Afford a woman like Valerie Thompson a few minutes of your time and you're apt to hear a phrase like "adrenaline rush" on at least a couple of occasions, peppered into the conversation in a calm, soft-spoken manner, a manner you wouldn't likely expect from someone who makes their living astride the roaring, body-shaking power of a Superbike, someone grown accustomed to tightly gripping the throttle of machines built explicitly for the purpose of setting, shattering land speed records, for firing down the track at speeds north of 200 miles per hour, leaving nothing but the smell of pavement and a ringing in the ears in its wake. But this is Valerie Thompson - this is "America's Queen of Speed."
Quiet. Calm. Confident in herself as a racer, confident in herself as a woman.
Confident that when the moment comes to pop the clutch and to open up the engine, to push the boundaries of acceptable speed, to ride the line between fear and excitement and hopefully somewhere along the way rattle yet another set of eardrums, turn a few more heads, make one more electrifying, pulse-pounding run towards the horizon, into the record-books, she'll be ready.
It's strange to think that Thompson's newfound career wasn't even actually her first, wasn't an interest ingrained in her as a child. No, Thompson, speaking to Headlines & Global News recently, revealed that it was an unexpected bit of happenstance - something she termed a "whoopsie" - that brought her from futures and figures to the world of cylinders, calipers and exhaust pipes.
It was an unfortunate occurrence that not all that long ago disrupted the lives of a nearly illimitable number of Americans. The rupture of the economic bubble left Thompson, a decade-plus veteran of the financial industry, without work and nowhere to turn. So Thompson, this woman with no familial ties to the racing world, no previous experience on a motorcycle, did something that would seem to, in hindsight, prove a precursor to the approach that has allowed her to thrive in her current profession - she made a massive gamble. She jumped in headfirst and let the world and her own abilities take her where they may. And where they've brought her is to pumping out horsepower on the back of a Superbike.
"I know I just go in a straight line," Thompson told HNGN, a smile in her voice, "but it's really fun."
For Thompson, all it took was a few runs with friends in Scottsdale, a handful of laps, handful of runs here and there. Once those first few laps were under her belt, there was no going back.
"I didn't pick my sport, it picked me," Thompson says, referring to herself and her fellow racers as "unique animals," thrill seekers who combine a passion for racing with the need to see their names engraved in the record-books. These record-setting runs are something Thompson, 48, is starting to grow accustomed to. Just this month, at the inaugural Colorado Mile Speed Competition, Thompson became the first female member of the Colorado 200 mile per hour club after running a 201.2 MPH pass - a record set despite complications from breaking in a brand new, first and only, crated directly from Germany Quicksilver Powersports Lubricants BMW S 1000 RR, not to mention the increased elevation.
But complications or no, Thompson is all to happy to face them, to continue her expedient march forward, as long as it means she gets to keep racing, gets to keep chasing that "adrenaline rush" that had, for too long in her life, evaded her.
"I've always wanted to do something that was outdoorsy. And I always wanted to be my own boss," Thompson said. "I moved to Arizona and met a great group of friends to ride with and I rode with them as fast as they did down Scottsdale Road and we were a bit out of control and that's what really started my drag racing was on the street.
"Then I went to the track and I just made hot laps after hot laps and that's basically how I started."
Do you feel an "otherness" as a woman in the sport?
"At first when I started drag racing I felt it was the boy's club. And when I did start I didn't act like the girl, I didn't wear my froofy stuff, I didn't bring out the Valerie sexy side, I only brought out the manly side because I was thinking I could fit in better with them. But once that wasn't really working out I said 'forget it, I'm going to get me a pink bike, I'm going to get rhinestones put all over it, my helmet, my suit' and once I started that, it's kind of like coming out of the closet to be a girl on a race bike. And that felt really great and my confidence level just skyrocketed and it's something I would never want people to hold back from being themselves in any kind of sports.
"Now I feel like I'm a girl, I can act like a girl and I can have my rhinestones and Swarovski crystals on my helmet and all over and I have some on my race bike. But my bike doesn't know what gender it is, so therefore that's how I view the gender issue now."
What are your plans for the future?
"I guess my next big thing would be I really want to hit some high speeds next year, faster speeds than I've ever gone. I'd like to go somewhere near 230 MPH. In the 1000cc class. And it's just going to take one more year to get up there.
"It's hard to just do 10 more MPH. I mean I've been 217.7 on the street, but being 213 on the salt is ten-times worse. It's kind of Colorado how it robs your speed, the elevation, well the traction is the No. 1 key for racing at Bonneville."
While Thompson, "American's Queen of Speed," has her heart set in the here and now on more realistic goals, she says that "in a perfect world" she'd be chasing the likes of 300 or 400 MPH from the cockpit of a streamliner. "It's on my bucket list," she says, a ghost of a smile creeping into her voice again.
But for now, she'll resign herself to shattering records on her BMW bike on the track, on the salt flats, whenever and wherever there's an opportunity to race, an opportunity to chase that sweet rush of adrenaline.
