Latest Dixie Chopper speed merchant certainly not your typical teenage girl

Like any typical 19-year-old Midwestern girl, Bailey Shea Williams can't wait for Saturday nights to roll around so she can mosey around the mall, shop for shoes and get a whiff of the latest fragrance at the perfume counter.

Well, at least one Saturday a year that is.

For Bailey's typical Saturday night includes a need for speed, not moseying; the squeal of tires, not sneakers; and the smell of oil and gasoline, not Chanel No. 5.

Typical teenager, she's not. Bailey is an ATV racer, the pride of Lock Springs, Mo. (population 56) and a sensation on the Extreme Dirt Track National Series, where she has completed her fourth season as the one and only female in her racing class.

Bailey will be signing autographs in the Dixie Chopper booth at the Feb. 11-14 National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville.

"It's like my life," says Bailey who now counts Dixie Chopper of Team Lucas among her prime racing sponsors. "I've never really liked anything else."

Oh sure, at 5-foot-10-1/2 there have been the obligatory basketball, softball, cheerleading and gymnastics forays for the statuesque blond. But none of them has captured her fancy like quad racing.

"I quit everything for racing," she says, noting that she really has only one free Saturday a year between March and November to do anything else whenever she's home in Chillicothe in northwest Missouri.

"Maybe it's the 10 years of competitive gymnastics and dance, or all the cheerleading, basketball or softball," she suggests. "I don't know why I feel so strong about this. I just know that no matter how good I was at all those other sports, I never felt the passion that I feel when I'm on that track. It's truly indescribable.

"Sports like gymnastics just made me a nervous wreck," she admits. "I threw up before a meet. But racing is different. It calms my nerves and takes all my cares away."

It's not that easy for mom Rinda Williams, however, who finds watching her daughter battle for racetrack supremacy just a little "too nerve-wracking."

But it's like a dream come true for dad Troy Williams.

"This started out as my hobby, my dream," he says, "now she riding for it. And I'll tell you one thing, there's not many guys who can say they get to spend the summer with their 19-year-old daughters."

Dad says Bailey came to him one day and said she wanted to race quads.

"I figured it would blow over in a month or two," he recalls. "Then I saw her on the track and saw her talent and could tell that she just loved it. Bailey's always been a natural at everything she's done.

"She's unbelievable for a female. All I've got to do is say there's a race, and she's ready to go."

She has amassed 16 individual championships and a carload of titles in the past four seasons.

Bailey finished fifth in the ATVA points standings in Division A for 2008. At 17 in 2007, she was nominated as Female Rider of the Year and was first-place champion in both the ARQA (American Quad Racing Association) Production B and Women's classes. That year she also finished second in both the B class and Women's Class of the ATVA Extreme Dirt Track Nationals.

Bailey also has the distinction of being the first and youngest female to win the men's 265 B Class nationals, the first woman to race the men's Production A Class and the youngest female to win a Nationals race at 16 years old in 2006.

The next step, her dad says, "is to get her physically and mentally prepared for the pro and pro-am circuit."

The physical part, of course, can be tough.

In fact, Bailey had a wreck at a local race that split her helmet and knocked her out.

"Luckily," Dad says, "she remembers nothing about it."

"Thanks goodness I don't remember," Bailey agrees, "otherwise I might be scared."

In addition to her head, she injured her hip, back and shoulder in the crash. "I couldn't even walk," she admits.

But she was back on the bike four days later to race to a fourth-place finish in the nationals at Ashtabula, Ohio.

Grandpa Roy Ferguson wasn't quite sure about his granddaughter's newest love.

"Grandpa thought it was just about the craziest thing you could ever do for your daughter - until she started winning," her dad laughed.

The quads can run up to 80-85 mph, Troy Williams says and the main feature race is usually a 20-lap affair.

But Bailey's favorite part is "the hole shot" where the riders surge off the starting line into the first turn to take the early advantage.

"I love to beat all the boys at that," she says.

Yep, a typical teenage girl all right.