There’s been some off-and-on discussion on a couple of message boards I
frequent about just where stock car racing got started.
It all began when a very intelligent and history-conscious poster offered
the opinion that it was a myth that stock car racing began with bootleggers and
moonshiners in the southeast after World War II. He pointed out that it existed
in various other parts of the country for some years before that catastrophic
war.
“Caution is out. Debris.” Every race fan, especially those watching the event on television, hates to hear that. And, sometimes we get a little miffed to find out it’s a piece of cellophane and is out of the groove. I agree with everyone who says that the TV people should show the debris whenever possible, …
Dammit, I hate doing this. Especially two weeks in a row. This is depressing. Just last week I did a tribute to my old friend Sonny Ates, one of the best who ever stepped in a sprint car, and now two more are gone – Jim Hunter and Ed Shull. I don’t have to write …
Pardon me for stepping out of stock car racing again, folks. This one was hard to write, but I felt I owed it to an old friend. One of my favorite movie quotes was spoken by Richard Burton as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in The Longest Day: “The thing that’s always worried me about …
I’ve mentioned the late Tommy Thompson of Louisville and the Motor City 250 NASCAR Grand National event at the Detroit Fairgrounds in 1951 before in this column. Tommy was a friend of mine, and was president of the old Fairgrounds Motor Speedway in Louisville when it first opened. I had heard a lot from him about that race …
You hear a lot about this article’s title nowadays in racing, people saying, “You’ve got to think outside the box.” Has “the box” changed or what? What’s new about this theory? People like Smokey Yunick, and later Junior Johnson, Gary Nelson, Ray Evernham, Chad Knaus, etc. have been doing it for years. Drives the NASCAR …
The 2001 MBNA Cal Ripken Jr. 400 was held 12 days after 9/11 and was the first major motorsports event in the country since the attacks. Over 140,000 race fans filled the track, all with American flags. That day, NASCAR and Dover provided extended pre-race ceremonies with Tanya Tucker signing “God Bless America” and Lee Greenwood performing “God Bless the USA.”
I just finished putting more than 200 photos of ARCA action and drivers from my time with that sanctioning body, plus some from before and after, on my own Facebook page. I’m not telling you this to publicize it, although everybody is welcome to look at them and enjoy. Some folks say I’m not just driven to the past, …
Ever so often, while working as an announcer at the local short track and listening to the radio chatter between officials, I think about the difference they’ve made in communications during race events. When I first got involved as an official, in 1961, such convenience was unheard of. At the old Fairgrounds Motor Speedway in Louisville, we …
I’ve mentioned before about how much I’ve enjoyed being able to meet so many people in my years bouncing around motorsports. One of the best of those experiences came at Indianapolis Raceway Park in 1989, when we had a celebrity road race intended to discourage drinking and driving. This was a week-long affair, and Dodge was one …
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