INDIANAPOLIS — IndyCar mechanic Cam Wexford is living a magical life, the first woman mechanic for Dubois Racing, an expert in gearboxes who loves everything about her career — the career she had to settle for after her racing dream died.
In her younger days, Wexford whipped around the tracks dreaming of one day making it as a Formula 1 driver, but the accident happened. The chaos erupted, and the Wexford name became mud in racing circles.
The crash that derailed Wexford’s dreams of having an elite driving career was supposed to be all in her past. She thought Loic Chalumeau was in her past.
Then, the unthinkable happens when Chalumeau, a hotshot, five-time champion Formula 1 driver, comes back into Wexford’s life, set to compete in the Indianapolis 500 on the Dubois team.
As Wexford is forced to come face-to-face with Chalumeau, at first, she tries to avoid him. Soon, that becomes impossible as their feelings start to grow and sparks start to fly.
But, Wexford has a secret to keep from Chalumeau, the one that’s buried in their past from the controversial accident that happened more than two decades before.
This is the dramatic setup to the new May romance novel “Overtaken,” written by Indy author Kate Shoup, a motorsports insider who is married to racing veteran Olivier Bouisson.
Shoup wrote “Overtaken,” which is set among the backdrop of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and its legendary Indy 500, under the pseudonym Elisabeth Oliver to differentiate from her non-fiction work.
The switch to a genre Shoup hadn’t tackled before came naturally to her — romance and racing — two things she is very familiar with.
A real-life racing romance
When Shoup divorced her first husband in 2007, she needed “literally any house,” she says. Any house would do, as long as it was located in her daughter’s school district.
The house Shoup landed happened to be right next door to a young, Frenchman who worked in racing. His name was Olivier Boisson.
At first, the sparks didn’t fly. Shoup’s life was kind of a mess, and Boisson “had his own situationship happening,” she says. Weeks passed, then months, then they started hanging out as neighbors.
And then, “I just thought he felt sorry for his old lady, single mom neighbor,” Shoup says.
That’s not what it was at all. Shoup and Boisson began dating in 2008, and they married in 2014. It was one of the easiest moves of Shoup’s life, just one house over.
With Boisson as her partner, Shoup became fully immersed in the sport of racing.
Racing wasn’t new to Shoup, who had grown up in Indianapolis. “I can remember riding my bike around the neighborhood, and you could hear the race happening in the background, just everywhere you went,” she says. “I was always kind of intrigued by it.”
Then, when Shoup was 14, her dad took her to her first Indy 500. That was the iconic 1985 “Spin and Win” race where Danny Sullivan won after performing a 360-degree spin on Lap 120 passing leader Mario Andretti.
Shoup fell deeply in love with racing. When she moved to Colorado for college, Shoup didn’t have a television set. And she desperately wanted to watch the Indy 500.
Her boyfriend had a TV. “I knew I was going to dump him, but I wanted to watch the race,” she says. “So I waited a couple days to get the race in before …” that relationship was over.
Fast forward to meeting Boisson, which Shoup calls “such a stroke of luck because it’s provided this unbelievable backstage pass into this whole universe.”
Shoup has traveled to all the races, met so many people, observed the drivers and seen all those insider things most people don’t get to see. And that adds authenticity to her book.
“It was so important for me to be accurate,” Shoup says. “I was lucky to have these relationships with these people where I could just ask, ‘What’s it like when you win the 500?'”
She talked to mechanics, engineers, drivers and owners.
“These relationships were so beautiful and so much fun and so fascinating to me,” Shoup says. “And what I really wanted to do was find a way to put all that together into a novel.”
Crafting the characters
“Overtaken’s” female character of Cam Wexford spawned from Anna Chatten, a real-life IndyCar mechanic who “really had to contend with a lot of real (crap) along the way,” Shoup says.
“And the way that she dealt with that stress and frustration was to be super sassy. Whatever somebody gave to her, she was going to triple down and give it right back, and that is how she made it work.”
The male character of Chalumeau came much easier for Shoup, because she’d had so many interactions with drivers through the years. And she had noticed something about those drivers along the way.
“Everybody thinks their lives must be so awesome. And in a lot of ways they are. They’re rich, they’re hot, they’re famous, and they get a lot of doors opened for them,” Shoup says. “But, at the same time, I could not shake the feeling that a lot of them, probably, were really lonely, too.”
Few can relate to the life drivers lead. And that is why the on-track romance between Wexford and Chalumeau works, Shoup says. They both understand the struggles of the sport.
When asked for her “dinner party” description of the book, Shoup says: “The main character is a woman who works in racing. She’s a mechanic, and a very famous F1 driver crosses over to run the 500. And she has to stay away from him because they have a secret past.”
From there, Shoup says, there are many layers to the novel.
“Overtaken” is a “rom-com set in racing with sexism aspects, class differences, and you have these painful backstories,” she says. “But really, ultimately, what it is, it’s a rom-com set with the 500 as its backdrop.”
More about “Overtaken,” purchase the book.
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar mechanic falls in love with the wrong driver. A perfect May romance novel
Reporting by Dana Hunsinger Benbow, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
