What do you do when the inside of your race car fills with smoke? If you are Tim Nagy, professor and vice chair for research in the department of nutrition sciences at the UAB, you pull over, kill the engine and ask the corner worker if you are on fire. At Little Talladega recently, Nagy was instructing, not even racing, when he rounded a corner at 100 mph, and his car filled with smoke. After pulling off track, he asked if his car was on fire. The reply was, “Not anymore.” Nagy had lost the oil cooler from his engine and had been driving with a fireball of almost four car lengths behind his car. “I never saw the fireball,” he said. “I just saw the smoke in the car.” Fortunately, Nagy and the car were okay, except for some bubbled paint on the body and a couple of hoses that had to be reattached. After a quick run through the car wash using the degreaser function, he was ready for his race that weekend. Mondays through Fridays, Nagy can be found at UAB, where he has worked for 14 years. He came to the university for postdoctoral work after studying lemmings — yes, the little creatures that supposedly throw themselves off cliffs. Nagy insisted that this is not true. His interest in body weight regulation, which is why he studied nutrition, led him to lemmings. “I used to study lemmings in my former life as a physiological ecologist,” Nagy said, “and I was interested in how they change body mass dramatically on a seasonal basis. I was interested in not only the physiological mechanisms that allowed them to change body mass and composition, but why they do it. What are the ecological and evolutionary reasons?” From there, he became interested in studying the causes of obesity in people. In his work at UAB, he studies the mechanisms of body weight regulation and why body fat is potentially detrimental to health, including its link to cancer. Currently, he is working on several research projects dealing with body composition and energy expenditure. Nagy is also the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Body Composition Research. “Racing is my escape from my mental job, the stress and the constant thinking of research and writing grants,” he said. “One of the things I like about (being) at the racetrack is there’s no time to think about work.” Nagy’s passion for racing began with motorcycles. A crash during a race changed that. He went on to win, but when he got off his bike, he realized he couldn’t stand on his left leg. His ankle was broken in seven places. “That’s when I decided that I’d had enough of motocross,” Nagy said with a laugh. He had just bought a sports car, and after taking a high performance driver’s education course, he wanted to race, but he couldn’t afford to crash his new car. So he bought a used Porsche 924S for $3,500, which is the car he is driving two years later. Last year, his first year of racing, he competed in time trials only. “I really just started racing wheel-to-wheel this year,” he said. His first wheel-to-wheel race was the weekend of March 29. In an enduro (a one-and-a-half-hour race) that weekend, he took first place in his class. In two half-hour sprints, he took second place in his class in the first race and first place in the second. Besides racing, Nagy is a driving instructor. He teaches aspiring drivers of local driving clubs (Porsche/BMW Owners Club and Sports Car Club of America) at Barber Motorsports in Birmingham and other tracks around the southeast. Nagy loves everything about racing. “I enjoy having to prepare my car before the weekend,” he said. “I spend a lot of time in my garage working on my car. I enjoy hanging out with the great group of people that I drive with all the time. I’ve gone all over the southeast to different racetracks and met new people, been up to mid-Ohio and Virginia International Raceway. I’m just trying to see as many racetracks around the country as I can.” Nagy’s wife of two years and step-daughter are supportive of his race time. His step-daughter even helped when he was painting his car. She told him it looked like Lightning McQueen from “Cars” and asked him to put lightning bolts on the sides of it. “I was driving on the track and instructing when I met my wife, and she knew it was one of my passions, so she is actually very good about it. They put up with it,” Nagy said. “They know it means a lot to me.” May 2008