CLOSE-UP
Pamala Wade
Multitasker
P
amala Wade is a woman with extremely varying interests. On
one hand, she’s cultivated a lifelong passion for dirt-slinging
oval cars, while at the same time entering and winning multiple
beauty contests!
Most of her adult life has been spent in Florida, where she won the Miss
Shrimp Festival in 1986 during her high school years, followed by a 1st
place trophy in the Miss Nassua County contest. Later, she was a finalist
in the Miss Florida competition. And while she regrets never getting the
opportunity to race a dirt track entry, she nevertheless enjoys burning up
the drag strip every chance she gets.
Wade’s love affair with cars began with a street-driven 1973 Firebird
she owned in high school. While she admits to participating in an obscene
amount of street races with the car, it would actually be much later in life
before this mother of five children buckled herself into a drag car and took
a tree at the drag strip. “First track I ever visited was Gainesville back in
1992,” she remembers. “I went there to watch and crew for my husband,
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David, who raced a 1971 Opel GT.”
One of their children was a newborn at the time and Pamala would
tend to the baby while also checking tire pressure and assisting David on
the starting line. It would be another 22 years before she herself experi-
enced the thrill of bumping into the beams while driving her 1984 Super
Comp Corvette at Florida’s Green Cove Dragway. “I had a good teacher
in David, but man, I took some lashing from him in the beginning!” she
laughs.
Wade later realized she was better suited to drive the Chevy Vega they
owned, only because the trans-brake button was on the left-hand side. “I
had a bad habit of not releasing it in the Corvette,” she admits.
Green Cove had a Top 10 list similar to that of Street Outlaws and Wade
began climbing the ladder. “I started out in the No. 10 spot while grudge
racing the Vega and ran it all the way up to the No. 3 position. We just
didn’t have enough horsepower to push through to the top.”
That would change when she moved up to a Top Sportsman 1964 Cor-
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Issue 143