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Here is how Andrea Hans knows she’s moving up in the world: Stuff aggravates her now.
Seventeen years old, a student at Churubusco High School, she just finished her second season racing an INEX Legends car, a developmental series for young drivers looking to eventually move into full-size stock cars. She finished 11th in national points out of a pool of more than 400 drivers. In a season split between North Carolina and Indiana, she had five wins, 13 top fives and six top 10s as a semipro.
“And at the nationals,” she says, “we qualified 11th and ended up 13th. So that was a really good improvement from the beginning of the year.”
Want to know what was also an improvement?
Her attitude.
When she didn’t perform well, it stank. In an appropriate manner, of course.
“Last year, I just went on and on and on about ‘It’s OK, it’s OK if I got last,’ ” Hans says. “This year, I was upset if I didn’t place in the top five.”
Hans credits both her heightened expectations, and heightened performance, to a second season with the Team Full Throttle NASCAR Driver Development Program, an outfit in Mooresville, N.C., that includes more than 30 racers nationwide. This season, Hans actually spent part of the year in North Carolina working with her Team Full Throttle coach, Tom Baker, and racing at Concord Speedway.
“Going to North Carolina really helped my confidence level, because it proved to me I could win,” says Hans, who opened the season with a victory after everyone else in the field was disqualified. “It really set off a good vibe and helped me strive to do better.”
Baker helped with that process too, she says.
“He helps me get the thinking aspect of racing and helps me get calm during the race and after the race,” Hans says. “Before a race he’ll be like, ‘Calm down, think of racing, focus.’ He definitely looks on the positive all the time and also criticizes to make you a better racer.”
The wins and top fives were a testament to his success. So was her performance at the INEX Legends Nationals, where Hans’ qualifying effort actually was the pole speed through three sessions of qualifying.
“That’s something we were working on, to qualify a lot better,” Hans says. “I definitely dropped some time on my qualifying from the beginning of the year after I came from North Carolina.”
It is, she says, all about what Baker stresses: Focus.
“I’ve learned that you really need to get into that mind-set of racing,” says Hans, who’ll run the Legends series again next year, and, she hopes, get seat time in a late-model stock car as well. “If you’re not focused on what line you’re gonna run or what braking you’re gonna make or how to come out of a corner, it’s not gonna work for you because you have to hit those marks. You have to get them done.”
So has she gotten them done?
Andrea Hans knows the right answer to that question now: Not entirely.
“We were hoping to make the top 10 in the nation in points,” she says. “We’re getting there.”
