Is your car safe?
The hidden dangers that lurk in your vehicle

Marlon Spencer and his wife Theresa, both in their early forties, always plan family trips. It's an established family past time to pile their three kids in the SUV and hit the road for a long excursion, confident on each occasion that it will be a safe outing.

Marlon is a very good driver, and his car is equipped with the latest safety features. While he ensures that everyone is buckled up, what he fails to consider is the problem posed by the items on the backseat floor or in the cargo area. The passengers are surrounded by suitcases, water bottles, books and toys for the kids, among other things. Marlon doesn't spare a thought for them.

But why would he? There are millions of vehicles on the road today just like his. They have fared well in crash tests and feature air bags and anti-lock brakes, which give the driver a sense of safety on the road.

People have turned their vehicles into a second living room, where hidden dangers abound. The laptop on the passenger seat, the PDA the on the dashboard, the boxes of tiles and supermarket groceries on the backseat for those weekend projects all lurk as triggers for a possible catastrophe. In the event of a crash, any of these objects could turn into a deadly missile.

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Lisa Bowman-Lee
Driven by Love and Support

Her husband will tell you that she is the perfect wife. Her two sons will say that she is the perfect mother and Jamaica's top motor racing professionals will admit (some perhaps grudgingly) that she is one of the best race car drivers on the highly competitive local circuit.

Driven by love, passion and commitment, Lisa Bowman-Lee has fought long and hard for parity in the racing arena. However, when it comes to the fight to balance her career and family, she is in a class to herself.

Lisa is Jamaica's leading female race car driver. Along with her responsibilities at the family-operated P&L Racing business and at home with her sprightly sons Mathew and Nicholas, she has developed an all-round ability. She is motivated by tremendous determination and competitiveness, which are reflected in the fact that she has spent the last 18 years of her life making a mark in the world of auto-racing. What makes her accomplishments and story more captivating is her success in preserving the integrity of her family life and business practice while "upsetting the applecart" and defying the ideologies in what remains an ego-driven, testosterone-dominated car racing fraternity.

Despite her innate passion for cars and auto racing (due largely to her father's involvement in the sport as a Vernamfield technician), her trophy-filled journey started somewhat by chance. She didn't consider getting behind a wheel competitively until after a life-threatening ordeal suffered by her husband, Paul, at the hands of gunmen.

Paul, an avid racing enthusiast himself and the current technical mind behind the P&L Racing team, had an epiphany of sorts after the incident and decided that he wanted to pursue his lifelong dream of auto racing. However, his already shaken wife refused to allow him to follow his dreams until she had satisfied her concerns by "testing it out" herself. That "test" became a relentless pursuit for respect and parity and even though she concedes that that struggle continues, she has undoubtedly established herself as one of the best drivers on the local circuit.

Lisa explained with a hint of amusement, "It was a dream of Paul's at the time back when we were just dating…he had a love for motor cars and I grew up in it with my father. I don't know if that was what attracted me to him in the first place, seeing that he was following in the trend that my father had laid."

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