‘When Shannon Hill made her debut as a back-up girl for the “Mad Max” nitro Funny Car, she dressed the part of a post-apocalyptic movie character: Leather pants, boots, and corset, elbow-length black gloves, and black paint under her eyes to match the color of her long locks.
She could have walked onto the set of “The Road Warrior” and fit right in with the rest of the cast, and she quickly settled on a name for her character: “Mad Maxine.”
On the weekend of Oct. 11-13, the mother of four became a road warrior of a different kind. She drove solo overnight from her home in Renssalaer, Indiana, to North Carolina to support her husband, Ryan, as he took a turn behind the wheel of “Mad Max.” Their 4-year-old daughter Kinsley rode to the event with her dad, granddad Dave Hill (who owns and also drives the car) and the rest of the team to the Tar Heel state.
On Sunday morning, after Saturday’s appearance at the track, the team and Kinsley headed home with the race car. Shannon – again, on her own – set off to the western part of the state, her 2018 Honda Odyssey packed full of donated and purchased items for Hurricane Helene relief. When she finally found a place to drop off the goods in the North Carolina mountains, she drove directly back to Indiana – in all, a day of nearly 15 hours in the car.
That side trip came out of the goodness of her heart and others who were inspired to help. The death toll across the six states hit hard by Helene currently stands at more than 300, and the area near Asheville, N.C., took the biggest blow. Mudslides and flooding wiped out towns and parts of key highways, including Interstate 40 near the border with Tennessee. Homes, businesses, and even tractor-trailers were washed away during the worst of the late-September deluge.
Hill, of course, was not alone as someone involved in racing who wanted to help. NASCAR teams, most of which are based about 100 miles from Asheville in the metro Charlotte area, sent tractor-trailer loads of goods to North Wilkesboro Speedway that were then distributed to the areas most in need. Greg Biffle, who won 56 races in NASCAR’s top three divisions and championships in the Xfinity and Camping World Truck series, stocked his helicopter with goods and has been delivering them almost daily into the most-affected areas almost from the get-go. Garrett Mitchell, a.k.a. YouTube influencer ‘Cleetus McFarland’ and a former racer, did the same with his helicopter.
Nor was Hill the only drag racer who helped as soon as possible. Wilkesboro (NC) Dragway promoter/manager Paul Salvatore and his wife Cindy used Facebook to help publicize a relief drive, and he estimated they filled two tractor-trailers with supplies from the track and its supporters. Their small group of volunteers soon became a group of more than two dozen who deployed with side-by-sides and ATVs to help deliver items received from church missions, Samaritan’s Purse and “a massive amount of everyday people,” Salvatore said, from food and medical supplies to water, gas, generators, clothing and more. Salvatore said that one of his racers “spent weeks with his excavator and track loader helping stranded folks.”
“We worked with every bit of daylight we had,” he added.
Shannon Hill was just as driven to help even though she lives some 600 miles from the most-devastated areas. It would have been a waste, she said, to have a mini-van and not fill it with relief supplies when she was heading for a state where her husband was going to race.
She decided to use her growing recognition – ‘Maxine’ has almost 16,000 Facebook followers – to drum up help from sources near and far, and that strategy worked. One fan from the United Kingdom, she said, sent money to help her purchase products.
The items she bought were added to a small mountain of goods she already had stashed away at home from being a serious bargain hunter.
“Everybody makes fun of me for couponing. My kids think it’s hilarious that every week, every few days, we go to CVS or Walgreen’s, and they’re, ‘What’re you doing, Mom, picking up more toothpaste? More body wash?’” she said. “I can get it pretty cheap, and I had built up a stockpile of personal hygiene items, so I thought, ‘I can give away my stuff – but I really want to fill this van.’
Her gig as Mad Maxine isn’t limited to signing autographs, posing for photos with fans, performing her back-up duties, and guiding either her husband or father-in-law to the edge of the pre-stage beams for a run.
“We work as a team, so I help the guys pick stuff up and clean things. That night, I was like, ‘Y’know what? I can’t stay awake any longer,’ and I went to bed about 10 or 10:30,” she said.
But by 6 a.m., Hill was up again, and within an hour headed west for the four-home drive toward Asheville.
She had her sights set on making deliveries to a couple of churches that were accepting donations. There was no one at the first stop, so she headed for the second only to arrive after the service had begun. When no one had come out by 12:30 p.m., some 75 minutes later, she moved on, knowing that she faced a drive home of more than 550 miles to Rensselaer after finding a donation site.
“I didn’t know where I was going, honestly, but my thought process is that that section of I-40 obviously was bad enough to where it took out an entire interstate for miles,” she said. “So I was going to find the back roads that run alongside 40 and go that route. I lost reception for my phone, meaning GPS wasn’t working, so I’m driving aimlessly for probably an hour with no reception whatsoever. It was, like, ‘Well, I think I’m going north.’ I still had my map pulled up, I just couldn’t get turn-by-turn instructions. I was heading west and then I took off north, and around some of the curves, half the road was missing. I finally found a volunteer fire department – I don’t even remember the name of it – and when I pulled up there, they waved me on in: ‘Yeah, absolutely, we’ll take what you have.’
“A lot of places had their donation sites set up on the side of the road, and there were donations just spilling out everywhere. I didn’t bring water because they were saying, ‘Do not send water.’ So I had all the stuff I had gathered – batteries, flashlights, toilet paper – and they took it all at that fire department.”
Hill’s trek came two weeks after Helene had swept north out of the Gulf of Mexico and ripped through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. The community of Busick, N.C., located northwest of Asheville in a neighboring county, received nearly 31 inches of rain.
“By the time I got down there, they did a really good job of clearing the roads of trees that had been uprooted. There were only a few times I had to really squeeze to get by dead trees and debris and stuff,” she said. “It was definitely as bad as I thought it was going to be. I didn’t see a whole lot of houses along the route that I was on, but their driveways were gone from what I could see from the road. They were taking tree trunks and building driveways so they could get out.
“One town – I don’t know which one it was – but I passed a town that was right alongside the river that runs through there, and the houses were just trashed, just destroyed. … All of their belongings were out in the front yard – furniture, clothing, all the trash that washed up from the river. It was devastating.
“Then I got into town, and it had flooded there, too. You could tell on the windows of the businesses how high the water was. … All these businesses that were downtown were ruined, just washed away. It was a life-altering experience, honest to God. It gave me chills heading west on 40, because almost every car I was riding alongside, everybody was heading in to go help.
You’d see trucks that were packed full of stuff – lots of excavating equipment and trailers with supplies the whole way there. There wasn’t a single regular car that I passed on the way that wasn’t packed to the brim. Lots of out-of-state plates.”
Hill’s 52-hour long weekend, in which a sponsor picked up the tab for gas, finally ended about 10 p.m. Sunday.
Hill posted messages on Facebook of her charitable efforts, but she is adamant that it was not done to toot her own horn, but for the sole purpose of showing that she had made good on her promise to literally deliver the goods.
“I like to think of myself as a trusty, reliable source,” she said. “Everybody that follows me, I would say, has some sort of trust level with me, and what I say I’m going to do. That’s the only reason I put it out there.”
The hours of solitude on the highway gave Hill some very welcome, precious quiet time, and once back home she could get comfy again in a racing T-shirt and yoga pants – the furthest thing from the smiling, curvaceous Mad Maxine seen at the dragstrip, in calendars, and on social media. She woke up Monday morning as Ryan’s wife and mom to Kinsley, Jenna, Emma and Blake.
“The going joke around our team is that Mad Maxine is literally everything that I am not,” she said. “I don’t consider myself a confident person. I don’t go around in everyday life showing cleavage. I don’t dress like that except at the track.”
To those in a hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina, she’s one of many racers who came clothed as angels in disguise.
