the guys, guaranteed.”
That makes the sight of Jerahleigh standing beside No. 15 slightly deceptive. The young woman with the long blonde hair and easy smile didn't just climb into the monster.
She helped build it.
Peach Rings
For somebody preparing to intentionally wreck a car, Jerahleigh has a remarkably gentle pregame ritual.
She drinks water, eats gummy peach rings and would appreciate it if everybody left her alone for a little while.
Then the fire suit and helmet go on.
When Jerahleigh climbs through the gutted shell of the cab and settles into the driver's seat, she might have a strategy, but she knows it won't last.
“It changes the second you strap in the car and they say go,” she said.
Everything becomes noise, mud, smoke and split-second decisions.
Jerahleigh watches the other cars and looks for openings, trying to protect the parts of the Cadillac she needs to keep moving while searching for opportunities to deliver a hard shot with the parts she can afford to lose.
Steve “Grumpy” Diorio noticed that the first time he watched her.
The owner of The Grumpy Italian pizzeria in Saratoga, and now one of Jerahleigh's sponsors, knew almost nothing about demolition derby when he met her. The Johnsons had become regulars at his restaurant, and eventually conversation wandered into what their families did for fun.
He went to watch her compete, discovering demolition derby was louder and crazier than anything he had expected. But underneath the chaos, he noticed Jerahleigh wasn't simply barreling blindly around the arena. She waited for her opportunities and picked her shots.
Now he's one of her biggest fans.
“I want to see her become a star,” Diorio said.
Blood On Her Face
Jerahleigh knows exactly what can go wrong.
Her biggest fear in the arena was getting hurt, but she's already checked that box.
At a derby in Utah, another car hit her hard enough that she bit through her lip.
She kept driving.
In fact, she kept driving well enough to finish second.
Jeremiah remembers his daughter finally climbing out of the car with a big smile and blood running down her face while everybody around her watched in horror. Jerahleigh was so busy talking to the other young drivers and congratulating them that she hardly seemed to notice.
“She didn't even realize that she was needing to go get stitches,” Jeremiah said.
She wears a mouth guard now.
Problem solved.
Not For The Money
Jerahleigh figures she's competed in somewhere around a dozen derbies, and she's loved them all.
But despite the occasional giant check, she insists anybody who thinks derby is a clever way to make money has profoundly misunderstood the economics of spending $15,000 on a car and then encouraging people to smash into it.
“We do it for fun,” she said. “If we were doing it for the money, shoot, we'd be losing. We would have quit a long time ago.”
What keeps her coming back is the entire strange, noisy circus of it — the smell of hot engines, mud flying from tires, radiators breaking open and throwing steam, cars disappearing into clouds of dust, and funnel cakes, hot dogs and beer in the stands while the machines below slowly beat one another into junk.
Then there are the people.
Her father calls them the “derby family” — all those people they race against, compete against or, as he quickly corrected himself, “crash against.”
Jerahleigh's own family is almost always there, too: her mom, her dad and her brothers.
And now Grumpy.
“I'm not a real big race enthusiast,” Diorio said. “What I am is a family enthusiast.”
That's what drew him to Jerahleigh in the first place. He watched the Johnsons work together — Jerahleigh behind the wheel, her father building alongside her, her brothers helping in the pits, everybody contributing — and saw something he recognized from his own family-run restaurant.
Jerahleigh is the one behind the wheel, but there are always people waiting when she climbs back out.
More Cars To Wreck
At 19, Jerahleigh doesn't pretend to have the rest of her life mapped out.
College never called to her, and rather than go simply because that's what young people are expected to do, she decided to work and figure things out as she went.
“I'm kind of just feeling everything out,” she said.
Ask about derby, however, and the future gets much clearer.
She wants more.
Jerahleigh wants to move into bigger classes with more elaborate builds, tougher competition and, as she readily acknowledges, considerably more money disappearing into cars destined for violent deaths.
She wants to get better at building them and better at driving them.
And she wants to keep hitting.
‘Overcome And Conquer’
Her father believes the sport has already taught her something considerably more valuable than how to weld or where to aim a Cadillac.
In demolition derby, even a good night goes wrong. You can build the car perfectly, have a plan and execute it well, and still come out of a heat with the front end folded, the wheels pointed in different directions and something important hanging on by a thread.
If you've qualified for the next round, there isn't much time to feel sorry for yourself.
You figure out what's broken, fix what you can and go again.
“Not everything's going to be perfect,” Jeremiah said. “Not everything's going to be the way it's written in the book how it should be, and you just kind of have to overcome and conquer.”
Jeremiah sees that quality in Jerahleigh, whether she's underneath a car building it, behind the wheel smashing it or climbing back out after something has gone wrong.
The car will get mangled. That's inevitable.
She'll fix what she can.
Then she'll get back in.
“You got to just stand up and keep going,” Jeremiah said.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
