John McCain’s director of motorsports outreach …Cindy:

GLADEVILLE — Cindy McCain bounced out of the pace car at the Nashville Superspeedway, grinning from ear to ear. “That was great! Oh my God!” she yelled over the deafening roar of dozens of high-performance engines revving up for the Firestone 200 IndyCar series. McCain, wife of presidential hopeful John McCain, rode shotgun in the pace car before Saturday’s race, an outing that was part campaign outreach for the racing vote, part field trip for a longtime racing fan. After a few laps around the track, McCain made a beeline for the garage, peppering raceway officials with questions about the track, the racing lineup and the cars. Cindy McCain’s been a racing fan since she was 14. Her father invested in a race car and took her to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to check out the car. But in those days, women weren’t allowed in the pits, so young Cindy was left fuming outside the gate. “Gasoline alley, the pits, no way. They wouldn’t let girls in,” she recalled in an interview with The Tennessean. Even so, she was hooked. Her favorite driver? “Danica Patrick, of course,” she said, laughing. “I admire her so much. She has really been a tough, tough racer and a great competitor and it’s nice to see her succeed. I was happy to see her win the Japan race. That one intrigued me because I’d been to that track and … I understand the difficulty in that race. It’s a difficult track.” At the speedway Saturday, McCain lingered over Patrick’s car in the garage, hoping to meet the driver and talking animatedly to the crew. McCain’s eye for the track comes from years of racing herself. In 2004, she and her oldest son, Jack, rebuilt a drift car themselves and began racing as the only mother-and-son team on the circuit. Drift racers deliberately skid their rear tires around turns until the car begins drifting sideways. “It is hilariously fun to do. It’s just a barrel of fun,” said McCain, who is also a licensed pilot. Mother and son ride tandem in the car and so far, she said, “we’ve done OK” in their races together. They came in first one time — they’ve also had a bumper fall off their car in the middle of a race.

Kind of like the bumper that’s falling off of the Obama pace car…