Race Against Time

Sixteen-year-old Cole Sonnier flips a borrowed car street racing outside Lafayette, and his father, an insurance man who never drives a mile over the limit, ships him off for the summer to a grandfather he's met maybe six times. Earl Sonnier fixes small engines with burn-scarred hands and keeps only one thing on his farm locked, the barn where a 1940s race car named Evangeline sits with her right front fender still blistered from an old fire. Past midnight, Cole's transistor radio pulls a broadcast out of the static, a Labor Day race at a dirt track called the Teche Bowl with Sonnier and Fontenot running side by side, and the signal dies on lap 86 every time. On lap 87 of that race, in 1949, Earl's best friend Remy Fontenot died in a fireball that Earl has spent fifty years believing he caused. As Cole and his grandfather bring Evangeline back to life, a voice in the cane tells Cole the race hasn't ended yet, and he and Remy's granddaughter Delia have until Labor Day to dig the old track out of the weeds before the bulldozers arrive.