Conversations Archives - International Motor Racing Research Center (2024)

[00:00:00] Brake Fix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. I wanted to give you a heads up before we head into this episode that we did have some technical issues with the audio.

We’ve done our best to make corrections so that it’s easier to listen to, but unfortunately, you know, there’s always challenges with internet connection, the different systems that people are using, the audio quality itself. Please, by all means, sit back and enjoy this episode. The content in is amazing, but our apologies for the quality right up front.

My name is Tom Wiedeman and I’m the new executive director at the Motor Racing Research Center, still under warranty. I’m incredibly impressed and incredibly excited about today’s conversation. To see these six gentlemen [00:01:00] all together here to talk about their careers in racing is pretty amazing. And so it’s my honor to introduce our speakers today.

We’ve got Joe Morata, we’ve got Roy Silva, Gary Montgomery, Greg Ricks, Mike Paz, and Frank DelVecchio. What a team. And now, Kip.

We advertise this as the men behind the mics. You’re going to have the six real good men behind the mics and the novice behind the mics. My dad took me to Watkins Glen when I was a kid. That was my first race and I was hooked right from the start. If you would ask me when I got home, what I wanted to be when I grew up, it would be a race car driver, flat out.

No questions asked. As I got older, it became easily apparent that that was a career path I would not be taking. I had no real mechanical aptitude. Eyesight isn’t the greatest and most importantly, I had no money. What I decided to do instead. Because [00:02:00] it was imminently cheaper, was to become a real good spectator.

And over the years I’ve become a real good spectator. But what appealed to me about racing from day one is the same stuff that appeals to me now. It’s the whole visceral approach to racing. It’s the image of the cars, both on the pace lap as they come around the grandstand, as well as flat out racing.

It’s the sound of a race engine at full song. It’s the smell of the racing fuel. Give me five hours in the grandstands at Oswego smelling methanol fumes. I am a very, very happy kid. If I get back home at two in the morning and my ears are still ringing and I can still smell methanol, it has been a very good night.

And it was also that Voice from above the announcer, the guy who was telling me what was happening on the track, but probably equally as importantly, what was happening off the track, the fellow who was weaving this whole storyline for the balance of the day or the evening, whatever the case may be. We don’t have six [00:03:00] good announcers up here.

We have six great announcers up here. Joe Morata, the voice of Syracuse for 44 years at Super Dirt Week. Roy Silva, beginning his 52nd year. Think about that. Oswego is beginning their, what Roy, 66th year? 66 years Oswego has run. for 52. And I will tell you honestly, Roy sounds the same today as he did 45 years ago.

Why does that make me feel old? Anyway, Roy sounds the same today as he did 45 years ago when I went to that track for the first time. Gary Montgomery, who for a number of years was the voice, or one of the voices, on the Motor Racing Network. And you do not get on the Motor Racing Network without being excellent at your craft.

Mike Paz, someone named him the Voice of God, who announced at nine different NASCAR tracks over the years. Apparently Mike can’t hold a job, so he’s announced it. Frank DelVecchio, who is [00:04:00] actually more our racer turned announcer. He’s going to speak about that. But Frank DelVecchio, and last but certainly not least, Greg Ricks, the voice of Lime Rock.

I have never been to Lime Rock, but, Trust me, sitting here as I do, we get people in here all the time who, it’s always a toss up between WGI or Lime Rock as to what their favorite track is. Greg’s not simply the voice of Lime Rock because he’s announced a number of other tracks as well. When we first set this up, I emailed each of these gentlemen half a dozen different questions.

So I thought we’d kind of start out by doing my questions. So we’ll get that out of the way. We’ll open it up for stories. I know that’s why you came here is to hear stories from all these guys, and then we’ll throw it open to you folks. So to begin the day, let’s um, start with my first question. That was, how did you initially get into the sport?

How many years have you been doing it? Was there any mentor or gentleman that you tried to model your announcing style after? And what keeps you in the sport? So why don’t we start [00:05:00] with Mike? We’ll just go down the road. It came from public address announcing for football and basketball at my hometown high school.

I was PA announcer for those two, had started in 70 and 71. And from an announcing standpoint for racing, I would go to the Crawford County fairgrounds, which is in Meadville, Pennsylvania, my hometown. Joey Chitwood was there. How many people got into racing or automobile stuff? Because they didn’t show. He was there.

I’ve made it every year. They had a star car race and I was in PA. Well, like I said, they brought me up to this crazy fairgrounds. Well, I called the crow’s nest inside this huge grandstand. Not as big as Syracuse, obviously, but. They put me out there for my first race. And from there it was DJ of music. I didn’t get a chance to get back into racing until about 14, 15 years later.

Okay. And how many years have you been race announcing? Did you try to adapt anybody’s style or have any kind of mentor when you first got in and what keeps you involved today? I don’t think there was any one person. They tried to mimic, there [00:06:00] were several obviously, but here’s the deal. I’m a car guy and have been, so I was three years old.

So with car love usually comes racing. It has to follow. It was a natural put two things together. Okay. Excellent. Right. I started in racing when I was seven. My uncle owned a race car and ran at the Oswego Speedway back in the old A and B modified days. I went every week with him. I don’t think over the course of the time I started to go there, I probably haven’t missed 12 races in my entire life.

First race I announced there was in 1964. I was working at one of the local radio stations, WOSC. They decided they were going to do a live coverage of the International Classic that year. Well, Roy knows racing, so we’ll have Roy do the race. I had never done a sports event at all. I did the race from the inside of turn number one, standing on top of a cube van.

200 laps of turning around. I was substantially ill by the time it was over. [00:07:00] The next year, Harry Caruso, who owned the track, decided he was going to Institute and infield announcer. And again, I was still working at WOAC and I had kind of a guardian angel there by the name of Wally Tucker. And Harry went to Wally and said, We want to have an infield announcer, we want you to do it.

And Wally said, I don’t know much about racing, how about having Roy do it, cause he knows racing. And so I became the infield announcer at the Oswego Speedway along with Wally. Harry decided to hire both of us. We wore these stupid little blue blazers and a narrow little tie and white shirts and blue slacks.

The next year, Jack Burgess was going to go on vacation. He had an announcer upstairs with him, his second banana by the name of Pauly Legault, Leo Legault. They went to Wally and said, Jack’s going to be on vacation. We want you to come upstairs and be the co announcer with Pauly. And Wally said, I don’t know much about racing, have Roy do it.

So I went upstairs, and that night I was doing the co announcing. We alternate races. There were three heat races at the time, two semi [00:08:00] finals, the consolation event, and a feature. Just one classic car. So, at the end of the heat races, Harry came in and said, Poli, you’re gonna do the consolation, I’m always gonna do the feature.

And the next year, Polly became an usher, and I moved upstairs, and Wally Tucker left the infield. In the 52 years, this is my 52nd year announcing there. The year I started to announce there, I moved out of Oswego. I moved to Ithaca, then I moved to Millport, uh, down into the Binghamton area, the Hudson Valley.

Spent 10 years in North Carolina. Seven years on Cape Cod, finally moved back to the Oswego area in 2007. In my 51 total years announcing there, I’ve missed two races. One due to a family situation and one due to a business situation. The person that obviously had the most effect on me was Jack Burgess.

Jack was the announcer there. The thing about Jack was he didn’t try to He let you learn from him. He was, he was wide open to giving you suggestions, whether you patterned [00:09:00] yourself after him or just learned from him. He was very, very good, very, very talented at helping other people become announcers. So that’s the guy that, if I emulated anybody, would be Jack.

He was a sensational announcer. And what keeps you there? Hot dogs. Hot dogs. She had a lot of hot dogs. Hot dogs. Hot dogs. That’s it. There have been several times over the course of the time I’ve been there that I have given serious consideration to not being there anymore, and the two worst cases were the deaths of Gary Witter, which was the most violent.

Long lasting crash I’ve ever seen in my life and the death of Jimmy Champine. In the case of Gary Witter I had to continue announcing the race even though we knew at the time he had perished in the crash. In the case of Jimmy we knew he had been taken to the hospital when I found out overnight after the races were over that he had passed.

In both of those cases if I had not had to go back and finish the next day I probably would have quit, then I had the off season and was able to regroup and stayed with [00:10:00] it. I say that because I love it. I’m a great race fan, whether I’m announcing the race or like tomorrow I’m going to Utica Long for the 2020s.

I’m just a good race fan. To me, to get paid to go and watch a race, you don’t get any better than that. Shh, don’t give our secret away. That’s right. I will say one thing. I have never announced a race without getting paid. With two exceptions. And that’s when the promoter sniffed me,

Mr. Murata. I got started in 1949. My dad took me to the wasn’t called the Moody mile back then. It was called New York state fair mile and went to the triple A championship races. And wow, I didn’t know anything existed beyond baseball, football, hockey, whatever. And I saw these champ cars out on the speedway and I said, this is unbelievable.

But then I heard this voice. And this guy’s name was Chrissy Konivacki. And I says, wow, this guy is really great. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But [00:11:00] boy, I gotta tell ya, I just swallowed up everything on that day. And I guess I wanted to become a race driver at the end of that day. But that Chrissy Konivacki voice continued for many, many years.

Many years later, I was a sophom*ore in high school. I had a high school teacher by the name of Mrs. LaCasse. And Mrs. LaCasse said to me, she says, you know, you’ve got a good voice. You are going to be in the Optimist Oratorical Contest. And I says, no I’m not. And she says, oh yes you are. She said, you’re going to be in the auditorium at 7am tomorrow morning for your first rehearsal.

So, I didn’t say nothing. I come home. My mother says to me, So, you’re going to be in the oratorical contest. No, I’m not. And she said, Yes, you are. Now, that was the year I was scheduled. I was going to turn 16 a couple months later, and I was going to get my driver’s permit. And there wasn’t anything more than I wanted than getting that driver’s permit.

I had to move those wheels. My mother said, if you’re [00:12:00] not in that auditorium tomorrow, you don’t get your driver’s permit. Well, the next morning at 7 a. m. I’m in there and everybody is lined up. There were folks going to talk about the future of a nursing career, future of space, future of a doctor’s degrees, and all this stuff.

And I had to pick a topic. So I picked a topic called Organized Hot Rod Clubs. And everybody looked at me and laughed at me. I said, okay, I’m going to fix you. So I appeared on a stage very, very similar to this. And I won it and I won the regional contest and I finished out on fourth or fifth in the state contest.

But I liked the sound of my voice and I love talking about hot rods . So anyways, I still had that dream that I was gonna become a race car driver. And I did build a race car, but I was terrible. I think I would go down a lap every three laps when I ran at Weeds Sport, and maybe a lap every two laps when I ran at Fulton, which was then asphalt.

So one Sunday night I went to Weeds, sport Speedway. [00:13:00] And as they were starting to run the qualifying heats, it started to rain. And they brought out all the equipment. So I went over and I brought a Gator Racing News and I read it. And I was also going to put it on my head for a protector. And I had hair back then, by the way.

I open up the column and I see under Dave Wright’s column. Wanted. Announcer. Fulton Speedway. Call 592 7005. Bub Benway. Wow, I can do that. Well, my car needed a new motor, and I says, you know, maybe this is the time I’ll just sit out for the next part of the year and save up my money, because I wanted to get paid too, right?

So I call up Bob Benway, and I said to him, Bob, I says, I saw your ad in the Gator News, and he says, have you ever announced before? Sure, he swear, oh I’d never been in the service and I was never in Alaska, but I told him, yeah when I was in the Air Force, I was stationed in Alaska and I announced that a track up there.

So he says, come on up. So I went up there on a Monday [00:14:00] night, turned on the PA system, gave me something to read, he walked back inside, he says, how much do you want? I says, what do you pay? Now, if you knew Bob Benway, he says, I didn’t ask you that. I said, well, I don’t know what you, he says, how about if I pay you 25 bucks a night to announce, wow, I get in for free too?

Maybe a hot dog. And he says, and I’ll pay you 10 a night to do the story. Do the story. He says, yeah, write it all up and then my wife will type it up and it’ll be in the Gator in the area in the National Speed Sport News the next week. I said, well, okay, I’ll do that. So the following Saturday night I show up and I still remember who won the first race.

Dutch Hold won the modifieds. Jimmy Colvell won the late model race and who did I pattern myself after a guy by the name of Jack Burgess. I remember the way he used to do lineups and the way he called the race and everything. So I called the race and at the end of the night, Buck Benway came in and he handed me that free hot dog.

And he said, you did a good job, kid. And [00:15:00] handed me the 25 bucks, that was the most important. So from there I went on and I finished a year out there and continued to announce there for the next 7 8 years. I announced at Spencer Speedway. And then I ran into a guy by the name of Glenn Donnelly. That started our marriage on the dirt circuit.

In between that time, I started announcing at Rolling Wheels Raceway. I was the first announcer ever at Rolling Wheels. That got me started between Chrissy Konamacki, Jack Burgess, and my good friend Roy Sova. That got me going into the world of announcing. So 25 bucks and a free hot dog. 25 bucks, a free hot dog, and yeah, that was it.

It was a cheap date. Yes, that was a cheap date. Well, I bought your breakfast this morning, so quiet. Laughter

I came in absolutely backwards to the rest of these guys. I did my first driver’s school in 1968. My first race is in 1969. I’ve been running formula cars [00:16:00] about 1980. The track announcer at Briar Motorsport Park, which is now New Hampshire International, didn’t show up. So they tagged me to About half of the races, I was politically incorrect enough so that it was ended by announcing career for the next 15 or 20 years or so.

In the 90s I started running the Firehawk series along with the Escort series, some Formula cars, some GT. Guys that are here today ended up being my mentors. Al Robinson, Mike Paz, Jim Mueller, who’s not here. What I learned from Jim is, you can’t say that on the mic. That’s mostly what I learned from Jim. A couple of guys from Canada, Tom Natchew and his sidekick Jim Martin.

And I’d go up to the booth and I would do a little color commentary, get out of the race car and kind of fill in with what was going on. That grew until about the late nineties. In fact, you weren’t there that weekend. I don’t think it was the Lime Rock. It was the Trans Am [00:17:00] race that Lou Gelati won. I was there.

Okay. Well, you just didn’t notice me. I was the guy holding the microphone for you. No, no. Tom Natchew was actually announcing that race because he was, I guess, the series announcer at the time. Come on up in the booth and, you know, we’ll tell everybody you don’t have a ride this weekend. I remember that in Lime Rock it always rains, and it doesn’t rain for very long.

Rain started as soon as the race started. The guy that I had raced with a lot of years, Paul Hacker, is up on the hill, and he’s got a headset, and he’s talking to Lou Gelati, and I know that. I’m saying to the crowd and to naturalize it all right now is telling Lou to come in and change two tires. Even though they got rain tires, that’s because you can only change two at a time and he’s going to come in.

He’s going to change the two dry tires. It’s going to go out a couple more laps. He’s going to come in and change the other two tires. Now he’s got four dry tires on. It’s a wet track. And he’s going to win the race by three quarters of a lap. The rest is history. The rest is history. The track dried [00:18:00] out.

He won the race by three quarters of a lap. And Natchel goes, well, you’ve got to be in the booth. So, from that, it just kind of expanded. We ended up doing a lot of races all over the country, not only driving the race cars, but whatever I could, I’d actually try and do both. A lot of times I’d jump out of the car and go up into the booth with Al Robinson.

A lot of nights we did the Daytona 24 hour together. Al the Prince of Darkness would handle the whole night shift. I’d go up there and hang around with him and do a little bit of announcing and the phone would ring right out and said, Gee, everybody’s asleep. So can you come down and drive? I’ll be right back.

I’ll and a half. So I’d go dow car and come on back. I k when I said frank was our that is really true. Frank

500 races and in 114 different cars. While Mike can’t hold a job at any one NASCAR track, Frank [00:19:00] wads up about a bunch of cars or something. Anyway, he can’t hold a steady ride. But that’s a pretty illustrious career. Easy to see how you have the insight into doing color commentary. Mr. Limerock, Greg. I’m not convinced yet that I am not a failed racing driver.

I still harbor illusions. My talent will be discovered, but like everybody else, I wanted to be a race driver. I came from a family that had no interest in automobiles. My mechanical ability now is marginal and was even worse when I was younger. In high school, though, I discovered the Sports Car Club of America.

Drove my first autocross in 1967. in a four door, six cylinder Chevelle with an automatic transmission. Not exactly the height of performance cars, but it got me involved. And shortly thereafter, I had my first article published. Thought I was on my way to a great career in automotive journalism. That was in the high school newspaper.

The local Sports Car Club of America region had a newsletter. I started writing for them. A fellow by the name of John [00:20:00] Peckham was a noted automotive artist. He also produced a car. The program for the races at Lime Rock Park, he picked up a few of my articles, and so I, I was going down this road of the written word.

Jim Haynes was the track promoter at that time, and he said, you know, you ought to try announcing, you know, you’ve got a good handle on what’s going on. And there was a gentleman by the name of Art Peck, who was Lime Rock’s regular announcer, and Art was from CBS. He was a serious professional commentator.

But he let me try out. Then eventually Art decided that he wanted to pursue some other opportunities, and I was the last guy left standing. So at 22 years old, I became the announcer at Weimark Park. I’ve been there ever since. They keep inviting me back, and I’m honored to be able to do that, as I’m honored to be here with this distinguished group today.

What keeps me coming back is the people. At one time it was the cars and the technology, but now it’s really the opportunity I have to interact with people that keeps me coming back. Gary. Uh, what got me started was my love of auto [00:21:00] racing. I remember the first race I went to, it was 51 or 52, Wellsville, New York.

That year I would have been 10 or 12 years old, whatever else. And Lorne Dillon won the race. And they tore his car down and all that stuff. But so I remember the first race. But that started a lot of fear. And I really never had any visions of driving. That wasn’t my thing. And I didn’t have any visions of anything.

I was just a race fan. The first time I actually announced was in 1959 at Bradford Speedway. Now called the old Radford Speedway. It was actually brand new then. It was his last race of the season, and the regular announcer, whoever he or she, he would have been a he, was neglected to tell the promoter that he had gone back to college, wouldn’t be around that weekend.

There they were with a race program planned and no announcer. And I don’t know how it was that I had the nerve to go up and tell the guy what I would announce, but I did. I don’t remember much about that event either, but So that was 1959. Then I went off to college and so forth and really got started in 1971 at Spencer Speedway.

And that’s an interesting story. Jimmy [00:22:00] Bollinson was the promoter and he had hired a fellow by the name of Dale Hartnett who was a disc jockey with the country radio station in Rochester. Who was out to make money and had a great voice and all the rest of it, but he didn’t have any passion for the sport.

I don’t think he’d ever been to a race before. But he was announcing and muddling his way through the season. Late in the season, I said to Bollinson, that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he needs help. didn’t know me, but did agree that that guy needed help. So I helped him out for a few weeks.

And then he had the nerve to get married and take the weekend off. And that was late in the season. And a race I will never forget, of course, is that that was the night that the car, Gary Cornelius, went into the pit grandstand. At the end, four people were killed. It could have been 40 people or it could have been a lot more than that.

We didn’t know. My wife and kids were there. My brother was there. And everybody was expecting a grandstand except my brother, who was in the pits. And again, you didn’t have any idea how bad this situation was, but you could tell it was pretty bad. So I was most concerned about my brother and the whole situation.

My brother was alright, as it turned out. That started a career at [00:23:00] Special Speedway, which really got me going in this whole deal. Because I went back for the next, I don’t know how many years, continuously. And that just really led to a lot of things. I’ll touch on the MRN situation. How I got involved with those folks would have been late 70s, early 80s.

And Dave Despain was on their team, and he was to announce in turn four for the 500 and the support races leading up to the 500. And I was working for Glenn Downey at Volusia. And John McMullen was the director of MRN at that time. And John and I had crossed paths a couple of times, most recently the fall before that at Super Dirt Week, where he was trying to get in, and Gert would let him in.

She didn’t know who he was. And I did know who he was, and I knew who Gert was. Anyway, we got that all put together somehow or other, and John remembered that. And John knew that I was working for Donnelly over just across the way. So they called, and when I announced it, they told him. And that started that career, which lasted for a number of years as well.

So it came at it a number of ways. I don’t do much of that anymore. Last year, I think I [00:24:00] announced just two races. I substituted at Canandaigua, and I substituted at Black Rock one night. But I love this love of sport, and that keeps me going back. And the point about the people is really important, and that’s kind of what it has evolved to all of us, I think.

And I think the greatest demonstration of the people thing was Super Dirt Week last October. For When everybody knew it was the last one. And I called it the Family Reunion of Dirt Racing or something like that. Because everybody that had been there over the 44 years before that Seemed to all gather back for the last one.

And just seeing all those folks again, it makes it all. And it’s the people thing, whether it be announcing the race or being at the races. That keeps me coming back. That’s my announcing story, I guess. I don’t think you can improve on that, Gary. My wife is still hoping I’ll outgrow it. I don’t think so, honey.

Sorry. I think you can see through all these gentlemen the passion and the love of the sport that just is obviously evident in all of them. The next question I had is kind of a, more a [00:25:00] nuts and bolts question. Is there any difference in how you approach announcing, uh, A feature race as opposed to a qualifying race or for the road racing gentlemen, the feature class, the IMSA guys, whoever that might be, as opposed to maybe some of the support classes in that same regard, is there a common denominator that you try to use so that you appeal to perhaps that person that’s sitting in the stands for the very first time, in addition to the guy that sits there every week?

So Mike, do you want to lead off with that one? You can pass to Roy. As a race fan. And when I do my announcing, I always think about you guys in the grandstand. And whenever I feel like I’m too big for my britches, I would come down and your grandstand to just listen to how they would react to stuff and try to announce to those folks.

I never really tried to instruct them like a teacher. I always tried to be the guy in the stands. And what would we talk about? What do we want for the announcer to talk about? [00:26:00] But in regards to feature versus qualifying races, in my head, there’s a guy out there with a car and he’s trying to race. He thinks he’s the best race driver there ever was.

Something myself, I can’t say anything bad about him because he’s working hard on the race car and driving hard. I’m up in a race announcer’s boot. So why should I say anything bad? There’s no way that I could ever do that. I can’t change the way I announce just because it’s a qualifying race. Do I get excited for a feature?

Absolutely, and who wouldn’t try to approach racing the same way each time. It’s a race a race a race So I tried to talk with the folks in the grandstands, imagining in my head what they might want to be curious about, what they may ask about, what they want the announcer to talk about. And that’s the way I’ve always approached it.

There’s no difference in my mind for qualifying versus features. I try not to approach any of the others any differently. To me, it’s all the same. The guys are out there breaking their gut in order to race. And again, they think that the best guy out there, whoever you want to talk about, drag racing, [00:27:00] John Forrest, Formula One, so many stars in there.

NASCAR, so many stars in there. Every one of them want to be there. And so do I want to watch them. I want to know. The race that they’re in, I want to see and hear things that everybody would like to hear in the grandstand. You folks are part of that deal, and if you’re here, you love racing just like we do.

I try not to put myself above. I try to keep myself right where you are. I try to be a fan as well. That’s the way I approach my racing, announcing. When I go to a racetrack, and I know Joe and I are very similar in this, and we learned it from Jack primarily, go to the racetrack. I don’t care if it’s the first time announcing at that track, or Starting my 52nd year at the Oswego Speedway.

The first thing I do is I go to the pit area and I talk to drivers. I get all their hometown information, their sponsor information, personal information. If it’s a birthday or something like that, you want to impart. I think it’s very important to give that information to the fan, to make the fan relate more to the driver and not just look at a car and a color and a [00:28:00] number.

You want to know more about the driver. Also, very, very important in terms of announcing a race, you want And I was just reading an article by Bones Boschier about this very subject. You can announce a race all night long, but if you don’t tell the people how this driver gets from this race to the feature race, you haven’t done your job.

If the fan comes in for the first time and leaves the racetrack and doesn’t know how this guy got to start in that position in the feature event, you’ve not done your job as an announcer. And those things are very, very important. Other than that, what Mike said is absolutely right. Every race should be treated the same.

Every driver should be treated the same. Joe and I alternate announcing an Oswego. He does a small block race, then I do a small block race, and he does an LR, then I do a super race, and he does a back and forth, we go. And then we, uh, we do the feature events. But because we do that, we have to stay impassioned about both divisions, the small block super modifies and the super modifies.

You have to be excited about what’s going on in the heat race to make sure the people understand what’s going on in the feature race. So I, I [00:29:00] agree with Mike 100%. Ditto. We’re done. Okay. That’s the shortest answer I’ve ever heard. You know, I think it’s very important not only to race teams and the drivers to get their names correct and the towns are from and the program and the sponsors and all that, but I think, you know, you owe an awful lot to the fan in the grandstand.

One of the things I absolutely hate is when a traveling circuit comes in I’d like to treat them just as important as our main class. And a lot of times in the traveling circuit, you do not get the right names. Just like Roy, I walk through the pit area, I try to get all the information. And you always, a guy or a car will come in late.

And you can’t get the name of that driver and where he’s from. Well, I have adopted a family named the Belonga family. And many nights there’s Billy Belonga, Bobby Belonga, Sammy Belonga, Junior [00:30:00] Belonga, and Joey Belonga, all running in the same race. I wanted to fill that name with that car. And then I get people coming to me, That ain’t Sammy Belonga.

Oh, is that Joey? No. That is so and so. Okay, now I got his name. Sometimes you just can’t get those names, because you’re up in the tower, I mean, the race has started, and you just Many times we’ll radio over into the pit area, who’s in car number 17, and get some information for them, but I think it’s very important.

For the fan in the grandstand to know who’s in that car, where that car is from, and where that driver is from. And I also like to plug as many sponsors as possible. These are the folks who put money up for tires and gas and so on. I’ve learned a lot of this from Roy. He is just absolutely fantastic.

Plugging the sponsors and keeping the thing rolling. As far as keeping the fans informed, the same as Roy, I like to let them know how they get from race A to race B or the concierge or whatever. How [00:31:00] the different situations happen on the speedway. We’re very fortunate now because we get the replays up in the tower.

Many years ago, a situation had happened out on the speedway and sometimes you had a guess at it. But today we’re very fortunate to look at the replays and talk about how a situation was created on the racetrack. A car got wide, a car came in a little bit too tight, a car tried to work underneath. And you pass that along to the fans.

And you know what’s really neat is at the end of a race many times when you’re walking out into the parking lot and so on, And hey, you’re Joe, aren’t you? Yeah, geez. You know, I disagreed with that call that they made out there, but after you said it, uh, you described how it was and everything. I agree.

That’s it. You gotta give them a show, and you gotta let them all know where they’re from. Just a quick story. We’re all race fans here. We love racing. And you have to project that when you’re announcing. I remember one specific race. New Jersey [00:32:00] Motorsport Park. Ferrari Challenge race. There’s nine cars in the race.

The track is 2. 2 miles long, cars are separated. I’ve got cars passing in the back where we can’t see, and I’ve got them running up and setting up for passes. At the end of the race, I walked down out of the tower, and somebody came up to me and said, Whoa, that was an exciting race. And I go, I did my job.

Yeah. Yep. Let’s have more nine car fields. I think things are a little bit different in road racing. With the support classes, if anything, you have to work harder at those, because you don’t know the people, you’re trying to build up the event. In a lot of cases, help drivers come along with their careers.

So the stars in the big race may be better known. You put a lot of effort into that, but you also put a lot of effort into the support classes. I think what’s changing the most And it’s all about bandwidth now. When I started, I had a scorer by the name of Craig Robertson who could sit through a six hour firehawk [00:33:00] race and write down the positions of the cars for six hours.

I don’t know how he did it. Now it’s all computerized. We have access to it. The fans have access to it. So that’s changing. In fact, now you can go to a road race, bring your iPad with you, watch the TV highlights as they’re broadcast. So it’s really changing the character and One of the things I think an announcer needs to do, names and numbers are always important.

Mike Joy spent some time at Round Rock as the track manager, and I learned a lot from him, from his announcing background as well. He said, names and numbers. You’ve always got to connect names and numbers. Now with the numbers on some of the cars, it’s so hard to see. You watch a Formula One race. I don’t know what car is what.

I can’t tell from the paint scheme. You’re trying to see what helmet is on the driver to tell who’s in what car. You guys started to say it’s all about bandwidth. People now bring their iPads to the race. They’re watching the scoring system. They’re watching the TV highlights. The announcer, I’m trying to do, I’m trying to anticipate when are pit stops going to come up?

Who’s gaining ground on who? Whose car might be starting to go off? And I think [00:34:00] that’s changed the character of what I do a little bit. The other thing is with vintage racing now, which is very popular on the road racing side. It’s really much more about the cars, the history of the cars. The technical nature of them, you know, the technical background when they were built, who’s driven them over the years, much more of a point of emphasis than the drivers.

A lot of it’s already been stated relative to support classes versus highlight classes. My view is they all paid the same amount of money to race. They have the same desire to win. Compete as the top guys. And so you try to treat everybody equally. And that’s kind of been the theme that’s been stated here so far.

Talking about who’s made this race possible, these cars possible. Another story, I’ll pick up on the point that was made earlier. I’ll never forget this night at Spencer Speedway, the Spencer brothers ran the place and they were interesting folks. Some of you knew them. I think they’ve all died now, but I never viewed them as really race fans.

They were in this to make a buck. And they had built the track with out of mortgage and they worked real jobs, their husband and wife team and so forth. It was a big deal with them, but they were kind of [00:35:00] phasing out a little bit. And Dell and Evelyn’s son, Gary became the manager or whatever his title was later on.

And he had me doing the stupidest stuff. He was trying to change the image of the track and racing. And they had, uh, Evel Knievel was a big deal then. Well, they didn’t have Evel Knievel, obviously, but they had somebody on a bicycle. Laughing Jumping from one place to the other, and I’m supposed to get excited about that.

And I say, I’m a race fan, I’m not into this for anything, this other stuff. Anyway, so, I like put up with that. I ended my career at Spencer Speedway on a particular night. When I was announcing Richie Evans was sponsored by B. R. DeWitter and Gary came to me and said you don’t talk about that at all, you talk about the track sponsors and he had sponsors for the night and so forth.

With that I announced that this would be my last night at Spencer’s B Way and it was. The initial question was any difference between sport classes and major classes and absolutely none and it’s great racing. I know you just finished Gary, but I’m going to start with you and actually you and Roy have already touched on this, but I’m curious how difficult it is for you.

To be the announcer when a [00:36:00] death occurs again, you’ve already touched on it to a degree. Roy has touched on it. I was at Oswego the night Jimmy was killed. We didn’t know anything about it in the stands. In fact, they pulled the car around the front straightaway. It didn’t even look like it had been hit.

Wasn’t until the next day that I learned that I’m just curious how you deal with that and how you keep the program going. That sounds ridiculous, but I’ve been really lucky in that regard with the Spencer Speedways incident that we talked about, it was obvious that that program was done that night. I mean, it was a tragedy and it was the feature event and it was late and so forth.

And so it was no question we were not going to continue, which we didn’t. So I had to have to keep that going at all. Only other time that I announced a race where there was a fatality, where I was the announcer was at rolling wheels, a crash bar came into the grandstand and killed him. Right down below where we were announcing from, but most people didn’t realize that.

Of course, Donnie didn’t want us talking about that. We didn’t. And so that race program went on like nothing had happened. But for a certain number of people, they knew something had happened, but we didn’t talk about it. The other [00:37:00] events where I’ve been involved where fatalities have occurred, One was here at Watkins Glen when McDuffie got killed and that happened at my feet.

I was announcing in that whatever turn that is at the end of the, they’ve not got the loop or she came down there, whatever, but again, it was the MRN deal. And I didn’t have to keep the whole thing going. And it was a long delay. I was at Homestead when John Demachek got killed in a truck race. But again, MRN, so they.

Continue to think I didn’t have to do much with it. I think those are the only events that I’ve been to as an announcer where there were fatalities and for that I’m really lucky because I’ve gone to a lot of races and a lot of dangerous things have happened, but that’s about it So I was lucky in that it’s not very many of them number one and number two that I didn’t have to keep the program Going like we’re already talking about situations in Oswego I recently had to deal with the aftermath of a fatal accident at Lime Rock.

There are a couple of things that I wanted to keep in mind during that time, and keep in mind in general with dealing with these kinds of situations. First of all, I don’t speculate. The only information I work off of, is information that’s provided to me by the people in race [00:38:00] control because they’re the ones who know the situation, and they’re the ones who, along with the track owner or track promoter who make the decision how they want it to be handled.

This is also true in any incident. I wouldn’t speculate unless you see it with your own eyes. Driver gets out of the car, and you know they’re not hurt. In road racing, we’re taking information from various corner stations. It’s going through one group of people, and there’s a lot of noise and a lot of confusion as an incident unfolds.

But to get back to this particular incident at Lime Rock, we knew it was a very serious accident. The program was stopped. This was in the middle of the day. We run during the day, so we’re not dealing with an evening event. In the state of Connecticut, the Connecticut State Police investigate all racetrack injuries.

So the events stopped. Connecticut State Police came in and just like any other accident, there are police cars out on the track. They’re doing all of the measurements, all of the photographs that they do. So it’ll Long time when the event was not running and we didn’t know if it was going to continue. I was fortunate that I had a [00:39:00] partner working with me that day by the name of Tom Hill.

And Tom does some color commentary while I will do play by play. So we started talking about the car show that was coming up and some other things that were going on at the track. Some cars that Tom had seen in the paddock. And then the word came that we were going to continue the event. Now we still didn’t know the outcome of that.

We went on with the event and then subsequently we found out that those injuries proved to be fatal to the driver. It was probably the saddest day I’ve spent a lime rock. This was a weekend event. This happened on Saturday, so then we had to come back and do the whole program on Monday and I wasn’t sure.

How we were going to approach the whole topic. Fortunately, we have a great relationship with the church that’s across the road from us, Trinity Episcopal, the Reverend Heidi Truex always does our invocation and she’s wonderful. And in this particular instance, you just found the right words, I think, to put us all at ease and let us go on.

That really was a moving experience for me. I think I’ve been fortunate. I don’t believe anybody’s had a fatality that some [00:40:00] serious injuries. Well, announcing we mostly don’t talk about it because you don’t know all the details. We just kind of gloss over that. I just want to add a little bit. What Frank said that now with HIPAA, you have to be very careful about what you say, unless there’s something official that comes out.

I would never speculate on anything that’s happened. Let me just go back to one other incident that happened last year, which will, I hope, illustrate why you don’t speculate. I was at Watkins Glen for a Formula 1600 series event. I’m not listening to the corner stations, I’m listening to our series race director.

And I hit a report, a car hit the guardrail, the driver was out of the car. And then the next thing I hear is, we need the ambulance. Well, what had happened was, the front of the car had started to collapse. The driver jumped out of the car, didn’t realize he had a broken ankle. And when he landed on the ground, you can imagine what happened.

Well, he passed out, half on the grass, half on the racetrack. So even when you see a driver get out of the car, you’re not sure exactly what’s happened. So that’s why you You’d never want to speculate. You really [00:41:00] can’t go with anything except the official word that you get from the people who have the inside information.

And therefore they’re the ones who are setting the tone and the subsequent events. I was at the track when Jimmy was killed. I’ve been at the track, fortunately, just one other time when someone was killed. And I never understood when people who don’t understand racing or don’t like racing would tell me that, Oh, people just go to the races to see people get hurt.

And it’s like, no, I have been to races when people are hurt and there is nobody that goes there for that. It is like you pump the balloon up and somebody puts a pin in it and it all goes away. So I never, for a second, ever bought into that, but it has happened. Joe, do you have any thoughts? I’ll tell you one thing I’ll never forget.

I was working Canada English Speedway with Gary Montgomery, and at the conclusion of the race, I would do the write up, and Gary would go down and into the office or wherever, and would call in results to the local newspapers and so on. This year was 1982. Gary came back up into the tower and [00:42:00] he said, Joe and I turned around and looked, and he was as white as a ghost.

I said, what’s up? He said, I called the Democrat the Chronicle to give him our results. And he, they informed me that Jim Cine died at a swig tonight. It was like the date of Earth stood still. It was just unbelievable. Later that night, I got in the car and drove out with my family and drove up through the pits.

Merv Treichler was sitting on his trailer. I said, Merv, you here? He nodded yes. It’s something you just don’t want to go through. It’s like losing the closest member of your family. I have been announcing at maybe three or four different tracks that a tragedy has taken place. Dennis Taney, a candidate with Speedway.

First time I ever announced at New York State Fairgrounds under Ira Vail. For Car went into the audience, into the crowd between turns three and four and killed the person. It was at Syracuse the night Kevin Fleming was killed. We knew it was a bad accident up in the tower. I was announcing with Doug [00:43:00] Elkins.

Glenn came over to our side of the tower and he said we just had word that we probably have one fatality and one seriously injured. Just kind of looked at Glenn and Glenn was a type of leader that just took control and he said, here’s what we’re going to do the 4th of July show, we’re going to lower the lights, we’re going to do the fireworks and the personnel is going to go in the back straight away, clean up the situation, but we don’t say anything.

We did exactly that and we continued with the program. Now, I never said it, Doug Elkins never said it, but boy, the word got through the grandstand in a pit area like wildfire. It was just unbelievable. One of the other things I remember, we did put a dirt asphalt race on at the Nazareth 1 mile speedway.

And that’s when Roger Penske owned the facility. Prior to the race, we had to be at a race meet at about 7 o’clock in the morning. And all the corner workers were there, and this was in conjunction with an IndyCar race. All the corner workers were there, safety people, flaggers, everybody that worked on the track.

And I gotta tell you, I [00:44:00] never saw a leader in my life like Roger Penske. We all sat there and he says, where are the announcers? And I put my hand up, Tim Pitts put his hand up, and the IndyCar announcer put his hand up. He said, why don’t you three guys sit in over there? And then he went over everything, strategically, in their positions of what they’re doing in case of an emergency and everything.

Finally, the room cleared out. It was Roger Penske, his right hand man, Glenn Donnelly was in the room, and the three announcers. He said, gentlemen, I want to just go over one situation. In the event of a fatality or a tragic accident on the speedway, number one, here’s what’s going to happen. He says, the injured person will be taken in an ambulance to the infield hospital.

The helicopter will be standing by. In the event that helicopter takes off and goes to the hospital, we don’t talk about it. And I’m going to tell you, he said this like a military general. The show will go on. We will [00:45:00] never say if the party is deceased, they’ll read about it in the paper the next day. Do you have it?

He pointed at each one of us. Yes, sir. Meeting is done. Thank you. And boy, I gotta tell you, that rang a bell to me like you wouldn’t believe, but these things happen and it’s part of the sport. And like the other gentleman said, no one goes to the racetrack to see anyone killed. Those things have happened.

It’s part of the game. But you deal with it as best as you can as it happens. Oswego had a reputation for a long time of being a violent track. The steel walls, inside and outside. During the 64 years so far of the track, I was just trying to figure it out in my head. Not counting drivers who died of heart attacks.

There have been at least 8 fatalities at the Oswego Speedway. One happened before I started to announce there. I was on mic for all seven of the other ones. It’s never easy. Roy, I think a good thing to bring up too is, we have had at Oswego, a couple people on the [00:46:00] speedway that have had heart attacks.

Three. Three. And I’m gonna tell ya, I’ve gone to many, many speedways around the country. The emergency crew at the Oswego Speedway is second to none. And Roy, I think you can take over how they have saved lives. We’ve had three incidents in the last five years of people suffering what would have been a fatal heart attack had it happened at any other racetrack.

One of them was in Victory Lane. One of them was in the grandstand. And one of them was in the pit area, a driver. In all three cases, it took at least a half an hour or more to stabilize the person, bring them back to life. In two of the cases, the person died several times and was brought back. Now there are two interesting things about this that have happened.

One I don’t understand, one I do understand. The track safety crew is fantastic. They’re not going to make a move until they know the patient is stabilized and ready to move. Now what happens with that, however, is You get people in the grandstand who don’t know what’s going on, and they will actually boo the safety crew.

It’s happened on several occasions, but the track [00:47:00] safety crew at Oswego is absolutely phenomenal. It’s the best in any weekly run track in the country, and I don’t think you can find another racetrack in the country that has saved one heart attack victim, let alone three. I have only been involved with three fatalities, but only one of them was on a microphone capacity.

Dale Earnhardt Sr., down at Daytona in 2001. I was in victory lane. I was supposed to interview him because he was the owner of Michael Waltrip’s team who won the race. We’re in down in victory lane and we’re standing and waiting for Dale to show up because we figured because he’s the car owner, he’ll be there.

And he never did. I was standing next to one of the guys who was security. He was listening to his radio on an earphone and he said, It doesn’t look good for Dale. He had a bad wreck in Turn 3. And we kind of already knew that, and he said that the ambulance was taking him to the hospital. It doesn’t look good.

And that’s one, obviously, I’ll never forget. The other two incidents, again, were not while I was on the mic, thankfully. I actually witnessed the death when I was a spectator on the back section of the [00:48:00] boot at Watkins Glen. It was a Formula One driver. His name was Helmut Koenig. I believe I’m pronouncing that right.

Came down the boot section out of turn six and into turn seven, and the car never turned. And Watkins Glen at that time had three catch fences that were made out of chicken wire. And those catch fences were supposed to slow the car down. And in that case, he didn’t, you know a formula car’s got a pointy nose on the front of it.

So as he went, made his way through the three catch fences, the fence never held the car. I don’t want to get graphic here, but the Armco guardrail was bolted in place. You can just imagine when the car hit it. It’s a formula car. It’s head is above the driver’s co*ckpit and it hit so hard that the guardrail bolts on the top did not break.

The ones on the bottom, however, did and it swung open like a gate. Now you can imagine what happened at that point. So it was one of the things that I saw, and I don’t want to see anything like that again. J. D. McDuffie is the other one. Again, I didn’t see it. I was down in the S’s as a [00:49:00] spectator. I’m thinking to myself, hey, the race has been stopped.

Nobody’s telling us why. State police cars are on the racetrack. That never happens. Ambulances and, uh, track safety crew obviously made their way over there. And I knew things were bad at that point. Like I said, you never see a state police car on a racetrack. But here again, I’m sure all of these guys have already mentioned it.

We are told not to speculate, not to guess, wait for a future word, and usually that means the track owner or whoever is promoting the race, tells us, And sometimes how to say it. And in regards to Adele Senior, Well, I’ve never seen any organization snap into action faster than NASCAR. They took over the situation from the very beginning.

And I remember being at Victory Lane and walking over to the press center because Mike Helton was going to give the official word. He walked into the press center. We already knew what happened. Announcement that he made. I know you remember it. If you were watching TV, he said, we’ve lost Dale and the [00:50:00] whole room hushed, you could feel the temperature drop.

That’s what it felt like. It was like cold again at a time. I don’t want to ever see or experience again, but NASCAR jumping into action, took control. And the next day I was told not to even wear a Daytona shirt because they were afraid that media would come up and try to get a statement from us. And we really didn’t know what happened.

I hope you have a better question for the next couple of minutes. This track has the best hot dogs. I’m going to have to lighten things up here a bit. It happens in racing, and these gentlemen are such professionals and have been involved in the sport for so long. I just thought that was something that we should touch on.

We won’t dwell on it. Now what I’d like to know from everybody is how has the sport changed either for the better or the worse? Frank, obviously you can comment on this from a driver’s perspective because you’ve been driving for 40 plus years. Now everybody else here will comment on it chiefly from the announcing profession.

So I’m curious as to how you feel the sport has changed [00:51:00] positively or negatively over the years. Let’s actually start with Joe. Well, you know, earlier today, I brought some picture frames of old race cars that ran around the Empire State, Northeast, whether they were a dirt car or asphalt car. I also had a collection of them that I passed around.

And those were the days that a guy could virtually pull a car out of a junkyard, out of a backyard, strip the car down, put a roll cage in it, do some modifications to the engine, put a good set of brakes in it, and go out racing. Today, that just doesn’t happen. Whether it be dirt or asphalt, it has really changed an awful, awful lot.

They’re cookie cutter cars today. Here again, whether they were dirt modified and asphalt modified, super modified, there is some changing around in there and you can look at a car and say, this is a Hawk chassis or home built chassis or whatever. I like it the old way I’ve been doing it for 51 years now.

So I guess that’s the old fashioned way. It was funny showing those pictures today. Mike [00:52:00] Monet is here. Mike could say, um, well, that car was originally the Don Diffendorf car, and then it became a Jimmy Covell car. Then it became the Boach Harris car and so on down the line. I don’t know if you can do it today.

The cars that are on the street are totally different than what they used to be. Everything is front wheel drive or all wheel drive. You just can’t pull a car out of the weeds and put a roll cage in it anymore. But I sure liked it the old way because those were cars were cars and men were men and racing was racing.

Racing quality is just as good. I mean, maybe the lap times are much, much better today. Maybe in any given track, whether it be a Speedway or, uh, Ransomville Speedway, a Lancaster Speedway, an Oswego Speedway. Lap times are way, way down. And we’re always looking to try to set a record and makes a good story.

And even on the national circuit, whether it be in the NASCAR circuit or whatever, it’s pretty much all cookie cutter, but it’s racing. We’re going to live with it. They brought a race car to the Oswego Speedway [00:53:00] last year that used to race in the early 1960s. The guy was out of Kentucky and his first name was Wayne and I cannot remember his last name.

Wayne McGuire. The seat is a wooden seat. It’s a plank that goes across the car. Yeah. Safety has changed a lot. Uh, Swigler’s been, as I mentioned, a violent track, but since the end of the, uh, 1990s, when A. J. Michaels was killed, and they started with the foam walls at Swigler, the foam barriers, and they went, uh, Swigler made mandatory seats, the Butler style seat at that point.

You know, they use the Hans device and everything like that. We’ve had some horrible crashes, but no bad injuries because of all the safety processes that have gone on. But when you look back at what it was back then, you know, the roll cage came up like this on a lot of these cars, easy to fly out of the car.

And even before then there were no roll cages. The safety aspect of the sport has changed tremendously and all for the better, in my opinion. The racing, as was already mentioned, technology wise, every day it seems like it’s changing. And now with the advent [00:54:00] of social media, there’s all kinds of speculation about what this car is and what that car isn’t.

And I agree with the Coca Cola mentality. There doesn’t seem to be much reward anymore for people to go into their garage in the backyard or whatever, and build a car that can take out everybody. Lap everybody. Can you think about that now? Somebody lapped somebody out in the They’d be accused of cheating, not because they had hard work.

Just bugs the heck out of me. That’s the case. Look, I like looking at a computer and a score chart just like anybody. But the idea that somebody can work hard and actually perform better than anybody else. The whole cookie cutter concept I am just, I don’t like. The whole concept is pretty similar to the way we live in this world now.

Nobody is better than anybody else. Everything should be on the same plane. And there’s no rewards for doing your homework. The future we’ve already seen in racing, if you watch the premium channels on cable, they’ve already done Formula E, which is electric racing. To me it [00:55:00] sounds like turbo slack cars, that’s what it sounds like to me.

That don’t even sound like race cars. There’s no such thing as a pit stop even. What they do is they bring the cars into the pits, they jump into another one that’s fully charged. They take it back out to the racetrack. There’s no working on the same car trying to get it better through the race. If you think racing’s changed now, you wait until we get into all electric.

And it’s probably bad for me to say that because we just have the Green Grand Prix down here. That’s a big bugaboo, man. I just have a hard time. I agree with you on the electric concept. I said an hour ago, what attracted me to racing? One of the things is the sound, the sound. I don’t care if it’s a super Doswego, a V12 Ferrari, something in between.

It’s the sound. And I agree with you, Mike, there is no sound. Now, Glendonley’s developing some electric sprint cars, I guess, to run at his new motorsports track up in Syracuse, and maybe that’ll be cool. But again, if you take the sound away from me, you’ve taken away a very large portion of what turns [00:56:00] me on anyway.

We’re all learning in the tower now to go, Vroom, vroom, vroom! That’s how it’s done. Best sound I ever heard was when I put Watkins Glen during the six hours in the K& M series where the two classes were allowed to race together because they didn’t have a full field of K& M cars. Porsches, six cylinders, Ferrari, V12s, big block Chevys, small block Chevys, all resonating off the trees coming into the boot section.

It was like a symphony, I’ll never forget it. One of the best things I’ve ever heard. And of course, that’s why vintage racing is so good today. It’s also a lot less expensive. Old guys with old cars, and even some young guys with old cars. And you can do it, maybe not a Can Am car or a GTP car, but you can do it on a budget.

You’ve got an old Alfa Romeo or a 1981 Formula Ford. Simple to operate, simple to work on, not very expensive. My motor lasted 10 years, we just took it apart. That’s cheap racing. Here’s the difference today, is four [00:57:00] years ago, this shirt. I walked into a Ferrari banquet, and I had my Watkins Glen shirt on, and this guy goes, Nice shirt.

And he sits down next to me, and I start telling him stories about racing. And he owns a Ferrari, he’s just sold his company, and talking about the total 24 hour, And he goes, Well, let’s do it. I said, Well, I’m a regular working guy, I can’t do that. He says, Sold my company, I got a lot of money, let’s do it.

For the one race, the 50th anniversary of the Rolex 24 hour, In a used car. Porsche GT3 Cup car. I spent a half a million dollars of his money. We had some good times. And the car, at the end of the race, went into his garage. That’s the difference. My Formula Ford is worth about 12, 000. My first race car was 450.

I bought it out of a barn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a 1958 Elva sports racing car. I bought it in 1968. I sold that car for a ton of money. The end of the year, 600 bucks. [00:58:00] The last guy had a price tag on it of 95, 000, but that’s another story. Oh, great. I agree with Roy. I think that what’s improved most is the safety of the cars, and that’s nothing but good.

The downside, which I think Frank touched on a little bit, was technology now has gotten so advanced that it’s not approachable anymore. This is, I think, in all forms of racing. I open the hood of my car now, and they don’t even want you touching me. You know, there’s a big piece of plastic there. And that’s different from when I was growing up.

We could change the crutch on a Volkswagen Bug in 30 minutes. Lift the back of the car up, drop the engine out, change the crutch, put it back in, and we weren’t intimidated by that. The complexity with all the electronics now, you know, I can’t see electricity, you know, there’s these sensors and these wires and they must be doing something, but I don’t know exactly what it is.

And I think that that and the fact that there are so many more things for young people to be involved with now, skateboards, bicycling, X games, kinds of things that the automobile does not have the same place in society that it [00:59:00] had when I was growing up. Racing is going to change and the young people who are involved Look at it a little bit differently.

I’ll tell you what my pet peeve in racing is, and that is all of the artificial rules that have been created. The lucky dog, the push to pass. It used to be very simple as an announcer to explain to people what was going on. The cars are out there, they’re racing one another. Now it’s, well, you know, the tires are degrading and they’re going to have to stop to change the tires.

They’ve introduced a level of complexity that, to me, just isn’t I guess for the show it’s needed, but to me it’s upset what used to be the essence of the sport. I’m not sure I’m going to transition from skateboards back to where we’re at. We’ve touched on all of it here. Cookie cutter business, I agree with it.

They’re terrible. Nothing prettier to me today than seeing a real one or imagining or looking at Joe’s photos of a 37 Ford Coupe. Not modified much, but just enough to make it a race car. Those were beautiful cars, and not just the Fords and Chevrolet. Safety, again, has been touched on, and Roy even touched on it specifically.[01:00:00]

And we had this question in advance that was going to talk about safety. I didn’t see the guy with the board seat, but if you look at a car that raced at Waterloo back in the 50s or 60s or whatever and you see them, it might have been a bucket seat that came out of an old airplane or something or other, but there was about as much support to it as this chair that I’m sitting in right now.

And these new low joy seats and the various manufacturers have just made it so much safer. And that’s what’s wonderful. So the technology in the safety aspects of it all are great technology that’s costing so much money for everybody for everything. Some of it’s safety, some of it for performance is too bad.

I liked it the old way, put new seats in old cars and I’d be happy. I think my point about the skateboards was these are things that young people can afford. Where now it’s harder to get people like us who didn’t have a connection to the sport. I mean there are lots of second and third generation racers that benefit from their family affiliation.

To find someone coming into the sport now with no background is much harder because. The cost of entry is so much higher. My fear is that racing will evolve into Formula E and drifting. [01:01:00] It’s almost there. Let me put in a good word for cars that don’t make much noise. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to drive a car that was built for what was known as the Volkswagen GTI series.

These were diesel powered cars. They made no noise from the outside. When you’re inside the car driving them, they It was just like any other racing car. You had the line from the transmission and they put on good races. They were real racing cars and they were fast. That’s one of the changes us graybeards and the like may have to adapt to.

But there will be different kinds of racing that will attract different people. I can’t say the electric cars do much for me, but quiet racing cars in some venues are going to be one of the things that helps to keep the sport going. Okay.

I think the problem is that for all of us up here is we come from a different age and there’s a new age. All right. Here’s my last question. And this is what I think is going to let us segue into stories, stories, and more stories. We’ll start with Mike and then work down favorite tracks, favorite series.

drivers, best [01:02:00] interview, worst interview, whatever one of those you want to take and just roll from there. Wow, obviously the track up here on the hill where I got my start with Al Robinson in 1995 is my favorite. Daytona, obviously I made it to there, that’s the pinnacle. As far as other tracks are concerned, Virginia International Raceway, another road racing course I was lucky to be asked to do.

That’s one of my favorites. Richmond on the NASCAR circuit, the three quarter mile short track and Nazareth, they both put on great modified races, no better track in my mind for modified than the three quarter mile over at Richmond. And I’m talking about today’s configuration. There’s a lot of guys. I remember it way before and they liked that as well.

Mid Ohio, I was able to go there. Great place. And I haven’t mentioned that I’ve done drag racing. The big track that I liked going to was out at Denver, Colorado, the Van Deme Speedway. And the reason for that is ’cause it’s up in the mountains that HRA wanted us to be at the track at eight o’clock in the morning, be ready to go.

So I get up [01:03:00] there. Speedway at eight o’clock and the owner of the track comes up to me and goes, who the heck are you? And I said, I’m one of the guys that’s supposed to be announcing with the NHRA today. He says, well, the races don’t start until one o’clock. I said, I was told to be here at eight. So what the heck should I do now?

He says, see those mountains go up and take a ride. And I went all the way around the mountains, came down through Evergreen, Colorado. Came back to the track, it took me about a three hour trip, in order to see those mountains. I mean, racing has taken me places that I probably would have never gone before.

Different places around the country that I would never have seen unless I went to announce racing. For that, I’m very grateful. You say one of the tracks I hate, you want me to say that? That’s a tough one. As much as I respect all you guys that work at Camp Dagobah. There was a night that I went there. I know it was only one night, but it seemed like you guys were racing on the craters of the moon.

I mean, the cars were bouncing up and down all over the place. I couldn’t understand how the drivers were even controlling the cars. [01:04:00] Like I said, I respect you guys a lot, but I didn’t have any fun at that racetrack. Another racetrack that I can’t stand is Pocono. I don’t like that track. The Triangle. I sat in the grandstand, so I didn’t announce that.

Thank God. The cars go way out to the north 40 and then they come back. That’s right. I do not like that track at all. I never will. You can pay me a dollar and I’ll start still want to go. How about the best interview or worst interview? I’m going to come back to Dale Earnhardt Sr. Two weeks before he died, I was asked to do a press conference for the Chevy Corvette racing team.

I don’t know if you remember, he raced with his son for the 24 hours in the Corvette team. He came back into the press conference and the guy from Chevrolet asked me to handle it. And he says, well, here’s what’s going to happen. Just like you had questions to ask us, he says, you’re going to have 20 minutes to conduct a question and answer session.

He says, I’m going to be in the back of the room going like this when it’s 20 minutes is over. So I started asking Dale some questions, [01:05:00] interview went 20 minutes, like the guy said. I said, we’re going to end the question and answer session right now, Dale Sr. is right here. And he says, wait a minute, we’re ending, where am I going?

I said, I was told you had to be on a plane here. They only gave me 20 minutes to go, so I’m not going anywhere. And if you know Dale, he was quite cantankerous. And he also tried to be a jokester. He played pranks on everybody. That’s probably my best interview that I had. My worst was when, and I’ll never forget this one.

Down on Homestead by Abbey. I was coming toward Matt Kenseth. And he was part of the Roush team at that point. And he saw me coming. And I saw him with his elbow and I could read his lips. He says, watch this. So I came up to interview him. He gave me one word answers to every question I asked. Drove me nuts.

I couldn’t get anything out of him more than one word. That was probably my worst interview. Right? I’ve announced at probably close to 50 tracks in any number of different divisions. And I can honestly [01:06:00] say my absolute Favorite race is the one I’m at right now. The race I’m announcing right now, and yeah, I’ve had some bad races and some bad tracks I’ve been at.

It’s the one I’m doing right now. The one I’m watching right now. That’s my favorite. I really don’t have any that I can say. I don’t like that track because everyone I’ve been to, there’s something about I like and really enjoy. In terms of interviews, I’ll give you the worst one first because it was when USAC split and IRL took over and ran, uh, USAC ran a race at Pocono.

They had a tough time putting together a starting field, 33 cars. So you had some very current Indy type cars all the way down to the old champ cars where the drivers actually had to get out of the car. for refueling because they didn’t have the quick fill. The race, when it ended, A. J. Foyt had won. There were no two cars in the same lap.

Second place was four laps down. Third place was 10 laps down. Tenth place was 40 laps down. And I had to interview A. J. [01:07:00] Foyt at the end of the race. I was doing that. Pocono had set up its own radio network for that race. It started to rain. They bring an ambulance out on the track. They bring AJ over to the ambulance, we get in the ambulance, they give me the microphone, I start to interview AJ, microphone won’t work.

AJ says, F this and out he went. In terms of good interviews, Jimmy Champagne on the local level was probably the best, the easiest person to interview. You could ask him anything. He would elaborate on anything. He was a very, very helpful person. I had a chance to interview an awful lot of the NASCAR drivers as well.

And in that group, I would say Richard Petty, and I’ll tell you a very funny story very quickly about Petty down at Pocono. I was brand new doing my television show in Binghamton, and it was my first NASCAR race. We go to the race down in Pocono, and I’m getting drivers, and I come up to Petty’s Garage, and Richard is right there, and I said, Richard, do you have time for an interview?

He said, not now, come back later. Well, I thought I’d been blown off. No big deal, it’s happened before. [01:08:00] I go down, I got Daryl Waldrip, I got Bobby Allison, I’m coming back, I’m going back by Petty’s Garage, and he says, hey, hey, didn’t you want to interview me? I said, yeah, but there was a drunk lady in the back of the garage.

I didn’t want her in the picture.

Joe. Well, I gotta say, just like why my favorite race track is the one I’m at that night. I enjoy announcing every race at every race track that I’ve worked at. I too have probably been close to 50 different tracks around the country. I’ve got a couple of stories on the worst interviews I have done. Um, One of them, I was working at Lebanon Valley Speedway for Lebanon 200.

And Tommy Corrales won the race. And this was before the unique wireless mics that we have of today. We had to use a two way radio and a microphone and bring it over to the tower. I was working with an older gentleman, but he was kind of the voice of the Lebanon Valley Speedway. [01:09:00] Uncle Art, that was it, Uncle Art.

He was up in the tower, so I had to go over and interview Tommy Corrales. I got there and I started with the interview and I’m holding the two way radio. And I felt something hit my hand, and I kind of looked down to see what it was, and I don’t remember anything after that. Because some gentleman from the tower threw a rock and hit me in the head.

Knocked me out absolutely cold. Everything came out okay. The brain shook a little bit looser after that. Funny part of the story is a couple weeks later was Super Dirt Week at Syracuse and I saw Tommy and I said, hey Tommy, how you doing? He said, good, how you doing? I said, pretty good. He said, you know, you’re the first guy that ever went down and I never threw a punch.

One of the other terrible interviews that happened, Gary, I think you were working with me, a candidate with Speedway with Will Cagle. If you knew Will Cagle at all, he was kind of a controversy guy. He could be hot, he could be cold, he could be nice, he could be bad. One night a candidate with [01:10:00] Speedway, a young guy took him out going into turn number three, who was in the qualifying heat.

They regrouped and everything. They knew what Cagle was going to do and they pointed to him. This was before one way radios into the co*ckpit of the cars. Cagle lines up in the tail and he comes up through there and he dumped Mark Livingston going into three on the very next lap. So he got the black flag.

And he had to run the consolation and obviously he won the conci, but he had to start back in the consolation starting spot. I’m going to tell you, if anybody ever used nitrous oxide that night, he was using it because he came from 20th spot up to first and probably five laps, maybe seven. And he got up there to the number one spot and he just put a lap on everybody.

He was just unbelievable. I went down to interview him and I came down with the trophy and I put the trophy on his right rear tire. And I said, so where will Hobbit tonight go? And he grabbed the microphone from me and he says, Number one, I don’t like the promoter. Number two, I don’t like the [01:11:00] flagger.

Number three, I don’t like you. And I don’t like any of you race fans. There, I did my interview. Because the rules were you had to do an interview or you didn’t get paid. He threw the mic back at me. He got in the car, fired it up, spun his wheels, and the trophy went up into the air. Next day at Weed Sports Feedway, I’m walking down through the pit area, and I says, I’m going to avoid him.

And he goes, Hey, Jose. And I turn around and I look and I says, Yeah? And he says, what did Glenn say? I said, well, Glenn says, Glenn said you’re a, start with an A. He goes, what did everybody else say? I said, they all agreed with him. That was Cagle. He was pretty controversial. As far as the best interviews, back when I started announcing, You really didn’t do too many interviews.

You know, here again, you didn’t have a wireless mic. And it was very tough to do a lot of interviews. Alan Johnson, I’m sure you’re going to agree with me, was one of the terrible ones. You had to hold him by the shirt because he had a [01:12:00] tendency of walking away from you all the time. As time went on, he got much better.

Danny Johnson was always a good interview. They were just all good. They answered the questions you gave them. They were happy they won the race. Sometimes a little disturbing to interview the second place or the third place because they didn’t win. I’ve really had a good time at it and that’s my stories.

I used to do interviews at the Bog Tent. These are corporate interviews. They bring the drivers in and these people paid a lot of money to sit right at the apex of turn 11 here at Watkins Glen coming on the front straightaway. Good guys to interview. Jeff Gordon. Laura said, always a great interview, especially when Conor Edwards would be sneaking up behind him and jumping him.

And the two of us start wrestling and fighting for the mic. That was good. The big surprise to me was Mark Martin walks in with his own interviewer. He makes a statement, doesn’t sign any autographs like everybody else, and walks out. And I thought that was probably the worst of anybody that I [01:13:00] had ever interviewed.

The best guy, I think, was Kyle Busch. And this was when Kyle was getting the rap for being just a jerk. I did an interview with Kyle. Again, because of my racing background, I was asking him a question about what he was doing between the two different cars, the sprint car, whatever it was, nationwide car at the time.

The difference between the two of them, between turn one and turn two, and how he approached turn two, Watkins Glen, and what RPM he was, and was he shifting, was he braking? You know, that’s not a, gee, M& Ms, or you know, what’s your girlfriend’s name, kind of a question. He spent At least five minutes talking about the difference between the two cars all the way around the track, the RPMs, the gears, the entrance to the turns as braking points.

And I thought that that was really a cool interview. It was something that you don’t normally hear. And I still remember that is probably the best interview that I ever had with a driver. I don’t know if everybody else knows this, but Frank is also a real estate broker in Connecticut. Have you ever sold any house to [01:14:00] anybody who’s like, really cool?

Thank God the motorheads in my area seek me out, because if they didn’t, I couldn’t have done all the racing that I did. And as I like, tell people, I said, you know, if I was really good at it, I’d be retired. But yeah, the racing has brought me my niche and clients. You know, some people it’s a PTA or bingo games or their local church or something, but I’ve taken care of the motor heads for years.

I sold the international motorsport association, their building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and they were there for years. And when they moved down south, I sold the building for them along with the 18, 000 honeybees that had built a nest in the chimney of the building. So it’s great. Like you’ve already heard, the best series or the best race is the next one I’m going to.

But I want to go back for the one that was the most fun. The race series that was the most fun goes all the way back to when I first started. It was called the Car and Driver Showroom Stock Sedan Challenge. The best [01:15:00] thing about it was there was free Schaefer beer. From there, it was like an automotive Woodstock.

The editors of Car and Driver Magazine came up with this idea that they would race against anybody who wanted to race against them in the cheapest cars of the era. So we had Ford Pintos, Chevrolet Vegas, Dodge Colts . These cars were slow . They leaned and they lurched, and the tires just screamed and protest.

But what a time it was. It was just amazing. I mean, there was this real antagonism between the writers and the readers that you couldn’t recreate. So that was the most fun that I remember. Going back, they ran it from 72 until 1976. Best interview? Ah, there are lots of them. I’ve had the opportunity to run the gamut from road racing people like Sam Posey and David Hobbs.

Some of the best interviews were with the guys from the old NASCAR North Series. Dave Dion, Mike Stefanik, that would come and do [01:16:00] one road race a year, or, if it wasn’t the only road race, it was the last race of the year, and the championship was going to be decided. They just came down and had a lot of fun and were great people to talk to.

Worst interview I can easily remember. Nobody ever heard it. 22 years old. One of the first races I ever announced at Thompson, Connecticut. New racer was there. His name was P. L. Newman. I followed him around all weekend trying to get an interview. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with an interview.

I had a reel to reel tape recorder with me. Finally, at the end of the weekend, he said, okay, we’ll do the interview. We did 40 minutes. I went back home and listened to it and it was 35 minutes of me and 5 minutes of Paul Newman. Tape went in the trash. It did help me though, subsequently, in my dealings with him because I realized he wanted his space.

You had to wear a peanut costume. Yeah, as long as Paul Newman wanted to come to the races and be a racer, he didn’t want to be a celebrity. Fortunately, I learned that early and I had a very good relationship with him throughout his career. Best interview, [01:17:00] I’m not certain. There have been a lot of good ones.

Worst interviewers, Cagle’s name was on, for that particular night that you referred to, Jim. He was never a friendly, nice guy. Arrogant. Whether he won or not. The other guy, most of you all know this name, but Walt Mitchell. Walt Mitchell, Drove variety of cars, but won a lot of races in a late mile division.

And I was working for Donnelly and Walt won about every Saturday night. I guess we ran those cars, but you couldn’t get Mitchell to say more than three words, no matter what the question was. So that was tough. The best interview was with Tim Fuller the night he won at my favorite racetrack, which is Canada Equal Speedway, which we know Mike doesn’t particularly enjoy, but, uh, sorry he didn’t like it.

I was only there that one time where I didn’t like it. Well, the track was smooth this night and Fuller won. And it was his first, and I believe, won once last year, but I don’t know what year this was, but it goes back a ways. He was driving for Bob Faust in the M1 car. Some of you folks remember that. But anyway, he won, and he was on his way to Victory Circle, and halfway down the back straightaway, he decided to get to Victory Circle quickest way, which would be straight across the infield.

He did not know that there was a [01:18:00] ditch there, which is about 10 feet deep. And he eventually got there, but not with his car. And we built a bridge after that. And that bridge is still there. Another interview, which is worth sharing with you folks is one of the last interviews that I did with Motor Racing Network.

It was the last time I worked for the Motor Racing Network and it was here at Watkins Glen. I was assigned a pre race interview with Tony Stewart and Tony had just done something bad the week before, or whatever it was, and he was not always, but often a problem. And so I was coached by what you could talk to him about, what you couldn’t talk to him about.

And most of all, you couldn’t talk to him about the controversy that he caused the week before. That was okay with me. And I went to his trailer as we were getting ready for the pre race deal. And he was of course in the trailer. I made arrangements with his PR guy that we would do this interview. And everything was set up, but he came out of the trailer.

It wouldn’t talk to me. It wouldn’t talk to anybody. And of course, my, whoever was running, David Hyde I guess was running MRN then was very disappointed with me. It was all my fault. Well, I had done my homework and I’d been the best gentleman I could be, but he just wouldn’t talk to me. So that was another highlight.

Another [01:19:00] interview highlight was Dale Jr. Worked a lot of truck races, but I guess this was probably a bush race. Dale was Jr. because he was who he was. They always wanted to talk to him and he was running well enough to deserve an interview before or after the races. But he was such a nervous young kid, couldn’t do an interview very well.

And just to watch him mature over the years as he’s now a pretty smooth guy. Mark Martin, you brought that. Mark was a tough guy as well. He stiffed me in a way at Pocono. I asked him a question and he answered it and I asked him another question and he pushed me away. David Hyatt wasn’t very happy with me, but in the next race I talked to Mark, why did you do that?

You got your one question, you got your one answer, and that’s all you were going to get. That was it. So I’ve never been a Mark Vinson. That pretty much answers all my questions, but now it’s time for you folks. Mike, tell them the story about when you were working for NASCAR that you got to do the event for Daytona USA.

Oh man. Daytona USA was a spot where fans could come in and ask questions just [01:20:00] like we’re about ready to do now. Back in the day, the Pepsi Theater was there. They had just put in a new screen for the video section. And my job that day was supposed to sit up with five NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series drivers who were brand new in the series at the time.

They have director’s chairs for us. And the five guys were there before I was. They introduced me to come up to do the interviews. And the freaking director’s chair collapsed. I fell backwards. The first thing I was asked, I wasn’t asked, Are you okay? Did you break our 10, 000 screen? They finally came over and said, Are you okay?

I said, yeah, don’t worry about your screen. I didn’t land on it. That drove me nuts. Is that what you’re talking about? No, I’m talking about your trip to California. They had an attraction down at Daytona USA. They called it Daytona Dream Lapse. It was kind of like a roller coaster that would go through the racetrack and you would have a visual sitting in the roller coaster of how it might’ve been in a stock car.

[01:21:00] At that particular point, and my job is to be like a PA announcer and let everybody know what’s going on. I did the voiceover out in California, of all places. They couldn’t put it anywhere in between California and Waukensland or Daytona, what the heck. So they bring me out to uh, California, now I gotta become a member of SAG.

Organization where most actresses and actors have to join that. So I have to pay dues to be SAG in another commercial sense. So I didn’t have to use that union card at all. Drove me nuts. One of the stories, one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in my career, took place two years ago in downtown Watkins Glen.

There was a race driver you may have heard of, his name is Rusty Wallace. And he had just received his star on the Walk of Fame. Wallace is a pretty busy guy, he did his autographs, he did his interviews, and he was on his way back to his car, and out of the corner of his eye, He caught a familiar face and he went over and spent the next 10 minutes [01:22:00] talking to his friend Al Robinson and the story that I want to hear Al tell is the one he told to Rusty that day.

Will you do that for us Al?

It was indeed. I was driving through Muncie, Indiana one night in the 1980s, and I found myself behind a rather beat up looking Winnebago, and the Winnebago had Missouri plates on it, and it was festooned with Busty Wallace and Kenny Wallace stickers. The Winnebago stopped at a gas station just about the time it became necessary for me to also replenish the tank on my rental car.

Asked the woman as she stepped out of Winnebago how she and her husband got to be such big Wallace fans. She said, we didn’t have much choice because Rusty and Kenny are our sons. That’s how I met Judy Wallace and also Russ Wallace. And I still don’t know what Rusty’s real first name is. You know, there was a controversy a number of years ago as Is Rusty Wallace’s name on his birth [01:23:00] certificate William Russell or is it Russell William Wallace?

On the subject of the best interview, I think routinely the best interview that I remember was Neil Bonnet. All you had to do was walk up and say hello to Neil Bonnet and he would give you as much time as he had before his next sponsor appearance. He was a genuinely pleasant person to talk to and a real gentleman.

As well as being a great race driver. Frank, I already warned you about this question. It has to do with Al Robinson. You and Al had a tradition at midnight hour at Daytona. Can you give us a little background on where that tradition started? Whose idea was it? Why did you pick that song? Well, I don’t know so much about the song, and Al’s going to have to help me with this.

Actually, a bunch of us used to do Daytona all night long. As they kind of narrowed down their staff, and I became politically not welcome up in the booth anymore. Unless I’d [01:24:00] sneak up there at night. Al would take over the midnight section. He was the prince of darkness somewhere around midnight. I’d go up in the booth for at least a couple of years there and we would do the howling at the moon.

Absolutely correct. Frank, our technical expert, David Bell created a, uh, In the Midnight Hour by Wilson Pickett, who I’m sure many of you remember very well. It was a staple of the Stroke of Midnight to, uh, play In the Midnight Hour by Wilson Pickett. At least David Bell’s outtake version of it. One of the guys I worked for in the PR department down at Daytona was named Mark Lewis.

Mark Lewis, actually. He liked to, uh, refer to himself as being the most influential African American executive in motorsports. Right. And he would help Al throughout the night. Right. Mark was a great guy to have around. He usually stuck in until about 3 a. m. or so, at which point fatigue began to play a role.

Let me tell you another story about Frank. Before [01:25:00] a race, the drivers are in the pre grid area. They’re all strapped in their cars. They’re trying to concentrate on the task ahead. And there was a young woman by the name of Stephanie Van Wye, who was just starting her racing career. She was a very accomplished equestrian.

Stephanie was trying to focus. And Frank asked me for the microphone. Proceeded to sing Happy Birthday to Stephanie. Oh, of course. That story has never died. And I’m the one who gets blamed. Frank did the singing, I get blamed because I handed him the microphone. We’ve played enough jokes on people over the years that At one point, in fact, it was the last race of the national season out of Bridghampton.

For those of you that remember Bridghampton, I think I had run off the road and come back on in a formula car, so I didn’t win the race, but Chip Ganassi won the race. Chip pulls into the pits and is looking for accolades and there’s nobody there. I had pulled in someone behind him. Chip’s entire crew, along with lots of other people, filled my car up with whipped cream.

They had a couple of dozen cans of [01:26:00] Reddi Whip and paid me back. Looking at the audience and trying to figure out what might be repeatable, what’s the stupidest thing you guys have ever done where you put your foot in your mouth? It was in a basketball game. I was announcing in Montrose, Pennsylvania. The shooter was coming across the top of the key.

And I started saying, he shoots from the top of the key. Well, he scored. So I was going to change it to, he hits from the top of the key. And I said, he sh*ts from the top of the key!

When that happens, you don’t stop. You just keep on going. Keep on going. How many know the music group? Glenn Donnelly was very famous for having musical groups come in to the County Fair. There was a big stage built in the center of Weedsport Speedway, then called County Fair Speedway. It was on a Sunday night during the races.

The next day, Molly Hatchet was going to appear at the County Fairgrounds. So, I go down to interview the [01:27:00] winner, and Glenn says, Take the group! Take the Molly Hatchet group down with ya! They had been up in the tower, tipping a few. So I says, okay, come on guys, Now, look, I grew up in the 60s, Beatles, Beach Boys, those type of groups.

So I come down, I can’t remember who the winner was, And I says, hey, alongside of me, We got the group that’s gonna be playing here tomorrow night, The Molly Hatcher Group. By the way, guys, where is Molly? Where is she? laughing I gotta tell you this, when I got up in the tower, Glenn says, Boy, if you didn’t sound like a jerk.

I said, where weren’t you? Where was she? Stupidest thing I’ve ever said. That was out of California Speedway. It’s called out of Club Speedway now. And I introduced Jimmy Johnson and I’m out in the Southwest for the first time. So he’s from El Cajon, what did I say? El Cajon, don’t forget that’ll never happen again.

I was announcing at Daytona for MRN, but I had the distinct privilege in 1999 for being the guy in the tower. If you’re [01:28:00] working for MRN in your tower at Daytona or any of these tracks, all you do is fill in between during the commercial periods when the radio network is doing their thing. This was earlier in the week and it was the IROC series.

I’m announcing all these famous name drivers that we all recognize driving these Pontiac Trans Am cars. And I’m not sure who it was that came over the radio. And it was either Roger Penske himself who owned the series or Hilton or somebody from the track. Tell that announcer, those are not Pontiac Grand Ams.

Those are IROC Grand Ams and they had lost their Pontiac sponsorship. So the cars were the same from the year before. They were obviously Pontiacs. Anybody with half a brain would have known that. But they were no longer Pontiacs as far as Roger Pinsky was concerned. I’m not going to tell you the most embarrassing things I’ve said.

I don’t want to remember them. Come on, I got a good story. I’m at Daytona and it’s the middle of the night. Al, you might have been there. This is very late at night. I think Tom Natchew was there with us. It’s like three o’clock in the morning. We’re looking for something to talk about. A few years earlier, I’d written a poem about what it’s like to run a [01:29:00] 24 hour race and have your motorhome with you.

It goes like this, and I won’t read the whole thing, but it shows that somebody’s listening even at three o’clock in the morning. I found the cheese the other day. Looked a lot like curds and whey. Someone had shoved it under the seat along with the peach and two slices of meat. It was all kind of fuzzy.

And what was that smell? Here in the Delvecchio Bad Smell Motel. Just about that time the phone rings next to us. We pick it up and there’s a voice on the other end and it’s There is no poetry at Daytona. So, we never got through the hotel. Well, that kind of reminds me of a story when I was down at Virginia International Raceway.

The new Mini Cooper that’s out is made by BMW, I don’t know if you know that. So I call it the BMW Mini Cooper. One of the guys from BMW said, it’s not a BMW. It’s just a Mini Cooper. Don’t tell anybody BMW. So I kind of got scolded that day. Now I can tell you that’s not a BMW Mini [01:30:00] Cooper. Wayne County Speedway is in the middle of North Carolina.

Well, it started out as a dirt track. It became a paved track. And it was one of those areas where fighting in the pits was mandatory.

During a race, car coming out of turn number two hit the outside wall, bill rolled down the back straight. Ambulance crew standing by the ambulance, they run down the back straight, get down to turn three where the car says, Damn, forgot the ambulance. Back they go for the ambulance. Same track, guy gets black flag, he won’t come off the track.

Cars keep going around, under the yellow, he won’t come off the track. They bring out the red flag. He won’t come off the track. I’m on the outside wall. They bring a tow truck out. The guy wasn’t going very fast. He was a street stock. He was just kind of motoring around. He comes down like this and the tow truck, tantamount against the wall.

By the way, I want to mention Keith Zares here. We’ve mentioned other announcers. Keith is the announcer at Adirondack and Evans Mills and also does infield announcing at Oswego. Same track, late model race. The owner of the [01:31:00] car gets upset because his driver has just been penalized for spinning somebody out.

He runs out into the pit area, which is outside the parking lot, rather, which is outside the track. Brings his car down onto the track. He’s going this way. The field is going that way. Goes around several times. They call the police. 911 is called. Here comes the police. The blue lights are flying in here.

The guy goes off the track. Now you’ve got three cop cars and this guy racing around the parking lot. Finally out into the road, and they finally stopped him. This track, by the way, is located in Nahunter, North Carolina, the pig capital of North Carolina. Perfect. Not the cops. North Carolina is the second largest hog producer in the United States.

What was the most exciting last lap that you have ever called? 1983 International Classic. Oh yeah. At the Oswego Speedway. At EV. 200 lap race and it was as boring as they get until the last seven laps. Doug Hebron was leading, Bentley Warren was running second, Warren Coney was third, [01:32:00] Eddie Bellinger was fourth.

Seven laps to go I start to say Hebron is running out of fuel. Doug Caruso, one of the brothers of the owners of the track, chose Mesa’s. Really, it’s a boring race. You’re not going to make it exciting now. Well, he was running out of fuel. Coming into the white flag, the running order was Hebron, Bentley Warren, Warren Conium, Eddie Bellinger.

Coming out of turn number two, Hebron bogged down, Warren was behind him, Conium went by, Bellinger went by. At the end of the lap, it was the exact opposite order that they started the lap. Bellinger won, Warren Conium second. Best last lap was at Little Valley Speedway. Promoted there for one year. I brought in the BRP Modified Tour, which was pretty unique to Little Valley.

It’s primarily a late model track. Kevin Mullen, a driver from Ohio. Weston, PA. And Ronnie Smoker, who is from nearby Eden, New York, or Boston, New York, which is just up the road from Little Valley. They ran a number of laps side by side, and that just doesn’t happen any place [01:33:00] much anymore. And Smoker’s car was smoky for the last five laps.

And we were never sure who was going to win. I mean, you just didn’t know they did not make contact. It was a great race and Smoker did end up winning. We learned later that the smoke was not a big problem at all, but that was primarily because Smoker had a fan base there. Nobody knew Bowling. They put on a great race.

And of course, the last lap was Formula 1600 series that I announced for, you never know who’s going to win the race until the last lap. And what, again, if you’re an Overtrack fan, you need to realize that road racing is a little different. The cars disappear and all kinds of things happen out back and a different group of cars appears coming out of the last turn.

It can be just about impossible to figure out, you know, what’s going to happen. But one of the races that made a biggest impression on me for a great finish was a Bush North race. In 2001 and going into the last lap, Andy Santer was leading Butch Lightsinger, who was a well known road racer at the time, going into the second to last turn.

Andy’s car got off course and [01:34:00] got upside down. And all of a sudden, here’s Butch Lightsinger with the win. Well, the NASCAR pits were inflamed to say the least because the supposition was, since nobody had seen what went on on the back part of the track, that Lightsinger had gotten into Andy and put him upside down.

So he towed Andy’s car in, and by now, you know, there’s lots of murmuring going on, and Andy came over and said, Screwed up bad, didn’t I? He never touched me. I looked in my mirrors instead of watching the track, drove right off the road. Wildest last laps I ever announced was at the Moody Mile at Syracuse.

And there was about two and a half laps to go. Danny Johnson was leading, driving the Freightliner car number six, and as he goes down into the tricky number three corner. I said, wow, a little puff of smoke coming out of Danny Johnson’s car. Now, over the years, I’ve been known to maybe fabricate a little bit here and there.

Embellish, embellish, embellish. I think that’s the word. And there were a couple of people standing behind me up at the [01:35:00] tower. One of them being Pastor Wells and his wife. He goes, yeah, sure. Tell him it’s smoking, Joe. I go, it is. It really is smoking. And he comes out of turn four and down the front straightaway to get the white flag.

And as he goes into turn number one, he really puts out a puff of smoke and he stands on it coming out of turn number two and down the back straightaway. And this time when he goes down to the turn number three, it is a big puff of smoke. And when he comes out of turn number four for the checkered flag comes across the line, he puked the engine right there on the start finish line.

I turned around and I said, there, I told you what I lied to you. Most exciting race I ever called on a last lap was Wanda Did Not Exist at VRR, Virginia National Raceway. The track is almost four miles around. I didn’t have a time and computer. I didn’t have a TV. But I called the best damn race I ever called.

There was all kinds of lead changes. There was all kinds of things going on. Guys rubbing [01:36:00] each other. It’s the best race I’ve ever called that never happened. Frank, that sounds like something you told me once, uh, in the SBRA Tower. If things get a little monotonous, you call a race battle that doesn’t exist?

Yeah, of course. That’s exactly what Mike said. Embellish it a little bit, you know. And sometimes you have to look far down the field. Sometimes we’ve got a 40 car field, you know, the front’s kind of stretched out a little bit. Look down and see what the 18th place car is doing because that 18th place car, that guy or gal is driving their hearts out against the 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd place car.

And that’s where the battle is. And that’s your job is to make it exciting. and get somebody to focus on what’s really happening out there. That’s just as cool as the front, if it’s closed. But if the front’s stretched out, you know, you might as well be talking to your hairbrush instead of a microphone.

1971 72, a guy came up to me by the name of Jack Brandt. [01:37:00] He was kind of a co promoter for Ira Vale back in the Ira Vale promotion days. And Jack said to me, Joey says, And I said, no. And he says, what do you know about a motorcycle? And I looked over at one and I says, it’s got two wheels. He says, good, you’re the announcer.

He was promoting during the state fair, an AMA sanctioned motorcycle race on the Moody mile. I says, gee, Jack, I really don’t know nothing about motorcycles. That’s okay. You’ll do good. So I get all the credentials and everything. And that was announcing from the old tower in the infield and with the old grandstand at the fairgrounds.

We had all the top riders there. I remember, uh, Kenny Roberts was there. And one of the things I learned real quick, I was told, they’re not drivers, they’re riders. I said, okay. They went out and they did some warm ups and everything, and the grandstand was absolutely packed. I’m really embarrassed because I don’t know much.

I walked through the pits, I got all the information I could get and everything, but I just didn’t [01:38:00] feel I was doing a good job. And when they went out for one of their qualifying heats, Coming off of turn two, I thought I saw a rider slip to the inside and fall. And when I said that, I said, Wait, we got one, two riders down.

I looked at the grandstand and I seen everybody stand up and look in point. Well, then I realized I could see turn two in the back straightaway, but they couldn’t from that old grandstand the way the elevation in the old grandstand was. So I said, ah, my secret. Man, I’ll tell you, I had four or five riders down at a time coming out of turn number two and I made it really exciting.

And Kenny Roberts won the race, by the way. Did they charge you a dollar every time you said driver? I didn’t race. I did. It cost me about 25 bucks. No, I didn’t get fined. I got a hot dog. You may have caught it at the beginning of this thing. My name is Roy Soto, and that’s important for this story. Down in Binghamton, Jack Crawford, who was a sprint car driver, and I promoted the first World of Outlaw [01:39:00] race in New York State.

We signed the first contract. Glenn Donnelly got in ahead of us. They were the race at Rolling Wheels the night before, but it got rained out. So we had the first race down at Five Mile Point Speedway. It was on television in Binghamton at the time. About two weeks before that, Art Bonker, who was the promoter at Five Mile Point, where the race was going to be held, we were leasing the track from him, Gordie Cunningham, said to me, Why don’t you come to the track?

You don’t have a race at Oswego on this Saturday night. He said, come to the track, announce a few races, and promote the World of Outlaws race. Wow, that’s a great idea. I’ll do that. The track announcer at Five Mile Point was Dusty Doyle. Dusty got into the amber liquid a little early almost every race night.

So Dusty comes out and he says, Ladies and gentlemen, We’ve got a young man here in the Binghamton area, you may know him from television. He’s gonna be promoting a World of Outlaws sprint car race. Here at Five Mile Point Speedway, and he wants to get his feet a little bit wet in race [01:40:00] announcing. Ladies and gentlemen, Leroy Sneva.

And Dusty Doyle always made the comment when he counted cars, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, plus one more. He would never say that word. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever heard made of an announcer was made by a fan named Dick O’Brien, who Larry knows very well. He spent a lot of time at the Oswego Speedway, and he once said that Roy Silver could make a two car concierge exciting, and that’s about the highest praise any announcer can get.

My question for you, Larry, did you ever have a reporter forget to plug in the microphone? No. Yes, Jim Richmond. Me, I was the idiot. That’s right, yeah. I’ve had many instances like that though. The tricky turn three. The number three turn. Well look, there’s also, you can take a flyer out of there and end up in the raffidily patch.

[01:41:00] I’ve had a lot of guys in the raffidily. You guys are great. Who was the most colorful driver you guys ever out? I’d say Will Kagel. Yeah. Will certainly, you know, will used to do some things that, particularly in a caution. He was accused of doing a lot of different things. It was because he did ’em. Yeah.

One of the things he would go through and I would play it up an awful lot. He’d pull his harness straps a little bit. Look at him. He’s trying to psych up the driver on the outside. He is pulling his sleeves up. But at one time he said to me, I don’t like when you call attention to pullin the sleeve up.

Because if you remember, mirrors were outlawed. And Will was known to have a bracelet on that may have had a reflector on it. So he could see around the track. I hope you guys have had as much fun as I have, because this has just been a bop. Let’s please thank all these guys up here.

So, on behalf of the Center, Gary, [01:42:00] Greg, Frank, Joe, Leroy, and Mike. Name became so popular in Binghamton. I was a baller at the time, and somebody made me a pair of heel plates that said Leroy Sneva on them. Are you related to Tom Sneva? Really? Cool. Leroy Van Dyke? Anyway, thank all of you for coming. Thanks to all of you for coming, and thanks very much.

Mr. Robinson has a question. Oh, Mr. Robinson. Yes. I’d like to mention the person who’s not here who made me an announcer for the first time. The link deal can’t fail. And of course, it’s my first opportunity to announce the major events, courtesy of Gary Montgomery and the 1983 Race of Champions in Okinawa.

I want to take a moment to thank each one of these gentlemen for taking time out of their busy schedule. It’s just been a thrill working with all these gentlemen and I respect them immensely. They have left me with memories that will last forever and totally enhanced my [01:43:00] experiences going to the races over the years.

Thanks guys. Thanks everybody. This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

org. This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers. organizational records, print ephemera, and images to safeguard, as well as to broaden and deepen the understanding of [01:44:00] motorized wheeled land transportation through the modern age and into the future.

For more information about the SAH, visit www. autohistory. org

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[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. I’m always a big sucker for the story where the small town guy makes it in the big time.

And our featured speaker today is that, quintessentially. I’m also a big fan if the small town guy happens to be from this area. And by this area, I mean Southern New York, Northern Pennsylvania. Mr. Post is a guy who, as a kid, grew up on the dusty bull rings of Five Mile Point Speedway and Pencan Speedway.

And once the small town guy who made good is a fellow that I know, that’s pretty much the trifecta for me. I’ve known Steve now for probably close to 25 years, I think. He was a tremendous guy then, he is a tremendous guy now. It’s taken us three years to get him here, [00:01:00] in part because he just has such a crazy, crazy schedule.

And what I’m most happy, and what I think you guys are gonna be Really interested in hearing about, you’re going to hear about NASCAR and drivers and all of that cool stuff. But this is really Steve’s personal journey. This is really the story of a guy from Halstead, Pennsylvania who made it to the big time.

There’s eight people that announced for Motor Racing Network. And Steve is one of them. Small town guy who made it on the big stage. Local guy who made it on the big stage. And a guy I know personally. That’s it for me. I’m going to introduce Mr. Steve Post. Thanks very much. Thanks for coming. Steve. Alright, thanks Kip.

Thank you. As Kip has talked about, it has taken about three years to put this together, and I’m really shocked that Kip would want to put it together. As he mentioned, we’ve known each other about 25 years, and Kip did bus tours. And I recall one of the early bus tours we did was a group from the WeGo Racing fan club.

We went to New Hampshire. And the shocking part that Kip would have me back is because I was surprised [00:02:00] he let me on the bus to return from New Hampshire. Back in the day, I enjoyed frosty cold beverages. And in many cases, I enjoyed multiple frosty cold beverages. So, we’re riding in this bus trip to New Hampshire, and this was when Stroh’s Beer introduced the 30 pack.

Oh, are you kidding me? 30 pack of beer. So I break out a 30 pack on our bus trip to New Hampshire. We get to New Hampshire, we park across the street, and over into the racetrack is six lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. So we’re playing Frogger, trying to get to the traffic. I have what I’m taking into the racetrack of my Stroh’s 30 pack in one of those really handy styrofoam coolers with a nice string handle on it.

I get halfway through playing Frogger in the six lanes of traffic, the handle breaks, the cooler hits the ground, and beer goes everywhere. While not wanting to waste the investment in the beer, I [00:03:00] do the best thing that I know what to do, and I pull my shirt, and I’m rounding up beer cans while all the cars are tooting their horns and people are laughing and cat calling.

And I probably got six or eight of my beers near my shirt there. And I look up and here’s Kip over along the fence line, just keeled over, laughing, laughing out of just the sheer moment of me trying to round up my beers, laughing out of embarrassment that this is part of his people. These are his group.

And here we go. One of the finest examples. So first off. Kip, I’m glad you let me get back on the bus to return from New Hampshire, and I do appreciate being here, and I’m glad everyone has joined us here on this snowy, frosty day. So the story kind of starts like this, and it starts with an announcer. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

This is Dusty Doyle welcoming you once again to Five Mile Point Speedway, your home speedway of the Southern Tier. I was a little kid, and my life and my passion began every Saturday night with those words. Dusty Doyle, five mile point speedway, going to the [00:04:00] races with my father. And I loved being at the racetrack.

And I loved listening to Dusty Doyle announce races. The Dusty Doyle isms that were out there. When a car came off from turn number two, he would go up, up, up, up, up the backstretch. And you know that he was making time. You may or may not have been, but Dusty Doyle sold you. That car is going into turn number three faster than any car in the history of Five Mile Point has ever gone into turn number three.

One of my favorites is a mysterious character named Andy. We’re under caution. We’re coming through turns three and four, ready to go green. And the phrase was, Andy, let him go! We all wondered who Andy was. The flagger was not Andy, the flagger was Joe Winterstein. Who’s Andy? But every time we’d go green, Andy, let him go!

And there is actually a Facebook name, Andy, let him go, out there now. In tribute of Dusty Doyle. The Dusty Doyle isms that were so much fun. When the heat rays would roll out and there was 13 cars. He would say 12, and another [00:05:00] car because it’s not good luck to say 13 at the racetrack. It was always that.

And when we did that moment at the beginning of the night, ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? Let’s remember who we are, what we are, and where we are for one stanza of our national anthem. Dusty Doyle isms, an announcer that had a passion for racing, a guy that I never met, but a guy that had such an impact on me along the way.

My roots in racing go back actually before I was born. My father, who is father of ever, I wouldn’t put him a year or a decade, my father was a mechanic, there was a racer in New Milford, Pennsylvania named Buzz Gulick, and Buzz’s grandstunts still races along the way, but Buzz Gulick raced locally at Pen Can, and my dad was a mechanic on his car before I was born.

Dad decided at some point that raising a family and they were doing some horse showing and some other things that maybe it wasn’t compatible with working on a race car, so he decided he was going to take the family and take us to races, and that’s what we did. We went to races virtually every night of my childhood along the way.

It was an amazing childhood. It really was. And we would go [00:06:00] Saturday nights to Five Mile Point Speedway. Pen Can was our Friday night track, but in that era, in the early 70s, Pen Can was very hit and miss. Some year, one club was running it. Another year, another club was running it. They’d start in May.

They’d end in August. They’d start in August. They’d end in September. It was very hit and miss. So a lot of my memories We’re from five mile point Speedway down in the Binghamton area. And so many great memories. We think about racing and we talk about racing now. And one of the bygone events that we used to have in racing that I don’t see too much of anymore are kiddie rides.

We don’t seem to see that too much anymore. I think they’re important because I remember riding in Wally Locke’s J 10 car at five mile point Speedway. And that’s 45 years ago. I remember climbing in and sitting on the side rails. And the rumble of red Harrington’s modified was 45 years ago. I remember kiddie rides.

I remember at Penn Can you’d line up along the fence and a car would pull up and you didn’t have a choice who you’re getting. I got the chance to ride with Mike [00:07:00] Colston in his car. The flagger threw us all in the back of it and we went into mud up to our knees riding with Mike Colston. And I remember those moments, those kiddie rides, those moments.

45 years later, it meant so much to me that developed this passion of racing. Grew up going to Five Mile Point, we would sit on the backstretch. We would sit over in turn number three, there was a barrel down at the end of the back straightaway, and we would stand on it, it was a big water barrel, big, long water barrel, and we would stand on it.

David Brush, one of my friends, He was the shortest guy, so he would stand in front. I’d stand next. My brother John would be there or whoever else we would all kind of fall into line and we would watch bigger than life names, wheel cars around a racetrack guys with a name like Chuck Akulis and Carl Bubby Nagel.

How about that name? Man, there is a great, great race car driver. Old Bones, Dave Kniesel. Wow, Clark Summit, Pennsylvania. Kniesel Speed Sport. Man, there’s not a cooler guy on the planet than Dave Kniesel. [00:08:00] Frankie Mears used to come up. That was the kid. That was a protege of Dave Kniesel. And Frankie Mears, he could roll a race car around a racetrack.

Larry Catlin from down in Waverly. Turquoise number 88 coupe. What a beautiful race car. He won a lot of races in that number 88 coupe car. Toughest guy in the world in the history of all of motor sports to pass. This is no offense to Dave Marcus and no offense to Ryan Newman, but if you pass Gordy Isham at five mile point speedway, you really accomplished something.

I ran into years ago, Andy Belmont, who raced in the Arca series. And I ran into Andy down at Daytona talking about the Arca series. And I said, ham from five mile point speedway. And he says, I’m telling you what he says. I lost 15 years of my life trying to pass Gordy Isham. And those were the heroes.

Those were the racers. Those were the big names that we love. Those were the big names that we followed along with my first recollection of a race. And I appreciate there’s a Facebook group. I went on there a couple of weeks ago and ask, and I think I’ve got the dates on this, right? Would have been 1971.

Would’ve been the Spring 100 or Miller Dodge 100 at five Mile [00:09:00] Point, and a guy by the name of Pete Cordes scored the win in that race. Blue number 68, bigger than life, Pete Cordes, Walden’s floor covering on the race car, and Pete Cordes won that race being that was maybe my first memory. That became my guy.

I was a Pete Cordes man, eight years old, but six years old when I first saw that race, but I was a Pete Cordes guy. My dad, he liked Bubby Nagel. My brother was a Chuck A Coolest guy. David Brush, he liked Dave Canizel. I was all in for Pete Cordes, and I loved watching Pete Cordes race a car. Pete Cordes, my hero as a childhood, bigger than life.

And I just loved watching Pete Cordes score and race cars around Five Mile Point Speedway. Away from the racetrack, my life was all about racing as well. I would take little matchbox cars and line them up around a carpeting, or on the floor, and I would announce races. I could say the same things that Dusty Doyle said.

I could say the same things that Cal Arthur over at Pen Can or Jimmy Bevins at Pen Can would say. There is no way in [00:10:00] the world I could sound like Jack Burgess’s voice ringing through the fairgrounds at the State Fair in Syracuse. I would do anything in the world to hear Jack Burgess’s voice ringing through the fairgrounds at Syracuse.

Sadly, Jack is no longer with us. And even sadder yet is that at that fairgrounds they tore that thing down and it’s just unreal. But all of the voices that I would listen to. And I love the way they described races. Joe Murata had some great, great lines. I love Joe Murata. I could listen to Joe Murata call a race.

Roy Sova, friend of mine up at Oswego Speedway. And I love the way announcers called the race. And it was a passion of mine on those little matchbox cars. I would use Dusty Doyle’s lines and Joe Murata’s and Jack Burgess’s lines. And I would love that. Another part of my childhood was on Thursdays. When all the other kids were riding bikes, or climbing trees, or in the creek playing, or doing whatever, I would sit by the mailbox, waiting for the gator racing news to arrive.

Gotta get a gator! Oh, I lived for Thursdays when that gator, I would tear into that, and I knew the next hour of my life was [00:11:00] reading through, taking me places that I had never dreamed I would go to see. Gotta get a gator, and I’m telling you, Pete the Mailman, that poor guy When that gator didn’t arrive on Thursday, you want to talk about a kid walking back in the driveway cussing out a mailman.

I was that kid cussing out Pete the Mailman when that gator didn’t arrive on Thursday. Saturday afternoons, the ritual in the family was me sitting on the front porch. Where I lived, between Halsted and New Milford, you could see both Highway 11 and Highway 81. And there they would go, the Kniesel Speed Sport Hauler with Dave Kniesel headed to Five Mile Point Speedway.

Oh ho, we knew we were in for it then, when Dave Kniesel was gonna be there. There goes Norm Norton, there goes Doug Holgate, going up there. And I would sit there and I would check off who’s all gonna be at Five Mile Point that night. Oh my gosh, there goes Dick Longstreet. In his late model, that number 97 late model.

You know what that meant? When Dick Longstreet was running late models, it was a race for second. That guy had more bounties on him than anybody in the world. And I would sit there on that porch on Saturday afternoons. And then we’d have those rainy Saturday afternoons where [00:12:00] I’d sit there and watch the cars go up and I’d sit there and one would go the other way.

And I was in complete denial as a kid. Oh no, the car must have broke down. Oh no, no, no, there’s no way. And when that second car went by, and the third car went by, I lost my mind. I’m telling you, you want to talk about a little kid having a tantrum. I am telling you, I was done, because we weren’t going to the races, because the stupid weather had rained us out.

on Friday nights or Saturday nights at five mile point. That was my young childhood along the way. We always went to the races and along with elementary school and then in middle school and into high school. And I think the first Saturday night we would miss some along the way because I am telling you, my father, what a wonderful man.

The only time we would miss races is we were in Canada fishing. So we would go to Canada fishing trips and that would cause us to miss some races. But the only planned miss that I had that I ever scheduled something else. was my junior prom. Oh man, I’m going to the junior prom. My brother let me have his car.

Really cool car. Wendy Hine was going to be my date along the way. [00:13:00] I was going to go to the junior prom. Yeah, I was sad. I was going to miss five mile point, but you know, it’s the junior prom. It was a disaster. I hated the junior prom. I had no fun at all and I felt sorry for poor Wendy Hines stuck with me at the junior prom so much so that the night of my senior prom while everyone else was borrowing brother’s cars and wearing nice.

I was in the car, headed back to Five Mile Point Speedway where I belong, and I spent my senior prom at Five Mile Point Speedway. I loved racing as a kid, and I mentioned my father. We would go on road trips. We’d go to Fonda. We went up there one time. We went to Albany, Saratoga, went to Lebanon Valley, and one of the great trips we would go on every year is Labor Day weekend.

We would load up. Bob and Ella Darrell, mom and dad, all of us kids, and we’d get a place somewhere up on Lake Ontario. Friday nights, we’d go to Rolling Wheels. Saturday nights, we’d go to the Bud 200 modified race at Oswego. We did a little bit of asphalt racing. We’d go to Shangri La a little bit. And boy, with the Bud 200, we were regulars there.

We loved going to Oswego for the Bud 200. We’d go to Weed Sport on Sunday night. And on Monday, coming back, we would [00:14:00] go to the New York State Fairgrounds. While kids were running to the cotton candy stands. While kids were running to do rides. While other kids were running to do this, or listen to that, or see that.

This guy was a beeline to the ticket window because we were going in to watch the Labor Day Classic at the New York State Fairgrounds, and we did that many, many years. What a wonderful, wonderful weekend of racing with the family, and it is something that I cherish forever. One of our other favorite events was the Northeast 150.

Up at Weed Sport. We’d go up there and we had our Pete Cordes and our Chuck Akulis and our Carl Nagel’s. The beauty of the Northeast 150 is that we would see Carl Nagel racing against Will Kegel. Oh my gosh. Wiley Will Kegel. The Tampa Terror. I read about him in Gator Racing News. And here he is in front of me.

Dave Lape. He built his own race cars. Lapco chassis. Oh my gosh. Dave Lape. What a legend. Jumping Jack Johnson. Kid AJ Slideways. Magic Shoes. Mike McLaughlin. So I’m sitting there and it’s overload for a kid. You’ve got Will Kegel and Carl Bubby Nagel and Dave [00:15:00] Kniezel and Pete Cordes and Alan Johnson and just overload for a kid.

It was the Northeast 150. Man, what an experience. We did that a number of years and all of those were great, but our favorite event, and actually I was just talking to dad about it a couple of weeks ago. Was the Eastern States 200 down at Orange County Fairgrounds, Middletown, New York. Man, that was it.

That was, that was big time. 1978. We watched a man by the name of Lou, the monk Lazaro win that race. Lou Lazaro. While everyone is rolling in with nice trailers, with wheel racks, Lou Lazaro would roll into a track with a flat trailer pulled by a station wagon. With tires in back of the station wagon and a dog is the only person with him.

He would roll into the racetrack and you know what would happen? He’d whoop everyone’s butt. Lou the Monk Lozaro. I watched him win the 1978 Eastern States 200. Man, what a memory. 1979. Oh, it was a fluke. No way this could have happened. The Eastern States 200, 1979. The [00:16:00] kid got lucky. Oh, the kid, he was not Will Kegel.

He was not Buzzy Rudiman. He was not Frankie Schneider. He was not Lou Lazzaro. Some kid by the name of Brett Hearn won. The Eastern States 200. Oh, what a fluke. That is never going to happen again. Well, it happened 10 more times. Brett Hearn, kid, but I watched him win his first Eastern States 200. Maybe my favorite, 1980.

Oh, just the name since chills. Just the names. Kenny Brightbell. Huh? I don’t know if any of you remember Kenny Brightbell. I’m telling you, still around, still doing stuff, raced up to a few years ago. And every once in a while, I think he still climbs aboard a race car. Kenny Brightbill, on the side of the car, on the side of the hauler.

Brightbill Donkey Farms, we haul ass. Yeah, and I’m telling you what, Kenny Brightbill, and it didn’t matter where he went, he hauled ass. That guy could wheel a race car. Later got to meet Kenny Brightbill, and the first thing I noticed about him was when he shucked my hand. He shook my forearm. His hand was so big he would grab you.

His fingers were at your elbow and your hand, [00:17:00] your palm to palm. Just an amazing guy. Kenny Bright Bill. I watched him win the Eastern States 200 in 1980. And I guess the point that I’m getting at is, is it’s no mystery how I ended up where I ended up because I had the best childhood that any kid could ever have going to the racetrack.

Watching heroes going to the pits afterwards and meeting your heroes. My dad was buddies with Eddie Rafferty. Eddie Rafferty showed up at my house one time. Oh my gosh. I mean, this was an amazing childhood that I have, and I’m so blessed with my mom and dad. They are just so amazing. And we did so much together.

My mom and dad were school bus contractors in Pennsylvania. The bus contractor, the school districts would contract with individuals. It wasn’t like New York state where you were, the school district owns all the buses and they just hire people to drive them. In Pennsylvania, they contracted with the people.

So mom and dad had the same schedule we did. So our summer times when we weren’t at the races, we were in Canada fishing and just a blessed childhood and amazing childhood that I had. And I’m just so thankful to [00:18:00] have been raised in turn number three at five mile point speedway and going to all those races.

Graduated from Blue Ridge High School in 1982. And I had this really weird, awkward, backward misconception of what a career needed to be. Somewhere I got twisted up that you never let your passion become your career because you could then learn to hate both of them and that I am telling you is the most faulty premise on the planet.

Okay, I lived my life for a number of years thinking I don’t want racing to be my career because I don’t want to hate and I don’t know where that came from. I know it didn’t come from my parents. I’m not sure where it came from, but I had this premise, so I go off, I get accepted at. I’m at Penn State University and I am going to be an accountant.

Yes, I’m going to be an accountant. And I’m going to go to the races on the side. So I roll through my freshman year and my sophom*ore year and I’m at Penn State Hazleton. And I go to my junior year at the main [00:19:00] campus and the big accounting 401 class. This is the Mac daddy of all accounting classes. This is the one man.

This is the one. This is going to set me up for life. And I’m sitting there at night library or in my room doing the homework. Oh my God, I hate this stuff. Oh my God. Let me just get this homework done. So I never have to see this stuff again. Have they lost their mind? I’m going to sit here and do this.

And all of a sudden it struck me. It’s like, wait a minute, dude. This is your major. This is what you proclaim that you wanted to do. And so I was in the Smeal school of business at Penn state and had this right hand turn and made the decision at that point to go into marketing because marketing was more people oriented.

Accounting was more numbers oriented. So I got out of that, but I still lived under this mindset that I didn’t want to work in racing. I wanted to work somewhere and just have racing be this passion and be this hobby. Along that time period, it was 1984, July 22nd, 1984, between my sophom*ore and junior year, made my first trip to Pocono Raceway, the like Cola 500 for the Winston [00:20:00] Cup series.

And you wanna talk about heroes bigger than life. Harry Gantt beat Kale, Yarborough. Kayle Yarbrough and Harry Gant. I used to watch those guys in February in the Daytona 500 with Ken Squire calling the races. I’d run home from church and hear those guys, and here they were at Pocono Raceway, right in front of me, racing, and watched Harry Gant win the race down at Pocono, beating Kayle Yarbrough, Bill Elliott, I think was third in the race, and all of these bigger than life TV guys were right here in front of me, right here, close to home.

Rolled through the balance of my college career when I arrived at my senior year, did all of the traditional interviews for sales jobs, all the marketing interviews you would do, and nothing was really happening. And I kind of poked around and said, well, maybe I’ll just dabble in this racing a little bit and reached out to Pocono Raceway, reached out to five mile point Speedway and soon after that effect that ironically, I think the phone call or the mail or whatever it was, we didn’t have email back then.

That all came about on the same day where Bob Plebin at Pocono Raceway. was going to allow me to volunteer to work in the press [00:21:00] room. Staff, man, I’m telling you what, I’m Kale Yarborough and Harry Gant, Richard Petty. I’m going to be right there. Well, rubbing shoulders with them. My gosh, we’re, Hey, we’re going to be hanging out together.

So I got hired, hired being an interesting term when you’re really offered to volunteer at Pocono Raceway. And then Jim Randall was the promoter at five mile point speedway at the time. And Jim offered me to do PR. And to find sponsorship, and I’m not sure. I think Jim was paying me 35 a week or something like that.

I mean, it was for where I was at. It was great. So graduated from Penn state in 1986. And that summer I actually worked at five mile point speedway, 35 a week. Worked at Pocono Raceway for free. We’re sitting at five mile point speedway and in comes a pace car. The Reverend Brother Pat Evans shows up. Now there’s a character.

Some of you know, Pat Evans, some of you have heard of Pat Evans and Pat was a racing minister. He showed up and he recruited me to be a columnist for Speedway Scene newspaper. Oh my gosh. You want to talk about having it all? I mean, I had it all. I was going to Pocono doing [00:22:00] the cup stuff. I was at five mile point doing the dirt stuff.

And now I was a columnist for Speedway Scene. Oh my gosh. Well, the reality set in. And about September, the 35 a week, the five mile point was paying was only during the race season. And that was going to be thin along the way. And I needed to find a job, got a job in the marketing and sales field. Cause again, I’m still subscribing to this racing on the side.

Got to have a career. That’s not racing. And I got a job at warehouse carpet outlets. They’re now based in Endwell. I was actually in the Ithaca store for about three or four months. And then in 1988, made the move down to the Endwell store. 1987 started working in Endwell with Warehouse Carpet Outlet.

1987, a couple of different things happened to me on the racing front. Made the move from Speedway Scene to Gator Racing News as a columnist. Just became dear friends with Norm and Donna and Joe and Susie Patrick and just wonderful people with Gator Racing News and another one of those entities we have that is no longer around.

But became a columnist there, just a sheer numbers thing and so much easier to get my stuff to Syracuse than it was up to Massachusetts. But something happened in 1987 [00:23:00] in local racing in the southern tier in northeastern Pennsylvania that would alter my life and alter the course of racing. It was June 26 of 1987 and a new guy had come into Pen Can Speedway.

He was a new old guy. As 1987 started to unfold, different people would say, did you hear Ricey’s coming back to Pen Can? I’m like, Ricey, who’s Ricey? Who’s, who’s Ricey? Seward Rice. He was the club president for the Susquehanna County Stock Car Club in the early 1960s. And from all accounts, he was the man.

He was beloved. They thought he did a great job. The club had more money than they ever had before, and Seward Rice was the club president. Ricey worked at a foundry in Halstead, Pennsylvania, the Halstead Foundry. And the Halstead Foundry shut down, and he was looking for work. Driving up 171. His old buddy, Pappy Bevins, owns Susquehanna at Pen Can Speedway.

Charlie Bray, the previous promoter, had shut it down the year before, and the track was sitting vacant. And on June 26th, Seward Rice took over and started promoting races in 1987 at Pen Can Speedway. And over [00:24:00] the course of that time, I got to know Seward over the course of that year, still working at Five Mile Point.

As we got acquainted and got into the off season, the next year, Ricey wanted to hire me to be the assistant announcer to Cal Arthur. Oh my gosh. Assistant announcer to one of my heroes. What an opportunity. And in 1988, I went to work as an assistant announcer for CalArthur. And I also went to work doing some PR and some sponsorship stuff for Seward Rice.

And I learned so many great lessons watching the way Seward Rice operated. He was one of those rare promoters. that would walk the pits after the races. Promoters never walked the pits after the races because you don’t want to hear all the pissing and moaning and complaining. Promoters don’t walk the pits.

Seward Rice would walk the pits. And I’ll never forget one of my favorite drivers meetings in the history of drivers meetings. Early August. It’s hot. We’ve been there every Friday night. Everybody hates everybody. Nobody wants to be there. We all want to be there because we all like racing, but everyone’s tired.

I’ll look at you cross eyed and you’ll take my hat off. And Ricey calls the troops in and he had a big baritone [00:25:00] voice. And he said, Gentlemen, we’re all tired. We’re all hot. And we’re all really bothered by it. You’ve been racing here, and this guy’s ran into you, and my flagger did this to you, and my handicapper, Casey Cole, he puts you back here.

Casey’s right there. He puts you here, and you feel like you’ve been screwed, blued, and tattooed. And Russell said, what in the world is this? He said, your crew members, they’ve been working all year. They’ve been sweating. You’ve hollered at them. They’ve hollered back at you. The officials, they’ve told them to push the car here.

We’re doing this. You got screwed by this guy. Your crew members, they feel like they’ve been screwed, blued, and tattooed. And all of a sudden, this is starting to unfold. He said, my employees. They’re sick of arguing with you. They’re sick of working in the kitchen up there, flipping burgers in 90 degree weather.

They’re sick of parking cars, and they’re sick of dealing with security, and everyone’s hot, and everyone’s miserable. My employees, they feel screwed, blued, and tattooed. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m about done with all of it as well. And I’m feeling [00:26:00] screwed, blued, and tattooed. And we’re all sitting there, it’s the only time drivers have ever listened in a pit meeting.

I’ll guarantee you, it’s the only time they’ve ever listened. And everyone’s standing there, he says, Gentlemen, let’s make a deal. We’ve only got three more weeks of racing. Let’s all just get through it together and get away from each other. And we’ll all come back next year. And I never saw a transition more amongst a field of drivers, employees, everyone, everyone walked away and we had three peaceful, wonderful weeks of racing ended with a pen can spectacular.

And it was just amazing. Ricey. I’m telling you, the guy had a real knack for communicating and his very first thing was the spectator comes first. I’ll never forget the first night back in 87. He took over the track and he called the driver’s meeting. And he said, look, he said, we’re in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.

There’s a few people around here. There’s a lot more people 30 minutes away at a whole lot more people in Scranton, which is 40 minutes away. We need to roll early. We need to be done. We’re starting at seven 30. We need to be done by 10, 15, 10 30. We need to be out of here so everyone can go do what they wanted to do.

Along the way, I became the lead announcer at pen can, and I knew the starting time was seven 30. We had a gentleman by [00:27:00] the name of Millard Hall, who sang the National Anthem. Quite generally, at 7. 28, Millard Hall was singing the National Anthem, and we were good. But we had one night, I think Mike Colston flipped on the front stretch, I think we had some kind of bounty to issue to Billy Trigo or something, I don’t know, something, there was all kinds of stuff going on, and we were late.

And I looked at my clock, I looked at my watch, and it was 7. 34, when I introduced the singing voice of Pen Can Speedway, Millard Hall. Well, Seward Rice, white, head to toe, handlebar mustache, he’s over in turn number two, he just walked out of the pits and I saw him. I saw him. Puts the arm down, like, oh boy, here we go.

I’m in trouble here because I’m four minutes late. First heat race runs, he’s down in the infield, he comes across it, and you’re sitting duck. He’s headed my way, he’s taking his time, and he’s meeting people and kissing babies and talking to tow truck drivers and everything, but He’s not veering in any other direction.

And it took him about three heat races to get there. And he walks up in the tower and I was announced from outside there and he walks up and he just kind of taps me on the shoulder and he said, uh, let’s get on the office and talk. I don’t remember. I don’t know if Liam was my gal, other announcer or someone, someone else took over the microphone and we went [00:28:00] down in the office and he said to me, Steve, what time do we start here?

And I said, we started at seven 30. He said, what time did we start today? And I said, well, Millard was singing at seven 34. He said, All right. He said, So that’s four minutes. I said, Yeah, he flips me a sheet of paper and he says, Count the names on that paper. And as I’m counting, I realized this is the employee list and everyone’s name is there.

Probably Grant Buck’s name was there and Casey Cole and everyone’s name was there. He says, How many years on that list? And it was 50. 50 people. He said, hold on one second. And he radios down to Sandy, his daughter who ran the ticket office at Sandy ballpark. How many people we have here? She’s way about 1500 people here.

And he said, okay, he flips me a calculator. He says, now take your four minutes. He says, and multiply it by 50 people. Now multiply it by 1500 people. He said, if every one of my employees cost me four minutes, we’re out of business. We’re done. I don’t know how, I don’t know what the number was, but it was thousands of minutes.

We’re done. He said, so my question is the same question I had at the beginning of this conversation. What time do we start? Said we start at 7 30 and it didn’t matter. We could have pestilence. We could have [00:29:00] tornadoes. We could have cars on. Fire the length of the front straight away. We could have 10, 000 people in the stands or two in the stands.

It didn’t matter. It’s seven 28. Millard hall was singing that national anthem. It was just going to happen, but those lessons learned about fans first and his passion for it. And all the lessons learned. What a great, great era. What a great time in the late eighties also did some work. Then I got into the radio business overnights at WHWK, the country station down in Binghamton and did that along the way as well.

And then came 1990, had an opportunity to pick up a second track, Makatek Speedway in Lakeville, Pennsylvania, the Thrill Track. And Thrill Track had something to do with what happened on the racetrack and had everything to do with what did not happen on the racetrack. I kind of went down for an audition.

I’m down here, I’m announcing and Makatek, you announced at a porch off from the side of it. I love announcing outside. I’m not one of these guys likes to be behind glass. I like being outside where I can hear things. So I’m on this porch and I’m reading lucky numbers. For a hat, lucky number 765 321. And [00:30:00] I hear some people cheer and I say, someone won something.

For a t shirt, 761. The next thing I know, I hear people cheering and screaming and hollering. I get to like the third number and the place is just losing its mind. I look up and at the start finish line. Making his way from turn number one to turn number three is a man buck naked. We had a streaker at mock attack on my first night announcing their crowd is going wild.

I said, well, there’s no sense of doing lucky numbers. They don’t care about lucky numbers. Now place is going wild. Everyone’s losing their minds. So streaker on my first night at mock attack. And as it got done, I said, you know, I think I’m going to like this place. This is entertaining. This is really entertaining.

I introduced music to the shows, and I would play some songs along the way. One of the songs that I liked to play was David Rose’s The Stripper. Da da da, da da, da da, da da. You know, and we all know that’s an old song from the early 60s. And so, and I would go, like, we’d go to intermission. I’m like, oh, ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna take a little break here.

And hey, if you feel so inclined, here’s a little music. You know, so boom, and I’d hit it. [00:31:00] And you know, some fat guy’d get up and dance, and I wouldn’t, you know, it’d be fun. So I’m sitting there one night. And I hear this ruckus as the stripper is going on, and I look down at the start finish line, and here is this middle aged woman who is starting to do the dance.

And I’m sitting here going, oh, this is fun, yeah, we’re gonna have fun with this, you know? Any of you, when you were first driving, ever play chicken in the car? You know, any of you ever play chicken? It soon became obvious that she was ready for a game of chicken, and I wasn’t sure. All of a sudden, articles of clothing started to come off, and I’m like, oh boy, we’re entering territory here that I’m not sure we should enter, but I’m game, I’m in.

And it became obvious to me, she was a little bit more in than I was. So I hit the pause button on the stripper song. She stops. The crowd loses their minds. Beer cans are flying at the tower. And all hell is breaking loose at Mocatech Speedway because I ruined what was a perfectly good Strip tease going to happen at the thrill track at Makatek Speedway.

Makatek Speedway the other thing, and they explained this to me right off the bat, you are a two sport announcer. When you announced that Makatek, you were a [00:32:00] race announcer and a fight announcer because they love to fight at Makatek Speedway. The flagger was a guy named Ed Ziga. And to my understanding, Ed Ziga, like three things, flagging races, drinking beer and fighting.

And I’m not sure what the order was, but I do know what the rules were. When a fight would break out on the grandstand, it didn’t matter where we were at in the race, the caution would come out. Because it was time for the announcer to start calling the fight. And you start calling the fight. Now, if Ziggy knew the people involved in the fight, the red flag would come out.

He’d come down off from the flag stand and join the fight. He loved to fight. And I called many a fight. fight at Makatek Speedway. So much fun. So we were going to clean the place up. We get this security guard, guy by the name of Clarence. Clarence was very round, big one way as he was the other. He was about five by five.

And I think the reason he got the security is he had the shirt, he had a fake badge and he had some handcuffs and he worked for free, probably for food in the concession stand. So Clarence is there one night and Makatek was built on a side hill. And so you stood along in the dirt on the back. So [00:33:00] Clarence is standing there watching the races unfold and this scrawny little guy bounces off from him.

Clarence is like, okay, you know, no big deal. This scrawny little guy bounces off again and Clarence says, I’m gonna have to ask you to stop bouncing off from me. About the third time the guy bounces off from Clarence, it’s game on. Now Any other place on the planet, when you have a fat security guy chasing a skinny guy, the first place the skinny guy goes is to the exit.

Not mock attack. No, the skinny guy goes right down through the grandstands with clearance in hot pursuit. Of course, we’re there, we’re during intermission or something, so I’m all of a sudden going down the front stretch, up through the grandstands, with clearance, in hot pursuit, back down through the grandstands, back up.

The pits were behind the grandstands. So the guy jumps the fence into the pit area. The whole crowd runs back to the watch and watches and up through the pit area. And the crew guys are all working on the car. So what the hell’s going on? And there goes this guy. And finally he wants to the pits and out the exit.

They go with Clarence and hot pursuit. All right, ladies and gentlemen, now that intermission is over, we need to get back to racing. I’m sitting there. Announcing a race and 10 minutes later or so, Clarence [00:34:00] walks up into the tower, just huffing and puffing like you wouldn’t believe he says to me, I caught that guy and I said, really?

I said, man, he put you through the paces. He said, yeah, I never ran like that in my life. He said, I caught the guy. He says, you ain’t gonna believe it. I said, I found drugs on him. Whoa. I said, man, that’s really, really good. You found, so he found drugs on the guy. He says, yeah, and I’m sitting there and I’m announcing or doing something and I’m like, well, what are you going to do about it?

Then he said, well, I’m going to call the state police. I’m like, oh, okay, that’s fine. I said, wait a minute, where’s he at? What’s going on? And he says he’s handcuffed to a tree, Steve. The modified feature is next and I’m not going to miss the modified feature. So he’s handcuffed to a tree up in the woods.

This poor guy goes to the races, has a little weed on him, gets into it with a rotund. He gets caught by the fat security guard and finds himself handcuffed to the tree. While Clarence watches the modified feature, then he calls the state police. Mockitech Speedway, the one and only. I could not do the post race parties at Mockitech Speedway were unreal.

I could not do one half of one night at Mockitech Speedway now, and we [00:35:00] would party until sunrise. We would bother. One time at Mockitech Speedway, I was in charge of turning the lights off. Well, I’m telling you at 10 o’clock in the morning, you don’t realize the lights are on. And the client that ran the track went over there Wednesday night to start grading the track.

And the place is lit up all week long because I forgot because we left at daytime. Mockitech Speedway, just some great, great memories. Some great Williams times along the way. Career, I’m still selling floor covering. I’d moved to a distributorship and I moved down to Clark Summit, Pennsylvania. And in Clarksville, Pennsylvania, I hung at a place called The Only Place, and there I made some really, really good friends.

Reed Miller and Dick and Phyllis Longstreet. Just dear friends to this day. Unfortunately, we’ve lost Dick in the last year and a half. Just really, really sweet people, and we formed a car show called Speed Sports Showcase down in Scranton. I know many of you that had gone to the car show, and we did that.

So we had the car show going on, and I’m really thrilled, by the way. I’m stepping forward to hear Tony Frable and a group are going to put together Speed Sports Showcase again. So the car show returns to Scranton, and I am just so happy for them. And I do like it. They didn’t know this. to me, but they actually reached out to fill us into myself.

And I believe to read and ask for our permission to go do it again. And I just like [00:36:00] that respect that they showed. They didn’t have to do it, but I love the fact that there’s a car show. So as I’m looking at life here in the early nineties, speed sports showcase, I have a program book that I do with all the racetrack or the two racetracks I’m at I’m announcing.

I’ve got all this stuff. I’m writing a column for Gator racing news. Another group that I was very involved with is we go racing fan club. I talked about that a little bit when we’re talking about Kip. I was president of the Wigo racing fan club, and we just had so many great memories. Life was just rolling along.

with Selen Carpeting and the party and the racing and everything else. It was really, really good. Well, at a WeGo Racing fan club event at Shangri La down in Owego, I met a young lady. And that young lady would ultimately become my ex wife. But of course, there was a few steps in between there, along the way.

And this whole philosophy of You don’t let your passion become your work was really starting to fail on me because I was spending more time and races and events and social events and we go fan club and speed sports showcase than I was selling carpeting and the people that I worked for was a distributorship out of York, Pennsylvania.

They came and they said, look, we’re not telling you to leave, but we’re ultimately going [00:37:00] to tell you to leave. You need to follow this racing thing, dude, you’re spending more time on racing than you’re working for us. And we really suggest you do it. Had a lot of things going on and. I had this young lady that I was falling in love with.

And so it was like, we better start to think about this. In 1994, started interviewing for some jobs in the NASCAR business. Landed in 1984, I was hired by a company called McLean Marketing. I was going to be the PR rep for Factory Stores of America with Butch Mock Motorsports and Todd Bodine. Well, what do we do?

How do we do this transition? So we hurried up February 4th, 1995. We decided to get married. We’re going to throw together a wedding. And some of you were there as well as 26 inches of snow on wedding day. This was fraught with a challenge as well, because we were doing all of our friends a favor by saying, we’re just going to do a money tree.

We want to make it easy for you. We just want to do a money tree. Truth of the matter is, is we needed the money tree to pay for the wedding and to pay for the trip to North Carolina. We have 26 inches of snow, we [00:38:00] go through the ceremony, and we’re getting word that this one’s not coming, and that one’s not coming, and this one’s not coming, and it’s like, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do?

Beyond all of the feelings we’re having of the day is, the money tree is going to be dry. We’re going to be at the VFW in Halsted, Pennsylvania and not even be able to pay for the keg of beer that we spent the money on. But the good news is, is the money tree was good, was enough money to pay for that. We went and we did a family reception at the VFW in Halsted.

Then we went and we did a racing family reception at Tego’s Tavern in Conklin. Another great place, by the way. And then we were staying at the Quality Inn. And of course, there’s 26 inches of snow. The Quality Inn was right next to a place named Country Bob’s. So the third reception was at Country Bob’s, and Country Bob’s was a place not for the faint of heart, not a whole lot of proud moments happened at Country Bob’s, by the way.

But yes, we were there, and my bride at the time actually rode the mechanical bull in her wedding dress on that night in our third reception, yeah. Casey and Clara, they’re, they’re remembering that. They’re remembering that. Well, just an amazing, amazing time. Tego’s Tavern. I got it. I got to [00:39:00] get off script here a little bit to do a Tego’s Tavern story.

Great little bar in Conklin, Tim and Polly Bunsik. They ran it. How ate up we were with racing. Okay. The old phrase, you’re not drinking a beer unless you have dirt in your beer. We get to the off season and we know we’re facing a long, cold off season with no dirt in our beer. Polly Bunsik goes over to five mile point and she gets a shovel full or pale full, five gallon pale, five mile point and clay, I don’t know that they’ve ever seen each other, but whatever the dirt was, and I love.

Five Mile Point Speedway, but I’m telling you what, the clay content of Five Mile Point Speedway has never been all that much. She went over and she got a five gallon pail of Five Mile Point dirt. And she brings it over, and she puts it in little baggies. And she takes and she puts a pinhole in the little baggies and tacks one up above every seat at the bar.

You’d walk in, you’d get your draft beer, you’d tap the baggie, and a little Five Mile Point dirt would fall down. We had dirt in our beer the entire off season. Now, of course, strangers that would walk in off the street What are these people doing? Putting dirt in their beer, lost their minds. But that’s just part of life that we had around at that time, and just an amazing, amazing adventure.

So fast forward, we’ll get back to the wedding [00:40:00] now. I got married on Saturday, February 4th. We made our way to North Carolina. We’re getting ready to go to Daytona. I’m gonna be Todd Bodine’s PR guy. Tuesday morning, arrive back in the office, get a call to go and meet with the boss. I could tell by the look on his face, this was not necessarily one of those real happy meetings that we were gonna have.

Steve says, I think I jumped the gun on hiring you. We no longer have the Factory Stores of America account. What I need you to do is take the press kits that you developed, take your business card out of the front of them, box them up, drive up to Charlotte Motor Speedway, and deliver them to another agency.

Because we’re so late in the game, they’re going to take your press kits and go to Daytona. What does this mean for me? What does this mean for, we just got married. We got no money. We got nothing. Ed McClain, the guy that owned the agency, he was able to take us to Daytona. We did hospitality for CITCO, for Speed Weeks, so we went down to Daytona for Speed Weeks, but it wasn’t soon after that, that we end up broke in Matthews, North Carolina, which is just outside of Charlotte.

Ultimately, to be ex wife and I, we handled things usually by going to a bar room somewhere along the way. That was generally our way of handling crisis situations. And it was a Tuesday night, and we [00:41:00] had a whopping total of 26 to our name. We didn’t have enough money to move back home. And I was pretty much committed, I’m gonna do this racing thing.

Even though right now it’s looking really bleak. Unemployed, strange city, all of our friends are up in the Binghamton area. We’re sitting here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we got 26 to our name. And she’s like, what are we going to do? We’re crying. We’re all upset. We’re all everything like that. And I said, well, there’s a bar out across the parking lot.

They have dollar draft night tonight. We’re going to go drink. Like we own the place. We’re going to get up tomorrow morning. We’re going to build resumes and we’re going to do like everyone else in America does and find jobs and that we did. We drank like we own the place staggered back across the parking lot, got up the next day and created resumes.

Fortunately, she was a travel agent and at the time we had travel agents. It’s an old career. That’s no longer on Skip can attest to very few travel agents around, but at the time it was a great career. And the good news is, is she landed really, really quickly. I think that was Wednesday morning and she interviewed with a guy that Friday morning, and not only did he hire her to start Monday, but he paid her a little bit in advance because she explained the situation.

So [00:42:00] we bailed ourselves out of that. I’m left with the dilemma. Do I go back into the floor covering business in North Carolina, knowing that I’m lying to whoever I’m interviewing with, because if I tell them I’m going to be your best salesman in the world and someone in NASCAR comes, I’m going. And so I made up my mind I was going to work for temporary labor agencies and that’s what I did.

And I’m not mechanically inclined at all. It’s really bad for a guy that works around racing. I mean, I can barely find the dipstick. I mean the key in the side of the engine. I’m good at that. That’s about it. So I get a job with a temporary agency installing heating and air conditioning units. And I often think about it when I drive by those complexes when it’s 100 degrees in August or when it’s 20 degrees in July, those poor, poor people, because there ain’t no way in the world when I installed those air conditioning units are those things working properly, and there has got to be the worst air conditioning installation job in the world.

So we rolled through 1995 with me doing that. Julie, being a travel agency, the fall of that year, I was able to get a volunteer job at Charlotte Motor Speedway working in the press room and through that was meeting a lot of people and that really worked out well. [00:43:00] And the good news is I came out of that with an interview and in 1996 was hired by Cotter Communications Square D Company.

Film are racing with driver Kenny Wallace. Yes, indeed. Well, Kenny Wallace, the Kenny Wallace you see on TV, the Kenny Wallace you see on social media, the Kenny Wallace that you hear laughing in real life is the same Kenny Wallace that I have. Wide assed open. Kenny Wallace. That’s who he is. Al Robinson, of course, we all know, a lot of us know and love Al Robinson.

Al was doing PR at Dover, and Al asked if Kenny and I could fly into Baltimore on a Thursday, do a media tour, and then drive up around and go to Dover. So we do that. And we go to all the TV stations and met with a reporter and did all of that. And when you traveled with Kenny Wallace, you were a fast food person.

We didn’t eat all that well with Kenny Wallace. We were fast food. Well, this day, we were feeling really, really good. We felt like, man, we did a great media event. Everyone’s going to be happy. So we stepped up our game. We went to Subway. Wow. Subway restaurant somewhere up around the Chesapeake Bay. We stopped at a [00:44:00] subway.

We walk in places full of people. There is a large African American woman is the sandwich artist that we have. And we’re going down through and we’re getting our sandwich. And she says, do you want oil and vinegar on your sandwich and Kenny said, why would I want oil and vinegar on my sandwich? And she says, that’s what Aretha Franklin’s doing.

And she’s losing all that weight. Kenny being Kenny right in the middle of the subway, puts his hands down and he says to this large rotund African American woman, you like Aretha Franklin. And she says, Honey, I love Aretha Franklin. 15, 20 people in the restaurant, 4 or 5 people in the line, Kenny Wallace, R E S P E C T, find out what it means to me.

He breaks into a chorus of respect right there. I don’t know whether I’m dying of horrified. I’m standing there going this is, I’m his PR guy. I’m supposed to be preventing incidents like this. She drops her fixings and she’s dancing, he’s singing. The whole place is wondering what the hell is going on, and we’re standing here in a subway, singing Aretha Franklin songs.[00:45:00]

Something I never saw and didn’t really plan in the whole PR training. There’s not a manual on Aretha Franklin songs in a subway. So Kenny gets done singing the song, and she says, So now, the question is, do you want oil and vinegar? And he says, I want double oil and vinegar on mine and put it on his too.

If it’s good enough for Aretha Franklin, it’s good enough for us. And out the door we go. Kenny Wallace, what a guy, what an adventure. Your first PR gig. If I would advise anybody on first PR gigs, I would say, get a guy like Kenny Wallace, because you know, you’re never going to have a dull moment and never going to have a dull moment.

As far as that goes, I learned a very valuable lesson during that time period because while Kenny Wallace was a lot of fun and we had a lot of fun doing media and media and everyone loved him. We average about 22nd place finishes. And so when you’re running in that position, you don’t get a lot of TV coverage.

Square D was like, we need to get more coverage. We need to get more coverage. We need more coverage. And I said, I’m trying. I’m talking to the TV people. And I met Benny Parsons. Benny was always around the Concord area. We’d always see him when we’re out to eat and out to dinner. And I met Benny and I said, Benny, man, I’m getting clubbed by my folks here.

He said, Steve, we’re not going to talk about a guy running in the mid pack. He said, we’re going to talk about [00:46:00] the guys up front. He said, I’ll do what I can. He said, we’re not going to talk about it. It was April of 1997. Second year was Square D Martinsville Speedway. Kenny Wallace goes up and puts the Square D Ford on the pole position.

Like, oh boy, here we go. Game on. We’re able to lure ourselves into an in car camera and that race for 500 laps at Martinsville, Kenny and Rusty went toe to toe for the win. We ended up not winning the race, but we ended up on TV all day long. Every reporter wanted to talk to us afterward. We’re standing there.

We’re an hour after the race and there’s people still wanting to talk and everything like that. I go out to dinner, but get back home Monday. There’s people calling radio interviews. Everyone wants to talk to Kenny. Everyone wants to talk to Kenny. Happy to go out to dinner that Monday night, ran into Benny Parsons.

And Benny said, let me guess PR man of the year after yesterday. Aren’t you damn right about that, Benny. There’s a whole big different world. He says, that’d be happy with your PR efforts. Now I said, yeah, you know, I’m a really good PR guy today. And five days ago, I was a useless PR guy. We learned the value of performance and learn those lessons.

doing stuff with Kenny Wallace. So I worked on that program for two years with Square D company needed to change. The agency business was [00:47:00] changing and was just in a spot where it was time to move on, which is customary in it and did an interview and got a job doing PR for the IWX motor freight team, which was a truck series team.

Randy Tolsma was the driver of that truck. And we just had an absolute ball did team PR for them also in 1998. I was able to return to my racing roots a little bit. My announcing routes, I got hired to sit in and start announcing the summer shootout at Charlotte motor speedway on Tuesday nights. That’s the legends and bandolero racing that they have at Charlotte.

So 1998, I’m doing team PR for IWX on the road, traveling with the team, having fun, really having a great group of guys. We’re all hanging out, having fun Tuesday nights during the summer for 10 weeks, able to do the summer shootout. Roll through that a year and a half, I get to August of 1999, Steve Coulter, a man that I have so much respect for, he was the owner of IWX Motor Freight.

We get to August, we’re in Indianapolis, and it was nothing for Steve to say, let’s go have a beer at the bar. And we sat down, we had a beer at the bar, and Steve said, I’m a trucking company, and a trucking company really doesn’t need a good PR man. Here we go. I know where this conversation is [00:48:00] going.

Conversation had a little bit of a twist to it though. Steve said, here’s the deal. He said, you’re part of the team, you’re part of the family here. I want to keep you on board, I’ll keep you to the end of the year. So, I’m a guy that got a five month window. to get a job. Why have so much respect for Steve Coulter?

He said, what I want you to do. He said, I want you to find the right job. He said, don’t take the first job. He said, if we get to the end of the year and you don’t have anything, we’ll talk about next year. We’ll figure it out, but find the right job. He says, and I’m with you. He says, use the fax machine, use the printer.

You need time off to go interview whatever you need to do. He said, you’re part of the family. You’re a great PR guy. I need you with someone who needs a great PR guy, not a trucking company. Then that’s what I want for you. Roll along. We get into October, November, and I catch when the Texaco Haviland is going to have a driver change, Ricky Rudd is going to drive for Robert Yates.

Knew the people at the agency performance PR plus woman by the name of Kimberly Brannigan. Kimberly is the daughter of Dick and Linda O’Brien, formerly with Oswego Speedway. Day before Thanksgiving of 1999. meet with her and it became just a formality. She says, I need to [00:49:00] run this past the owner of the agency.

She said, but I’m going to recommend we hire you. She said, where are you going? I said, I’m going back to IWX for the team. She said, I’ll call you by the end of the day. I get done, go up to the race shop. Sure enough, an hour or two later, get the call. And I’ve been hired by them. She said, here’s the problem.

This is brand new with Ricky Rudd. We’re late. We’re behind. We don’t have a photo shoot. We don’t have this. We don’t have that. We need to start ASAP. Called up Steve Colter. And I said, look, I got a gig, Texaco Haviland. It’s exactly what you said I needed to do. It’s what I need to do. It’s what I need to go from there.

I said, where do we go? And he says, what do you have to do there? And I said, I got to do this. I got to do that. And he says, you start Monday down there. He said, as long as you get done, which you’re supposed to get done for me over the month of December to get everything buttoned up, we’re good to go that month of December, double money, double income because Steve Colter, the man of his word, kept me through that year and that month.

December 1999 with IWX, we had a bonus program and the bonus program was a percentage of winnings and had this conversation with my wife and I said, you know, I can’t ask for the bonus check, but you know, I guess technically because I was with the team all year, I earned it. I had that month of December of 1999 was getting paid by IWX by the Texaco have on folks performance PR plus.

And the day after [00:50:00] Christmas got a check for 2, 600. My bonus money for Steve Coulter just could not believe that someone could, it’s fair and it’s right, but in our business that doesn’t happen all the time. And what an amazing, and it turns out Steve ends up being part of my story as we go further down the road.

2000 ends up donning Ricky Rudd. I’m going to be Ricky Rudd’s PR guy. Ricky Rudd, classiest guy that I’ve ever worked for in my life. Straight up shooter. We sat down and met the first time and he said, what are you responsible for? I said, I’m responsible for media. He says, when media around you be there, he says, you’re not my hat.

carrier. You’re not my helmet carrier. You’re not in charge of my suit. You’re not in charge of anything else. You’re hired to do PR with media. You do media and we got along really, really well. Ricky Rudd, just an absolute pro to deal with some amazing PR stuff. We pulled a lot of really good stuff. Ricky cherished the media relationship.

He used it to his advantage a lot. He would go do media tours. He was very savvy on it. He had previously owned his own team with the tide sponsorship, so he certainly knew the value of it and had a great, great run with Ricky Rudd through the year 2000 came close to winning. And in 2001, what was it? June 17th.

We roll [00:51:00] into Pocono Raceway where I’d got my first gig, first volunteer job. We roll into Pocono, Friday afternoon, when the pole position and I’ll be darned if Ricky Rudd doesn’t go out and win the first race with the Texaco Haviland team. My first race as a PR guy at Pocono Raceway of all places. When you’re the PR guy, when you’re going to win a race, especially when you’ve been snake bit like we had, we had a lot of things go wrong.

You have in the truck, you have a hat bag. And that is your victory lane hat bag. But of course, you don’t want to be the guy with five laps to go to get the hat bag, because then you jinxed everything. But of course, Pocono Raceway, to get from one point to the other is about 18 miles. There’s nothing close at Pocono.

So I’m sitting there with five laps to go. It’s like, we’re going to win this race and I got to go all the way back to that truck and then all the way back out to victory lane with that hat bag. So I said, well, okay, I’m not going to get the hat bag. I’m just going to walk back here. So then when Ricky brings the car in, so I walked and walked, I didn’t want to jinx anything four laps ago, three laps ago, two laps ago, I’m just about to the truck as the car’s coming off from the third turn.

Pocono and the radio just erupts. We did it, we did it, you know, and I did that and a run into the truck [00:52:00] and Kelly was our truck driver and Kelly literally throws me the hat bag and I said, dude, he said, I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to be the one to jinx this. I said, I didn’t want to walk back here.

I didn’t want to be the one to jinx it. He says, let’s go. And away we went with a hat bag out to victory lane, had an amazing celebration, amazing first win for Ricky with Robert Yates and fat back McSwain. And that whole crew did all of the post race stuff, did all of that needed to be done. And I’m sitting there and I got.

Don and it was quiet and most of the media had left. It was dark. It was late at night. And I said, you know what? I’m just going to take a walk out to victory lane. Just to kind of take this all in to kind of savor it. I walked out into victory lane, victory lane at Pocono still the same victory lane. It’s kind of an oval shaped area over in the corner.

Someone had left a cooler, one of those little igloo coolers. And I’m like, Oh, open that cooler. And there was one can of yingling beer. in that cooler. There’s no one around. I’m like, I’m technically stealing this beer, but I’m assuming somebody left it. And I sat on the steps and just thought about life, thought about starting at Pocono and standing there in victory lane that day with the first [00:53:00] win with an ice cold, yingling beer.

Man, I’m telling you what, life didn’t get much better than that. Get in the car, go back to the hotel, back to the airport, and we’re just rolling along. The PR gig with Ricky Rudd, with Texaco Have One, was an amazing time. I learned a lot of the lessons with Kenny Wallace about being in the front of the field and being in the mid pack and where you’re at in the pecking order.

With Ricky Rudd, we were challenging for championships, winning races, and you just became a really, really busy PR guy, and what an amazing, amazing time it was in life. As we rolled along, that was 2001. We got our first win. We want it Richmond later that year. We want it Sonoma the next year, but Ricky and Roberts were, they were getting ready to have a divorce.

Texaco. Have one was going to go to chip Canassie racing with Jamie McMurray. And you know, I started to look at the lineups here and I said, wait a minute. Ricky’s going to the wood brothers and they already have a PR person. Texaco. Have one is going here and they already have a PR person. Robert Yates is going to have one car with Dale Jarrett, UPS or Ford, whatever it was, might’ve been UPS.

They already have a PR person. And I’m like, huh. I don’t know, this is not working out and I was working well ahead of the curve and got a chance to talk with David [00:54:00] Hyatt, who was then the president of Motor Racing Network. And we had talked before and we’d talked about me doing an audition and he grabbed me at Pocono, the July race.

We’d won the June race. He grabbed me in the July race at Pocono. He says, you still interested in doing an audition for us? I said, yeah, as a matter of fact, I may be a little bit more interested now than I was before because, and I shared with him, I said, look, my deal’s coming to an end and I don’t know what it’s going to look like.

I feel like I’m going to be all right, but I don’t know what it looks like. September 13th, 2002. New Hampshire Motor Speedway, hanging off a billboard in turn number three for a modified race, I did my audition. It was an interesting cast of people in that audition, now that I look back at it. We had Joe and Barney Hall in the booth, which they always did the auditions.

Down in turn one and two, Kyle Rickey. In the pits, Ryan Horn, Gary Danko, and I was in turn number three. Probably turned out to be the biggest audition that MRN ever had, because I actually work for Ryan Horn now. He is our production department manager. He oversees the department. Kyle Rickey still works with the network.

I still work with the network. Gary Danko had a few races. So we literally on that audition went four for four and everybody got a gig with MRN along the way. The modified race [00:55:00] was kind of funny. A little bit of a side note on the modified race. It was one of those races, I don’t know if it rained or was wet or damp or something.

Ryan Horn was our pit road guy doing the audition and we were just mocking the broadcast. This was going to nowhere other than just our little private channel there. This is going to nowhere. Carl Pasterak is one of the modified racers and Carl wrecked or something broke and he was really hacked off at NASCAR.

So Ryan being a good little MRN audition pit reporter runs down, Carl what happened? Well the goddamn NASCAR did this and damn the NASCAR didn’t do this and they didn’t do that. NASCAR officials heard it. And NASCAR officials fined Carl Pasteryak 500 for something he said on an MRN audition because they thought it was an MRN broadcast and he actually got fined later on they amended that because he got into it with an official they amended it so that he was altercation with an official but actually it was the MRN audition were the only audition in the history of MRN that resulted in someone getting fined just a crazy great memories along the way so we roll into 2003 I’m going to get this career of a lifetime motor [00:56:00] racing network here I come I get my contract, I rifle it open, and the number on the bottom of it is 12, 000.

Let’s see, wife, two kids, 12, 000. That’s not gonna pay the rent, let alone anything else. But it’s the dream job. But it’s 12, 000. How does this work? How does this work? And I had one of those moments where I reached out to all the relationships I had in the past. I reached out to performance PR plus the agency and they hired me to do hospitality for DuPont that year.

So I ended up doing Jeff Gordon hospitality for 10 or 12 or 15 races. Went back to Steve Coulter with IWX and I said, look, here’s my deal. You know, this is my dream job. If I could write a trucking newsletter for you, if I can do whatever it is. He said, well, we still have the team. I don’t need full time PR.

He put me on a retainer, did that, knew the folks at Concord Speedway hired to do that. Another one that, and we was chatting earlier, LW Miller, Wayne Miller from down in Dew Shore, LW was racing in the modifieds down there, and I had done some work up here with LW and I reached out and I said, guys, I just need a favor.

I’ve got a [00:57:00] dream job here with MRN. but it only pays 12, 000. I need some help to get to the next level. And everybody that I had formerly worked for contributed something that year. And it was an amazing year. Next thing I know, I’m juggling projects and I’m flying here and I’m doing this and I’m doing that and trying to invoice people and trying to remember, did I do this?

And did I do that along the way? Also the summer shootout gig at Charlotte motor Speedway had moved into the big track. So I was the voice of Charlotte motor Speedway for a few years. And for the years, 2003 and 2004, it was very, very part. time the MRN stuff was 16 races. I think it was in 2003 and I’ll never forget that first race.

It was March 14th of 2003. The craftsman 200 NASCAR craftsman truck series at Darlington raceway. My first race at that was at Darlington. That’s pretty stinking cool. I don’t care who you are. That was pretty cool. So we’re there and I’m gung ho. I’ve done research on. Every guy that has ever ran in the truck series.

I know more than anybody ever needed to know about the truck [00:58:00] series. I am so gung ho and so ready to go. And there was a young kid from Missouri by the name of Carl Edwards in that race. And Carl was his ninth truck series start and he was driving for Jack Roush. It was his first year of his big opportunity.

We’re running in March. So it was early season might’ve been the second or third race. What we had is Carl’s truck was overheating midway through the race. And the signal with MRN is we would just point, we would see the driver, get the driver’s attention as he’s sitting in the truck. He would motion you in or tell you no, and that’s fair, and that’s the kind of the signal we have.

They push the truck off from Pitt Road on the front stretch. What we had was an announcer that was really, really anxious to get that interview. I was gonna get Carl Edwards. Well, what we had was Carl Edwards who was like, I’m gonna get the chance to talk on MRN. This is great. Point of the mic flag, Carl calls me in.

In hindsight, looking at it, it was pretty stupid because the crew was still working on the truck. I go in. Carl, what happened? What put you out? Put the microphone into Carl. The next thing I know, I’m picked up by a crew member, told to get the hell out of the way. They pick me up, and they’re pushing the truck back to the garage area, and I did my first in race interview with MRN, being carried by a crew member through the [00:59:00] garage.

Well, Carl’s getting his first MRN interview, so he ain’t letting up. He’s thanking his dad, his mom, his Meemaw, his papa, he’s thanking everybody. And we’re rolling across the interview and there’s crew guys and I’m hanging out of the roll cage and I’m getting carried and my feet are dangling and I got the microphone in there and I’m getting this story and everything and I drop.

And when I go off the air, the crew chief cussed me out from head to toe. And I said, but Carl, it doesn’t matter. It was just, it was my first race. And Carl Edwards and I, our first meeting along the way, and it was just really, really cool to have that. The irony of the world, you know, talk about the interesting irony, talking about Ricky Rudd to win that first race at Pocono.

Bobby Hamilton won that truck race, Square D Company was his sponsor, which was part of my past. And, I don’t know, I just love the irony like that. And then we rolled along, 2004 sedan, and I got a 33 percent pay raise, baby. I’m up to 16, 000 man again, went and begged, borrowed and steal from everybody. But as things would happen with MRN, there was a couple of things going on that [01:00:00] really worked in my favor.

One of my dear friends got my name of Winston Kelly. Winston is the executive director of the NASCAR hall of fame. And Winston is still with the network. But at the time he was with Duke power and we had a. Period of time there in 2003, 2004, where we had a lot of hurricanes in the Southeast. And when there was a hurricane, Winston had to stay back in Charlotte and man, the headquarters, if you will, for Duke Power, because I was in Charlotte, which was a hub city for US Airways.

I was a very convenient guy to fill in. So I’d be sitting there on a Thursday morning and someone from MRR recall and say, Hey, Winston’s, gotta stay. Can you fly to Dover? Yeah. Says there’s a plane ticket waiting for you at the airport. Up to Philly. Would go to Dover. And I think in the course of those two years, 2003 and 2004, I picked up six race weekends.

because I was in Charlotte because I was convenient because I was ready to go because I had all of this part time work and I was very flexible and was able to do it. We also had in that time, our veteran reporter, Jim Phillips, he retired at that time. Adam Alexander was another one of our reporters. He made the move to TV, although I worked a few years with Adam Daniel Humphrey at the time or Daniel Fry.

She [01:01:00] also moved on. And so there was a lot of turnover and Adam and Danielle were having. babies and kids. So I was called every time that someone was having a baby. Someone had a doctor’s appointment. I was called to fill in and I was very, very fortunate in 2003 and 2004 that I picked up a lot of extra work with motor racing network and really was able to kind of carve out a little bit niche somewhere around the way.

2005 things really started to pick up. I did an audition with NASCAR performance at the time. NASCAR had an automotive line. They wanted to do a NASCAR performance doors, brand moved chassis parts or clevite bearings or whatever it was, you know? And so they want to do a crew chief show. Larry McReynolds was going to be the co host of it.

It was just determined who was going to be his co host of it. And I’d have gotten along really well with Larry. His son Brandon had ran the summer shootout. Larry and I knew each other fairly well from the garage area and everything. And just loved Larry and I thought we could work together well. But their vision of the show was, let’s have a bunch of crew chiefs sitting around and talk tech.

And we’re gonna do this on radio. And I thought, okay. And I was able to weasel my way into an audition. I have no technical knowledge at all, no skills at [01:02:00] all. And I’m sitting there and there’s this crew chief turned broadcaster auditioning with Larry and another crew chief turned broadcaster auditioning with Larry and another MRN guy that worked on his own car, shade tree mechanic guy.

And me, I wouldn’t know a Phillips head screwdriver from a socket wrench, okay? I’m just, that’s just, just how I am. And so I did the audition and the on air audition went well. Larry and I worked well together. We mock interviewed somebody or did something. And I sat in the meeting afterward, the interview portion of it.

And there’s old cartoons, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it where the light bulb goes on on the head in the caption of the cartoon. And I don’t know where this came from. This is just divine, whatever, whatever it is. I’m sitting there in the meeting. And I said, what you guys envision is crew chief sitting around talking.

They said, yes, that’s what we want. And that’s really what we’re concerned about. Steve, you’ve admitted you don’t have much knowledge of the technical end of the sport. And I said, Are people going to listen to that? I said, Because what happens when those two crew chiefs get talking over everyone’s head?

And I sat in that room and I swear to God, I’m watching light bulbs on top of people’s heads going off. I’m like, You need an [01:03:00] idiot. You need a dummy. You need someone. That can get these guys to translate it to English so that people will listen and not drive themselves into bridge abutments trying to figure out what Larry Mack and Chad Knauss are talking about, for God’s sake.

And I sat there in the room and I thanked them for their time and I walked out and I’m like, son of a gun, I don’t know where that came from, but I think that was pretty good. I got back to the hotel and David Hyatt, the president at the time of MRN, he calls me at the hotel. He says, dude, I don’t know where that came from.

I think you got the gig. He said, and you were the low man on the totem pole when we went into this thing. He said, you were the one who just slid in there because we liked you. And sure enough, I got that gig NASCAR performance live. And we had a 10 year run, which is in radio. A 10 year run is a lifetime.

And we had a wonderful experience where Larry, another crew chief and I would co host a radio show and getting to know those crew chiefs and getting to work alongside of them. And they. owned it. Guys like Jimmy Elledge and Chad canals and those crew chiefs loved coming in and doing NASCAR performance live because it was their show.

It was a crew chief show. And yeah, there were times I had to [01:04:00] slow them down. There were times I have to say, okay, speak English guys. There were times I had to do it and we really had a great run and that really emboldened me in the garage area. I was so fortunate to have that show. And to this day I have crew chiefs come up, man, we got to get that show going again.

We got to get that crew chief show going again. And that relationship with the crew chiefs talking about. That relationship. So that when I walk in that garage on Friday morning, I know those guys that is gold for what I do with MRN and that radio show may be one of the best breaks that I ever had in my life in the opportunity to do that show and to sit in the studio for an hour with a crew chief and pick his brain and talk about things and talk about the way things go.

As we rolled along programming on Sirius XM NASCAR radio kind of came into play as well and I was able to weasel my way into the midday show co hosting with Chocolate Meyers. And I don’t remember, I tried to find the year of this, but there was one year where I was on the air virtually seven days a week.

I know I had one year, the month of May and the month of September, I was on the air every day doing something. And you get to the stage where you’re just running yourselves in circles. And you continue on, and I had [01:05:00] all of these things happening, and this career is just growing. And along the way, I mean, you’re interviewing, you’re in Sirius, you’re at the SEMA show in Vegas doing Sirius shows, where you have Carol Shelby and Guy Fieri.

Sitting there across from me, the diners, drive ins, and dives guy, and they’re both car guys, and they’re talking about it, and Chocolate Myers, and you know, Charlie Daniels swings by and hangs out with us, or James Taylor’s doing a new concert tour, and we have a, I’ll never forget, we’re in Daytona, we’re down there for one of the anniversaries of the Daytona 500, and up comes AJ Foyt.

And sits down at our table and chocolate Meyers, A. J. Foyt and Steve Post. Talk about who doesn’t belong and why. Okay, we’re sitting there talking, hanging out, talking, racing, just absolutely amazing what was going on and what was happening. When I look at Interviewing different drivers. The question always comes up, who are some of your favorites to interview?

I’ll tell you the one that’s always the adventure to interview is Tony Stewart. Tony Stewart. I am telling you, he will mess with you every time. His standard go to is while you’re talking, you’ve got the microphone, he’s tapping the microphone and you’re talking and it’s bouncing [01:06:00] off your lip. It’s bouncing off your chin.

And he does that. But Tony has this trick, uh, I’ll try to describe this in a family friendly manner here. Tony is part of the Coca Cola race or was when he was driving part of the Coca Cola racing family of drivers. And that meant during driver intros, he’d always walk around with a Coca Cola bottle.

Well, he would carry this Coca Cola bottle at about belt height, walk up alongside of you. And one little flip of that Coca Cola bottle at belt height, he could take your breath away. If you know what I mean. So you’d be standing there interviewing somebody and the next thing you know, boom, you’d get hit by Tony Stewart and your breath was gone.

Poor Clint Boyer and I are talking to each other. We’re standing face to face pre race. Neither one of us saw it coming. The good news for me is the microphone was over to Boyer. At this point, Tony puts the bottle and did a double flip. And he got Both of us, at the same time. Boyer is there, and I’m not pulling this microphone back.

Cause I’m in as [01:07:00] bad a shape as you are. And Boyer’s like, Oh! Oh! Tony Stewart’s down here with his normal greeting! And I’m like, Oh my God! So the Tony Stewart, he was just that character. And so, uh, Boyer got through that interview. I just threw it back to the booth, cause I couldn’t talk. I was breathless, and we rolled along.

And I would dare say though, The characters in NASCAR, one of my all time favorites, Was Ward Burton. Ward Burton, South Boston, Virginia. Oh, Ward Burton with the South Virginia draw. Ward had ran for Larry McClure for years and that deal had went away. And then two or three years or one year or something later, they had kind of revived the deal and they show up at Pocono with a car and Ward is ready to go.

He’s their driver. He’s their guy. We’re out on pit road for qualifying. And I said, Hey, I’m the two way channel or whatever it is. Let’s talk to Ward Burton. We haven’t talked to him in a while and you know, he’s always good to talk to and everyone loves Ward Burton and everything. Hi, Ward. Welcome back to racing.

Welcome back. Uh, good to see you. How did this deal all come together? And hold the microphone over. And Ward starts to talk [01:08:00] and a bee starts flying around his mouth. Well, I want to thank Larry McClure for putting this deal together. And he’s blowing at the bee cause the bee is landing. And we got Ron Pittman running the engine.

Runt Pitman building the engines and we got Joe’s text sponsoring. I’m losing my mind. My producers on the radio, what is going on? I can’t answer. I’m just holding the microphone. We do also, MRN does the sprint vision, the vision screens. And later on they told me the vision people, all you could see was the MRN microphone just doing this because I’m losing my mind.

You talk about church laughs. This interview never. Ended. I am telling you, Ward and this bee had the most persistence I’ve ever seen in my life because Ward wanted to thank everybody from the guy that cleaned the shop floor. And this bee was not leaving him alone. And he did a he had to do that 20 times during the interview.

I’m losing my mind. I can’t even stand myself right now. And literally when the interview was done, we use that while that’s [01:09:00] word bird, I just turned the mic off. Cause I couldn’t have talked if my life depended on it. And it was an amazing, amazing run. And an amazing time in my life doing all of the serious stuff and doing the stuff for Motor Racing Network.

And again, the years all kind of run together. Got called into an office, got called into a meeting, and it was with the serious folks. And, uh, they had decided that they were going to go in a different direction with the Midday Show. Face it, nobody likes to hear this and I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t like to hear it.

Although I will say this, doing seven days a week and doing everything. I knew that that probably wasn’t really good either. And so I was still going to work on serious on the weekends, but I was no longer going to do the midday show. And I kind of disagreed with that. I’m not one of those people that really, uh, you know, I told him, okay, when’s my last day?

I’m not going to be a jackass at the end of it. I’m going to thank everyone for their time and say, Rick. Benjamin will join you next week and we’ll continue right on. And then they were cool. We were all good with it. We all handled it well. And so you’re doing it. And the NASCAR thing is kind of rolling along.

And I love what I do for motor racing network. And it’s like, okay, all of a sudden I have this big block of time during the middle of the week. And so I started working on some projects beyond NASCAR. And at the time, and it would have been [01:10:00] a 2010 MRN bought a website called racing one. com and racing one.

com had chat rooms and fan forums. Back in the day when that was a big time. So they had the fan forums and we’re at a meeting and they said the number one fan forum on racing one. com is cup series. Next tell cup sprint cup. It wasn’t Winston cup then, but probably next tell copper sprint cup series racing.

The number two fan forum is the world of outlaw sprint cars. Does anyone here know anything about the world of outlaws? And I’ll be honest with you. I knew. A little bit about the world of outlaws. My history with sprint car racing was generally not all that good, quite honestly. I grew up here in this area, as I’ve established, and I would go to the races around.

And we had a group up here called the Empire Super Sprints. And the early years of the Empire Super Sprints were not all that pretty at times. The Empire Spin and Stops, I think, were some of the nicknames that they had. The drivers were perfectly fine, but a track would prepare for the sprint cars by bringing in one push truck.

And sprint car racing was not necessarily something that I really enjoyed at that point in my life. But I love dirt track racing and I’m like, I want to get back to some dirt track [01:11:00] racing routes. So what we did that year is we formed what we call the world of outlaw report in 2010. We would just dial up somebody, Steve Kinzer, Sammy Swindell, Donnie shots, whoever it was, Jason Myers, Jason sides, we’d call them up and interview them about the race that they just had.

Maybe they won or an upcoming race and we put together the world of outlaw report and that was 2010 and it was the year of the 50th. Annual Knoxville Nationals and the numbers on the world of outlaw report to the voice of NASCAR to MRN, the numbers on the world of outlaw report were surprisingly good.

I don’t know now looking back at it, the neighbors were shocked, but I think we were all kind of pleasantly surprised by it. So let’s do something special for the 50th anniversary of the Knoxville Nationals. Let’s do an MRN one hour show. Highlighting the Knoxville Nationals. We need to get your cohost.

Who are you going to have? Kendra Jacobs. I had worked with Kendra on the Texaco Havilland account. Kenny Jacobs, a legendary sprint car driver from Ohio. His daughter, Kendra, she had been working at the time for Penske Racing. So she knew sprint car racing. She’s a former Miss Knoxville National. I said, she’d be the perfect cohost for this one hour show.

We’re just going to do one off. It’s going to be one off [01:12:00] deal. Kendra and I knew each other. Like I said, we’d work together. We were buds. We were pals. We’d travel around the country some. So we were really, really good friends with each other. Called her up. She would love the idea of doing it. She sat in the studio and we recorded the show.

We were going to just record it and then air it later on. Not going to do it live. So we sit down and we do the first segment of the show. Five minutes, seven minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it is. And this thing is just rolling. We are on the same page. I mean, I’ve done a lot of radio by this point and I’m sitting there and we are clicking.

We get to the first break. Craig Moore is our producer of the show. Craig gets on the private channel. Kendra, how much radio have you done? She looks at her watch. She’s about 10 minutes. He says, you’re serious. You’ve never done this before. She says, no, I’ve never done any of this before. Well, we interviewed Danny Lasoski.

We interviewed Brian Brown and readers, Bobby Ellen. Bobby would have been the 20th anniversary of Bobby winning the nationals. I think he won the 30th Knoxville national. So it would have been the 20th anniversary. Obviously, Danny Lasoski and Brian Brown was the young gun. Danny’s nephew. We interviewed those three showing up and the show blew the doors off.

We’re like, man, there’s something here. There is something here. That was 2010. We sat down during the off season. We’re like, you know, you have the world of outlaws, [01:13:00] which are great, but you have the Pennsylvania posse, which are not the world of outlaws. Although the world of outlaws come there and you’ve got.

California and you’ve got Ohio and you’ve got Knoxville and you got Jackson. You’ve got all of this sprint car racing. So we need to be bigger than the world of outlaw report. And we came up with a show by the name of winged nation and wing nation was born in 2011. Kendra Jacobs and I talk in sprint car racing.

It has been an absolutely amazing journey along the way. We ended up with an invite to go out and do live shows at the Knoxville nationals. Wow. It’s go to the Knoxville. My first year I did a Knoxville nationals. It was opposite of Watkins Glen. for the cup series and I’d already committed that I was going to be with MRN Watkins Glen.

So the idiot that I am said, we’ll do Wednesday and Thursday shows at Knoxville and then we won’t do a Friday and Saturday show. I’ll just leave. So I go out to Knoxville for my first time ever and I arrive in Mecca. I arrive in heaven, dirt track heaven. Tom Schmay, formerly with the Sprint Car Hall of Fame, he knows what I mean.[01:14:00]

You walk into the Marion County Fairgrounds for the Knoxville Nationals, and you know that’s where you want to be that week in August for the rest of your life. I walked in, we did a live show, crowd there, everyone’s screaming and hollering, races go off, preliminary night one, just a great night. Come in and do a show on Thursday, preliminary night number two, everything is great, everything is good.

And Friday morning Well, everyone else is all fired up about going to Knoxville. I go to the Des Moines airport to get on a plane, to fly Des Moines, to Charlotte, to Philly, to Buffalo, to Erie, to wherever, to wherever, to wherever, to get to Elmira. I love Watkins Glen, but I have never been in a spot where that was the last place on the planet.

I wanted to go that day. I was in good company that day. I don’t know what exactly was going on. A young lady that many of us know, Aaron Crocker, who raced sprint cars and race world of all the sprint cars. Erin Everett. She was on the board of directors for the Hall of Fame and something in her world was that she had to leave on Friday morning and her and I sat in the Des Moines [01:15:00] airport and had the biggest Pity party that two grown people have ever had in our lives.

And we have vowed that that will never, ever happen again. We roll along. We started doing live shows at Knoxville in 2015. He called into a real quick meeting at MRN. We’ve got something out here. Someone’s fishing around here. So we’re going to play around with this a little bit. Mav TV. They want a sprint car show, radio style talk show covering sprint car racing.

And so we’re thinking about putting cameras in the studio. And would you guys be into that? Well, yeah, we’ll be into that. Mav TV. It’s great taking a show to TV. It’s a sure enough. We ended up doing a separate show for Mav TV, just the logistics of it. And I just take a whole lot of pride. In saying that M.

R. N. And I love the motor racing network. I love our NASCAR work. I love what we do. M. R. N. The voice of NASCAR. Our first venture into TV was sprint cars. And I just love that. I just love, I love what we’ve created with Wing Nation. And it continues on to be just this amazing show that we’ve built. Kendra has gone on, she is [01:16:00] now out at Knoxville doing all the marketing and promotion out there.

Aaron Everham now, Ray Everham’s wife, Aaron Crocker, she’s my co host on the show and I’ve got another co host, Ashley Strami, David Strami’s wife, her father was Joe Deal, raced at Port Royal. So we have got this show, we do three shows a week and the numbers are unreal. As a matter of fact, this year we hit a milestone, 2017 Wing Nation was the first MRN digital show to clear one million unique.

Listeners to our show. It has been unreal. We’re now invited to do Knoxville. We did shows at the Jackson Nationals in Jackson, Minnesota. We did shows at the Bob Weikert Memorial in Port Royal and this wing nation stuff just is amazing. And I think it’s so amazing about it because when I sat down years ago and had that meeting was serious.

And they told me they no longer wanted me during the mid days. I don’t know that I was heartbroke. I know I was disappointed. And I look at that meeting and I’ve talked to Daniel Norwood, the guy at serious, and I thanked him because that door closing opened up this unreal world of sprint [01:17:00] car racing that we have now.

And it is absolutely amazing to get to do my passion of NASCAR racing, my passion of sprint car racing, and be able to do it all and put it all together. Along the way, I ventured into some other things. I did a food blog. I shared with you that when I was doing the serious stuff, I’d met Guy Fieri, the diners, drive ins and dives guy.

And we remain in touch now and just kind of once in a while our paths across, but he’s just all over the place like I am. But I said, what if we did a NASCAR version of diners, drive ins and dives? Like, what are the good places to do in Richmond and what are the good places to eat here and who are the good team cooks and you know, food sponsors and everything else.

So for a few years, did a website called food around the track. dot com, and we actually had an MRN podcast called fast food. What really happened with it? I was kind of at a crossroads with it. And when that meeting about the math TV thing happened, I said, well, I think it answered the crossroads probably need to put my focus on sprint cars.

And so we kind of got out of the food business along the way. Last year, kind of discovered a couple other hidden passions that I didn’t realize were there. Lenny Sammons, who does area auto racing news and does. Indoor TQ racing. So I had the opportunity to [01:18:00] start announcing those. I did Allentown and Atlantic city last year.

I was able to do Trenton and I’ll do Allentown and Atlantic city, not able to do the Albany race. I’m sorry. I’m going to miss the bus load, but we’re in Daytona at that point. And I just found this world of TQ and we did 600 micro racing. That is just a wonderful, wonderful place of short track racers just out there slugging it out and I’ve had so much fun.

Along the way last year as well, we have a modified tour, the NASCAR wheel and type modified, the Southern modified racing series. Of course, in the South, we have this juggernaut called Bowman gray stadium, the mad house, and it is an amazing place. And the mad house is a football stadium. So they’ve got to end like in the second week of August, because a Winston Salem state plays their football games there.

So the mad house is a very short season, very compact, very exciting. It’s great. great racing. Those drivers have got with the folks who are in Caraway, a private tour, southern modified racing series, and they also promote the north south shootout. So found myself getting involved with those folks a little bit and I discovered the asphalt modified again, kind of rediscovered it.

And what an amazing car that is. I sat at [01:19:00] Charlotte Motor Speedway and there was a modified race. Then I was on that little quarter mile track, so it’s not really a great track for him, but I’m watching this and I’m like, man, he’s modified cars. Wow, they’re drastically different than the wing sprint car, but so much the same wide tires engine hanging out all over the place.

You know, sprint car has a wing. They have the wide tires and the loud pipes and the noise and started to do a little work in the modified world. And we’ve got a project coming up beginning of next year, a little bit more work with a modified tour and going to start doing some of that. And so as we’ve evolved and as NASCAR has evolved, I love doing the pit road stuff, but I found passion and the other forms of racing.

I just had a moment this year. I had a couple of moments this year, but I had one that just kind of blew me away. The summer shootout. I mentioned that in 1998, I was hired to do the summer shootout. So I roll along and we’re on a media tour. And one of the executives at Charlotte motor Speedway says, how long have you been doing the summer?

Sure. I says, actually, you know what? This is my 20th year of doing the summer shootout, man. That’s really cool. We need to do something with that. We need to do something with that. And I’m like, oh, that’s good. That’s great. Whatever you guys want to do. I’m here. So we roll along through the summer shootout.

I never hear about it. [01:20:00] I’m not. begging for it. It is what it is. I mean, it’s a great idea, but a lot of great ideas fall by the wayside. We get to week number nine, the next to last week. And they said, Hey, we want to do something special next week for the season finale. We want you down with Lenny’s the tiki is the announcer.

He does the track side stuff. I do the play by play. So we want you down to do the pre race for that. I said, okay, whatever you guys need, I’ll be down there, you know? So I go walking down and I’m just standing there, minding my own business, talking to the flag or talking to the officials. And I see a young man behind the stage, a young man by the name of Thomas van Wingerden, the van Wingerden family.

is an amazing family. Tom Van Wingerden was the patriarch of that family. He had a passion for racing that was just amazing. It was legends racing at Charlotte. It was what him and his boys did. His boys went and raced on Tuesday nights at Charlotte and they were all in. They were there to win races. He ran a successful business in town, but they were there to compete hard and they did racing for all the right reasons.

Tom. Died probably seven or eight years ago in a four wheeler accident. So sadly the family had kind of fallen by the wayside. As far as racing goes, they still run the business. They’re [01:21:00] still all very successful. And I follow along with some of them on social media, but I saw Thomas Van Wingerden backstage.

I said, that’s weird. I hadn’t seen him at the track all year long. There is an award that is not given out on a regular basis called the Tom Van Wingerden spirit of the legend award. And it is an award that is given not on the basis of what you’ve done. It is given on the basis of how you’ve done things and that passion, that spirit.

And I’m standing there and all of a sudden it strikes me that I’m getting ready to go on the stage and get the Tom Van Wingerden Spirit of the Legend Award. And I am telling you, I’ve been blessed with so many honors in this sport with so many things that have happened along the way. But getting that award in August of this year for who I am, the Tom Van Wingerden Spirit Award was the highlight.

It’s the best award because it was how I present myself. I love racing. I don’t know if I can tell. I know I’m a little shy. I know I’m a little reserved. I know I don’t really come out of my bubble. But I love racing. Racing legends cars on Tuesday night at the Daytona 500 and everything between. I love it.

And to get that award was just [01:22:00] absolutely amazing. And it’s just really, really touched my heart, but I up that this week, I did something this week that is even in my opinion, better than that. I was at Eldora Speedway doing the, uh, truck series race. And I shared with you back an hour, hour and 15 minutes ago, my favorite driver was Pete Cordes.

I’ve never met Pete Cordes as an adult. I was a fan of his as a kid, but I’d never met Pete Cordes as an adult. I met Eldora. I’m doing some hospitality. I’m there hanging out and some guy comes up and says, Hey, I remember you from five mile point. You used to watch Chuck. Cool. Some Carl Nagel and those guys race.

And I said, yeah, man, those are the days. It’s a man. I used to live right nearby to Pete Cordes. I was all my God. That was my guy. Pete Cordes. That’s my guy. He’s man. He’s doing great. Doing really, really well. You know, we’re older race car drivers. We don’t know. I hadn’t read that Pete had passed or anything, but you just never know.

And I’m like, wow, that’s great to hear. He’s doing well. He’s doing great. I got thinking to myself, I said, how many people get to meet their heroes? How many times when we’re a kid, whether it’s a baseball hero or [01:23:00] football hero or racing hero, do we get a chance to meet our hero? And as Kip and I were putting this together, I said, you know what?

Why don’t I come up a little bit early and why don’t I go see if I can meet my hero? I’m at Knoxville. I’m out there getting ready for the Nationals. Pete and I had started to email back and forth and started to talk a little bit back and forth about it. In 1975, Pete was involved in a crash at Five Mile Point Speedway.

And I was an 11 year old kid, a Pete Cordez fan, and he broke his back in that crash at Five Mile Point Speedway. Being the fan that I was, I was able to reach out and send a letter to Pete and send him a note. And I’m there and Knoxville Raceway. We had just kind of emailed back and forth and broached that conversation about, Hey, I’m coming up there in December.

I’d love to take you and Judy to dinner to meet you. You’re my childhood hero. I would love to meet Pete Cordes. I’m pulling into Knoxville. I get an email from Pete Cordes. And in that email is a picture. And in that picture is this [01:24:00] card. Dear Pete, I am one of your fans. And I saw you Saturday night and hope you get well.

I will miss the blue number 68 at Five Mile Point. Your fan, Steve Post. How cool is that for your hero to save it? Isn’t that amazing? He sent me that. Steve Post, RD2 Halsted. Pete Cordes, modified stock car driver, Sydney, New York. I found the zip code, 10 cent stamp. I’m pulling into Knoxville Raceway. I get an email from Pete Cordes, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and I open this up.

And I started to cry. My passion. My hero had saved this letter from an 11 year old kid that his bigger than life hero had suffered a back break at a race blown away by this. I was able to reach out and to make this even better. I landed in Syracuse, jumped in the rental [01:25:00] car, made the haul over to Sydney and on Thursday night at 4 I did dinner with my hero, Pete Cordes, and his wife, Judy, to meet your hero, the guy that saved your letter as an 11 year old kid.

I’m happy to report a lot of times when you meet your heroes, they may disappoint. As we live in this age of social media, we learn way more about our heroes than we need to know about them. We all have warts. We all have bad times. We all have little hiccups along the way. My hero, Pete Cordes, when I was an 11 year old kid, was bigger than life.

My hero, Pete Cordes. As a 53 year old man is bigger than life. Times 10. An amazing man, an amazing man. This guy built his race cars from bumper to bumper, built his engines from bottom to ground up, raised three kids, had a successful career at Bendix, race that modified three or four nights a week, depending on what the tracks were and did it all while raising that family and while doing everything.

Pete Cortez, 30 years ago, found out he had cancer in his arm. Had some failed [01:26:00] procedures done and has lost his right arm to cancer. His wife shared with me something that just blew me away. And part of the reason he lost his arm was maybe some faulty diagnosis from some doctors or some faulty treatments.

The day after he lost his arm, he went home and he got up the next morning and Judy walks out and Pete Cordes is sitting at the table learning how to write left handed. Unreal. He still changes brakes on his own cars, says it’s amazing what you can do with vice grips and some leverage with only one arm.

And it’s your weak arm. He claims, and I was, he claims he’s smarter because he says the whole left brain, right brain thing. And he was right handed. So his left brain was very engaged, but now that his left hand is the primary hand and he says, I have so many ideas I wish I could have done as a race car.

I’m like, why didn’t you think of that? Why didn’t you think of that? What I learned was that he was so smart with chassis setups and then it was bigger tires on the right front, bigger tires and bars here and everything like that. And on Thursday evening, I had a two and a half hour visit with my hero, as I mentioned, bigger than [01:27:00] life as a kid and bigger than a lifetime’s 10.

I met my hero, Pete Cordez. And that is just an amazing, amazing night that I will never forget. And the good news is we’re going to meet again. Next time I’m up, he may even come to a NASCAR race along the way. I just cherish that relationship. So that’s really my story. Steve post race fan, little kid that grew up at five mile points.

Speedway loved racing. Little kid that used to sit around a matchbox cars and mimic the announcers. A single dad with two kids and just love my daughters to death. Teenage girls love my desk. I’m a radio broadcaster, but ultimately just a kid from Halstead, Pennsylvania that decided to pursue my dream after some bumps and hurdles and misturns along the way, and I got, I caught that dream and I’m really, really proud of where I’ve been at and where I’ve come to.

And I’m just appreciate the opportunity today to share my story with you. And I thank you for coming out and listening here today. Appreciate it.

This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and [01:28:00] preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

org. This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers. Organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard as well as to broaden and deepen the understanding of motorized wheeled land transportation through the modern age and into the future.

For more information about the SAH, visit www. autohistory. org.[01:29:00]

We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

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[00:00:00] BreakFixPodcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere. From wrench turners and racers, to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Tonight’s guest needs almost no introduction. He’s been part of the NASCAR community for over 20 years. And Steve, the postman post has been one of the mainstay voices. of MRN for the past 13 years while carving out a niche in television projects, reporting, and being a talk show host for programs like The Winged Nation.

He joins us tonight and we pick up where part one of the IMRRC’s Life in the Fast Lane leaves off. Folks, picture it, Watkins [00:01:00] Glen, December of 2017. And with that, let’s welcome Steve to BreakFix. Hey, hey. Like I said, Steve, in the introduction, in part one, we were settling in at the MRN. You were talking about how Wing Nation was picking up speed, and you had just met your longtime hero, Pete Cordes.

And it’s been nearly seven years since then. So let’s talk about Where is Steve now? Take us on the journey from 2017 to 2024. Well, it’s interesting because you held that cover. And where I’m at is the hair is obviously longer. I think I’ve shed about 60 pounds since then, too. I’ve actually, I’ve seen some of those pictures that kind of pop up every once in a while.

And it’s been an amazing journey. It’s been a remarkable journey and really, really good. Wow. Where have I been in six years? A little bit of everywhere. And it’s been all over the map, if you will. I guess big picture as far as the motorsports goes, just continuing on as the lead pit reporter now for Motor Racing Network.

Absolutely love my work with [00:02:00] MRN. I was sharing with some folks that as we wrapped up the 2023 season, I think This year I maybe enjoyed my NASCAR coverage and being part of the NASCAR coverage as much as any other year. And this is the 21st year that I’ve been on the road with MRN. So really, really enjoyed the season with NASCAR.

Love being on pit road. I still just absolutely love the men and women who work on these cars, whether it’s the technical engineers or the mechanical guys that are up under the car and inside of the car. Are those athletic pit crew members? I just absolutely marvel at how they work on these cars. Always cool to hang out with the drivers.

Always cool. Just to get into the people involved with the sport. So have you learned the difference between a screwdriver and a ratchet since 2017? No, it’s still served me well not to know the difference between that. I know what a hammer is. So I do know what a hammer is exactly. But now, as I shared in my visit back in 2017, and it was Eli Gold, the great broadcaster, the voice of Alabama football, many, [00:03:00] many years with MRN, he says, you don’t need to know the answers.

You just need to know the people and ask the questions to get the answers. And so I still don’t know a ratchet or a socket wrench thus far. It’s still served me all right in the past six years and the previous years. In addition to all your duties at MRN, you’re also still part of Winged Nation. And like we were talking about, it was just picking up a head of steam back in 2017.

So how have things progressed since then? Yeah, Winged Nation has just exploded. It’s taken over my life. And that’s a good thing. I really enjoy, I love winged sprint car racing. We had probably just started the MAV TV portion of the show. And so we have just wrapped up. As a matter of fact, the MAV TV portion.

We’re in such a beautiful time in communicating in the world, let alone sports, let alone motor sports. And what we found is the constraints of a 30 minute television program broken down in seven minute segments. We just get someone started talking and then it’s like, hold that thought. We got to pick a commercial break.

[00:04:00] There was some other behind the scenes issues with the program, some challenges with personnel, the timing of it, we’d had to record it on Monday. I’m telling you, you get home midnight, one o’clock in the morning or fly home Monday morning. You’ve got to go straight to the studio and do the show. So the Mav TV portion of wing nation, we just closed that out.

But what we’re doing is we have a Tuesday show that will remain about what it is. And that’s the nuts and bolts, the weekend and week out who won this, who won that. We’ll interview at least one of the race winners, big newsmakers. If something’s coming up, we’ll preview it. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to do a little bit more podcast D storytelling where we sit down and we don’t have those seven minutes.

So when we get someone wound up on a topic. They can get going on the topic. So we’re going to go along form wing nation conversations, also looking at some social media elements. When I’m out at the racetrack, I’m going to be doing a fair number of sprint car races this year. And you know, rather it’s just good to three or four minute segment with a driver that we’ve not heard from.

There’s so many interesting characters. We’re in a fascinating time with [00:05:00] sprint car racing, where there’s even a split in big time sprint car racing with the world of outlaws and high limit. And everyone’s worried about where everyone’s going. Well, let’s say High Limits gets eight drivers. And let’s say the World of Outlaws get 12.

That’s 20 drivers. And we all know those 20 drivers. There are hundreds and hundreds of drivers at Lernerville Speedway and Silver Dollar Speedway and Usage Speedway and various racetracks. And we’re going to kind of get in the trenches. And even if we go three, four minutes with some of these guys and gals and talk about who they are.

We’re going to tell a little bit of a story. Our president of the Motor Racing Network and MRN owns Wing Nation. Our president is like, who is telling the story of sprint car racing? And we’re raising our hands. We’re going to be the ones to do that in a little different format as we look at 2024.

Originally you had talked about. Coming up through oval track racing, especially asphalt, you got into dirt later, especially winged outlaw cars and things like that. Now you’re heavily involved in that. Earlier this season, we had Lynn Paxton on and he gave us [00:06:00] a tour of the EMMR, which is basically, you know, his museum, if you think about it.

Who are some of the hall of famers, some of the people you’ve met now that you’ve had to kind of go back and relearn that world? Well, I’ll tell you, first and foremost, Lynn Paxton is my go to guy. When it comes to things, we did a variety of live shows for years at Port Royal Speedway. And one of the shows we would do on our Saturday night program is all the hall of famers, all the classic drivers.

And I said, I’ll do this under one condition. That Lynn Paxton will co host it because Lynn knows everything about everybody and he knows every story about everybody. The true ones, the untrue ones, and all of those that fall in between. Lynn has always been a great resource to me as far as that goes. I was fascinated you mentioned Lynn Paxton.

I always get a little bit of a chuckle. My local track was Five Mile Point down in the Binghamton area. Which sadly, I think we’ve lost five mile point. We were supposed to lose it last year. It got a stay of execution, but sadly, I think we’ve lost it this time. And it looks like it’s going away. And in 1972, there was a world of outlaw [00:07:00] race there.

And I went to that race as a kid, never remembered anything about it. Now here I am doing wing nation. So I am in Lin’s museum getting the grand tour as only Lin can do. And he said, what’s your background in sprint car racing? Well, I said, not a lot in sprint car racing, just as I shared with everybody at the talk six years ago, not a lot in sprint car race.

I said, there was a race at five mile point. I went to a 1972 world of outlaw race. Only 14 cars showed up and yada, yada, yada. He stands back and he gets this big grin on his face and Lynn says, Oh, you were at that race where he says, you remember who won that race? I have no idea who won that race. He says, you’re looking at Lynn Paxton actually won that race.

And it was ironically. The first world of outlaw race in the state of New York, which I found out in talking with Lynn, I think the next night they ran up at rolling wheels, but it was the first outlaw race in the state of New York. So Lynn Paxton is certainly one of those historic people that I really, truly love to talk to.

Another one from [00:08:00] Pennsylvania is Fred Ramer. Fred Ramer is one of my favorite people on the planet. If you want to know an opinion, just ask Fred. Because he will share with you his opinion. There is very little gray in Fred’s world. It is black or it is white and he will gladly share with you. And I always look forward.

I always make it to the pits and make sure I catch up before the races. And then after the race, we always have a cold, frosty beverage. Fred and I do. And we solve all the problems of the sprint car world. And shake hands and go on our way. So Fred RA’s one of those legendary, iconic people that I really enjoy.

When you look at some of the younger legends of the sport, Darren Pitman is a guy that I just have huge respect for, really have enjoyed our visits. Darren is such an advocate, and this is whether it’s a visit on Wing Nation or a visit in the pit area, Darren is like the foremost authority on safety in sprint car racing.

And of course. All of auto racing, we always deal with safety. We always have those questions in whatever form. Darren is just a wealth of information [00:09:00] on safety in sprint car racing. Always enjoy chatting with Joey Saldana. Joey is just such an interesting guy. So he looks like an accountant. But he drives like the Tasmanian devil.

I mean, it’s unreal how Joey Saldana is just such a great, great person in the sport, great, great guy. And honestly, one of the guys, and he is future hall of famer. He’s not there yet. But one of the guys that I have just truly enjoyed is Donnie shots, 10 time world of outlaw champion. We just have hit it off really well over the course of time, Donnie and I have.

So, you know, you get into the sprint car world and when you’re hanging out with guys like Donnie Shots and you’re interviewing guys like Sammy Swindell and Joey Saldana, Terry McCarl is another guy I love. Just spent some time with Terry at the World Finals at Charlotte. We solved all the world’s problems in the trailer one night before we even got started.

Really enjoy. Talking to the legends of sport will love the talent in the sport, the present talent in the sport, but love talking to the legends of the sport as well. I got two more names to throw at you. Damien Gardner. We recently [00:10:00] sat down for a movie night with our friends at the international motor racing research center and watched his documentary about going from the West coast version of outlaws to doing land speed in a late model there.

And so I’m wondering, have you had a chance to sit down with Damien the demon? I had one chance with Damien probably seven years ago. Auto club speedway in Southern California. They did a tribute to the California short track racers. They had Brent dating down, but they had Damien there. And I actually interviewed Damien on a stage show that we did there.

And it is fascinating to listen to his stories about sprint car racing, the demon. He certainly earned that nickname, but then the land speed and the things they did with that car and the way that that car went, I think that you have got to be a special, not one too tight person to run a sprint car on a dirt track.

Damien Gardner says here, hold my beer. I’ll show you what really whacked out is, and he is absolutely amazing. Great, great conversation we had there on the stage, actually, at Auto Club [00:11:00] Speedway. Let’s rewind the clock a little bit and talk about Pete Cordes and his wife, Judy. You were just reigniting that relationship in 2017.

So how has that played out? Eric, I’ve dropped the ball on that one totally. Pete and I would talk to each other a couple times a year on the phone, and we would go, and about nine months ago, I crushed my phone. I’m not one of those people smart enough to back up anything, and I’ve lost numbers. I was up in the Binghamton area last week.

I reached out and sent a Facebook message to the person that had got me Pete’s number, and I haven’t heard back from him yet. I’ve lost touch with Pete, but the goal is to get back with him here. And as soon as I get the number, that’s going to be the next call I make, uh, within the next day or two, I’ll be reaching out and touching base with Pete again.

But it’s just one of those things where once the season hits, I just lose mind. And the next thing, you know, it’s a month, it’s two months, it’s three months. And that’s been multiple months since I’ve had a chance to catch up with Pete. And I haven’t caught up with him this year yet. And I literally was thinking about him.

I crushed the phone and haven’t had a chance to double back. So I need to get on that one [00:12:00] again. Well, you know, what’s good about this is that he’s still with us. So that’s kind of awesome that that relationship, that friendship perpetuates and you guys will get back together soon enough during part one, you also talked about, you know, moving to the Carolina.

So guessing you’re still headquartered down there and how are your girls? Girls are great. They are 25 and 22. They are living their respective dream lives. I have stressed to them that if their dad could move from Northeastern Pennsylvania to North Carolina to try to get a job broadcasting races on the radio and do it, they need to pursue their dreams.

And so my oldest daughter is doing well. She’s 25 years old. She spends about half of her life here in America. She spends the other half of her life in India. She is a yoga instructor and you vetics is a holistic medicine that she does. She is a counselor in that. And then some spirituality as well. She knows who she is.

She’s trying to figure out how to monetize it, but she’s doing really, really well. And I love the path she’s on because she’s just as I did with my passion. She’s chasing her passion. [00:13:00] You chase your passion. You’ll figure out a way to how to make it work. She’s doing really, really well. My youngest one is far more traditional in the, went to college and did that.

She is in what they call a gap year. She just wrapped up. She graduated from Charlotte with a theater degree and she is literally not in school. She is working at a cat cafe. She’s living with four roommates and she’s working at a dance studio. And it’s been fascinating because she graduated in May. She said she wants to take a year before she starts doing anything.

And over the Thanksgiving break, she’s like, you know, Seattle has a really interesting theater scene, of course there’s Chicago, of course there’s New York. She said, there’s some other cities that have a really nice theater scene. So I think she’s finding her way as well. And she’ll do well also. So my girls are doing really, really well.

I’m fortunate. As a matter of fact, we spent some time over Thanksgiving weekend. Up in Pennsylvania, all of us together. So they still like to hang out with dear old dad every once in a while. I share that in common with you. I have two girls as well. They’re a lot younger, but one of the things we pride ourselves on here at Grand Touring is [00:14:00] that we want to perpetuate motorsport in the younger generations.

And one of my biggest things that I subscribe to is make the kids part of your life. Not really the other way around. And so I wondered from your original talk, if you were dragging the girls with you to the track, what their track life was like, did it rub off on them? Do they enjoy it in any way? Mine are still coming up.

They’re coming up through the sports car and endurance world. So they’re seeing cars that they can relate to, you know, Lamborghinis and Porsches and things like that, that they can relate to everybody air quotes around that. So what was it like for you as a dad with two girls in the world of motor sports?

Sierra, my oldest one, really never caught on to it, and she’s my free spirit. Just never caught on with her. Now, Summer, my youngest one, she started going with me to the summer shootout. I do the Tuesday night summer shootout at Charlotte Motor Speedway, and she would go because of the cute boys. Out there at the racetrack.

Well, she’s no longer going because of the cute boys, but she goes every week and she hangs out and watches and she knows all the storylines. So it’s, it’s not [00:15:00] nearly as involved as I am, but she still follows the sport. They all follow that. I mean, she, they know who wins the NASCAR races. They follow along.

It’s funny with summer though. I always joke around with her. Ben Rhodes is our truck series champion. And now he’s a two time champion. I am not mistaken. I know one of these facts is maybe the other one is truthful. She may have been the first person to join the little Ben Rhodes fan club when he was running a legends car out at Charlotte.

That may or may not be true. If not, she was second or third. The one thing I know is that he was her first celebrity crush and I busted her and Ben about that. Ben is happily married and winning truck series championships. And she’s doing her thing. So she follows along with it a little bit, not nearly as much as dear old dad, but I think they have a really good respect.

Some of her friend group now they’ve started, they’ve got into watching the formula one races. And so they’ll get up on Sunday morning and do brunch and watch the formula one races. And I think that’s awesome. Racing is a social thing. And if she finds it for her friend group, if it’s formula [00:16:00] one. If it’s sprint cars, wherever it is, I think that’s really, really cool.

You being in the profession of motorsports, you have to stay in tune with what’s going on during your season in your discipline of motorsport. Is there a guilty pleasure? Is there another discipline of motorsport that you enjoy watching? Or maybe when you take some time off, you’re like, you know what? I want to go check out a race.

Over at X. What is X? I’ve been very, very fortunate with MRNs NASCAR coverage. We cover cup Xfinity truck, Arca, and some modified races with wing nation. We cover wing sprint car racing. I do Tuesday night legends racing at Charlotte motor Speedway. I do micros and box stocks out at Millbridge Speedway.

Then I do some pay per view with late model stock racing on asphalt in the Carolinas. Those are all the things that I work in and I love every one of them. My guilty pleasure is Dirt Late Model Racing. Dirt Late Model Racing is the one series where I refuse. To work anything in it. I actually turned down a pay per view [00:17:00] gig because I’m like, I’ve got to keep something where I’m just a fan.

I’ve got to keep one aspect of where I’m just a fan. So for instance, a couple of weeks ago, there was a Saturday night race at Lancaster Speedway, which is a half mile dirt track, southeast of Charlotte. And then one of the historic great late model races is that Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, South Carolina.

The blue gray 100 pays 20 grand to win. And they have these two paired up. And I literally like lived for that weekend. Got up Saturday morning, did my thing, went to the track, paid my money, had my cooler, went in and sat down and watched the late models. They were great. They started the show early. So it was a cold November evening.

But we were out of there at 7 30 home, restocked the cooler, got up, went and tailgated over at Cherokee, paid my money, went in and sat there and watched the dirt late model. So I really enjoy the dirt late model racing and I’ve traveled to the Western part of North Carolina for some dirt late model races.

There’s a couple of other bucket list races that I’m going to get to, but I’m really working diligently not to get involved in it. I [00:18:00] want to keep that as my fandom. I’m starting to actually know some of the drivers and which ones I follow and which ones I like, and there’s some incredible racing there.

So that’s my guilty pleasure. Dirt late mounts. Have you gotten behind the wheel of any of the race cars? Have you been on track? Years and years ago when I was at Five Mile Point Speedway, I was writing for Gator Racing News up there out of Syracuse. I did a meteor race. And I learned really, really early that I was not cut out to be a race car driver because I am the most calm, mild mannered person on the planet.

In that 10 lap media race, every little infraction or that I thought was an infraction toward me became an offense that I wanted to wreck the guy in the spot. I grew horns in that race. And I got out of the car and my buddy, Roger Salai, Rockin Roger was, his car was driving. And I got out and he thought I was ready to go whoop somebody and he thought I was pro wrestling it and I got out and he said, you’re really pissed off, aren’t you?

I said, yes, I am. He said, stop, stop, stop. And we decided [00:19:00] right then over a couple of beers that that might be my one and done as far as driving goes. No, I don’t need to get fighting and scrapping going on here because I’m not a fighter. Man, that got the juices flowing in a way that I’ve never had anything in my life took over like that.

That was an interesting 10 laps of my life. So in part one of your story, you took us on this journey from the late 60s, early 70s, all the way through 2017. And you see so much evolution, not only in your person, but in motorsport and the way you tell the story and this encyclopedic knowledge of all these people’s places and things.

I mean, absolutely incredible. If we just hone in for a second, we target fixate. On NASCAR, which you’ve spent a lot of time in NASCAR has gone through multiple evolutions over the years. And it parallels formula one. There’s even a point at which, you know, they had to say no more tobacco advertising and everything changed.

But we find ourselves now with the six or so. generation of NASCAR cars, and we can expand upon that a little bit. I want to talk about what you’ve seen in your time at NASCAR and how you think the [00:20:00] sport has changed some of the new rules, the new formats. What do you like? What don’t you like? I really do like the playoffs that we have.

I respect the year long championship run, and everyone can point out the one that went down to Atlanta. With Bill Elliott, Davey Ellison and Alan Kowicki, but there were also multiple ones that ended three weeks before the season was open with Dale Earnhardt firing the engine at Rockingham and being crowned the champion.

So I just think we live in a time where you’ve got to have those moments. Sports entertainment is not about anticlimactic. It’s all about getting that two minute drive, that ninth inning home run. Four drivers going head to head at Phoenix for the championship. So while it’s a huge change and I’ve enjoyed watching how the teams navigate this, the first round of the playoffs, the round of 16 to the round of 12, that’s your base hit round.

Don’t have any problems. Just knock it out. Give three top 10 finishes. If you have a chance to go win a race, go win a race. Don’t put yourself in a bind when you get down to the round of eight, it’s like all hands on deck. [00:21:00] We’re going to do anything we can in our power to win a race. And so I think that’s fascinating the way that that’s been navigated and the way teams have successfully or not successfully navigated it.

So that’s one thing that’s changed drastically. I think our race weekends have changed drastically as well. We used to go in on Friday morning, we’d practice for two hours, we’d qualify on Friday afternoon, we’d practice another hour or two on Saturday morning, and then we’d race on Sunday. And, and this all started during COVID, during 2020, since we had that visit, but now we go in on Saturday morning, we have 20 minutes of practice, we qualify right after it, and we tee them up on Sunday, and we race the cars.

I think the one constant in NASCAR racing is when something changes. You listen to everybody wringing their hands. This is never going to work. This is never going to work. Four weeks later, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s what we do. We practice for 20 minutes. For years and years and years, we practice for hours and hours and hours.

Now we practice for 20 minutes. For the Phoenix race, we had a one hour practice session [00:22:00] and the crew chiefs were like, well, we don’t have enough tires. I don’t even know what we’re going to do. We’ve got three things we want to try and we got an hour to try them in. I mean, yes, they enjoyed having the hour of practice, but they just had to reset everything.

So the way we do the race weekends now being so compacted is amazing because I mean, it used to be, you were at the racetrack three long days to run one race. Now you’re there two days, we learned during COVID, we could be there for one day. The problem with that is that you’re selling all these camping programs, you have all the television networks, and they need some kind of content to go.

The qualifying shows are a great place to tell stories as well, that we can’t tell on Sunday afternoon. So, I think the race weekends has changed drastically as well. So, you know, when you look at the playoff format, that’s been a drastic change. The weekend format, that’s been a change. And then where we’re going with NASCAR racing, we have raced at the LA Coliseum who in the wide world of sports would have ever seen that coming.

We have raced on a street course in Chicago. I love the [00:23:00] new nature of it. I was talking with a buddy today and I said, you have a mutual friend that’s getting married. When are you getting married? I’m getting married the third week of August. Oh, well, I’ll be in Michigan. I’m getting married the third week of September.

I’ll be in Dover. We lived our life year after year after year with the same schedule. Now, when someone says. We’re having some going on on April 15th. I have no idea where we’re going to be at. And what I think made 2023 so fascinating is we have the new, we have the Chicago street race, we continue with the Coliseum, and yet in 2023 we also brought North Wilkesboro back into play.

And we went with the old as well with the all star race up there. I think it’s fascinating where we’re at with the schedule. We’re bringing Iowa onto the tour this year and it’s going to be interesting to see where we go with the schedule. You know, are there other coliseums or venues we can race in?

There are obviously other street courses we can do. So stay tuned and see where we go with it. And I think the other thing is we’ll probably know more after this year. Is the coliseum a three year deal? Is it a four year deal? And then we go somewhere else for three or [00:24:00] four years. Then we come back to the coliseum.

In Chicago, it’s a three year agreement. Do we do three years in Chicago and then go do the Meadowlands for three years and then go do Seattle for a year or two, and then back to Grant Park in Chicago. This is not your dad’s NASCAR where we went to Pocono twice a year, whether we needed it or not. Now we’re all over the map.

You know, we’re going to Watkins Glen next year in the playoffs in September. I think that’s awesome to have that race in September. I just, I love where we’re at with the variety in the, in the series and not knowing one year to the next, where we’re going. So you mentioned the All Star Race, which brings back memories of IROC, the International Race of Champions.

Do you miss those days? I lament about how we need to bring IROC back. Yeah, I really did. I loved when you would have Eddie Cheever and Dale Earnhardt arguing at Daytona. You know, Al Unser Jr. swinging it around with A. J. Foyt and Steve Kinzer at Darlington. SRX has attempted to do it, and it’s a good attempt, and what they’re doing there is fine.

But it’s not been the Iraq series. It’s not been the old Jason Norie [00:25:00] Iraq series. And I would love to see more of that. I think when we look at, and we have a cycle there, a period of time where the Rolex 24 was looking a lot like that. I loved that when we had the Rolex 24 with all the NASCAR drivers and all the IndyCar drivers.

We’ve gotten away from that a little bit. I know A. J. Allmendinger’s ran it some, and we’ve gotten away from that a little bit. I don’t know that the feasibility of IROC, but to me, it’s like the Rolex 24 seems almost like a no brainer. It’s why can’t we do something there where we get more of the NASCAR drivers.

The international crowd is already there. The IndyCar crowd is there to some degree, but to me, it would be really, really cool to see something like that. To me, it seems like the Rolex 24 is a simpler. Ask and get that maybe a separate IROC series. I think that’s a little bit heavy lifting that we’re going to do.

I’m glad you brought that up because that takes us back to 2001, which is a great year and a bad year at the same time. And we had Andy Pilgrim on the show two seasons ago, and we talked about his time at Lamar and [00:26:00] at Rolex, and obviously he was Dale and Dale Jr’s teammates in the C5R back in 2001, to your point for me, seeing.

The Earnhardst and seeing some of the other folks coming over from the other disciplines to run in sports car endurance. It was like, wow, this is a meeting of the greats. And I think 2001 was probably one of the best years for that. I think you’re right on that because you did have all of them. Tony Stewart running the Rolex 24.

I remember late in the day, he cuts a tire down and he wheels that car on three wheels around the racetrack and saves the day for his team. And so to me, it was like, you’d see these non NASCAR people, the folks that I’m not familiar with that I read about. Back in the day and speed sport news, if you will, or the, you would only see on ABC’s wide world of sports or the Indy 500 coverage.

And I think that that was a fascinating time. And I would love to see us get back to that. I don’t understand. And especially what really strikes me as the lack of NASCAR involvement in the Rolex 24, especially with the proliferation [00:27:00] of road courses in the NASCAR schedule. Now, back in 2001, there was two road courses.

You know, there was Watkins Glen and Sonoma. And yet everybody from NASCAR was running the Rolex 24. Well, why are we running it? We’re running it because it was a race. It was a trophy and we wanted to win. It’s fascinating to me that now we have seven road course races and nobody goes and runs the Rolex 24, which would seem to meet backward, but it seemed to me like everybody would want to get a ride at the Rolex 24 to get some left and right experience, but.

The other thing is, is that our young drivers have so much left and right experience between coming up through the ranks and running Trans Am and TA2 is, TA2 is the hotspot right now. Ford’s development program and Chevy’s development program have such a road course emphasis that these young drivers, the Austin Cindericks and Chase Briscoes of the world are very, very good road racers.

So maybe that prevents them from thinking they need to go run the Rolex 24. It’s kind of a different time, but it’s interesting. I would love to see. More and more of that integration of the various forms of motorsports take place on the racetrack. You’re a hundred percent right. And one of our previous guests, Colin [00:28:00] Garrett came up through the world of asphalt oval and the truck series and whatnot.

And now he finds himself as the touring car champion in world challenge through SRO. So he’s working his way up into IMSA as well, but he wants to be this Swiss army knife, right? He wants to have all these different backgrounds in these disciplines. That being said, we could turn this whole conversation on its nose here in 2023 by uttering.

Two words, garage 56, you take a NASCAR to Europe. Yeah. I’m the public address announcer at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Among other things, I do the PA address for the rollable race in October. The guy I work for walks in and says, Rick Hendrick wants to talk to you. And I’m like, Rick Hendrick wants to talk to me.

I’m like, what did I say? Did I say something in qualifying? Did I do what, you know, cause I’m just the dumb announcer, you know, Rick Hendrick wants to talk to me. And he said, yeah, the garage 56 car is doing a couple of parade laps and he wants to make sure you have the bullet points. And I said, his PR people gave [00:29:00] me six.

Pages of bullet points sequential shift. I know the gear ratios. I know the weight I know that the mirrors on the side of the car this I know everything about they’re going to run two laps I could talk about this car for 20 laps with everything. They gave me I understand That’s Mr. Hendrick’s PR people.

Mr. Hendrick wants to talk to you to make sure you have it right. And I walk down and I’m supposed to coordinate with a PR person, supposed to meet Rick Hendrick in the 24 Hall or at 1030 on race morning or whatever time it was. So I walk out and I have those notes and everything there. Uh, I said, Hey, and we chit chatted.

I’ve interviewed him multiple times. He’s a wonderful guy. Rick Hendrick, he’s a racer. That’s a successful businessman. He’s a great guy. We chit chatted for a few minutes. He said, I know you have all the bullet points, but I just wanted to make sure that you have the right messaging for this. And I said, well, yeah, I said, you know, I’ve kind of highlighted this and I’ve kind of highlighted this and I’ve kind of highlighted that and he looks at the sheet and on the bottom of the sheet, it said garage 56 brought a lot of American and NASCAR pride from the international motor [00:30:00] sports world.

And he’s looking down the sheet and he looks and he says my people have this buried at the bottom. This is the lead. This is the only thing you need to talk about. He said they called it the beast over at Lamont. When it showed up, everyone was snickering. Everyone was thinking this beast is not going to get around the racetrack.

We fired it up and then they were snickering even more, except for it sounded really, really badass. So they were kind of snickering, but kind of like, well, it does sound kind of cool. He said, we put it on the racetrack and it was fast. It was real fast for what we were doing, where our expectations were.

Then our pit crew members go over and do the pit crew contest. And this is NASCAR style pit crew contests. He says, from snickering the crew members from other teams wanting to come and swap crew uniforms with our crew guys, this thing turned upside down. And he said, and I don’t care who you are, he said, when you’re an American standing on the start finish line in France, and they’re chanting USA, [00:31:00] USA, USA, he says, it’s a special moment.

It’s a special moment. For America, it’s a special moment for NASCAR was a special moment. I’ll never forget it for the rest of my life. And he said, that’s your story. These other details use them wherever you want to do it. But that is your story. Typical MRM guy. I was covering a race somewhere else. So, I mean, I knew Lamont was happening.

I knew what was going on with garage 56, but wasn’t glued to the TV. Like a lot of people were, which I thought was fantastic. I thought it was great. I wasn’t glued to it. But after having that conversation with Rick Hendrick, what, uh, the other thing is, is just the international interest in NASCAR that we have and, and yeah, Shane Ginsberg and coming over certainly didn’t hurt anything from the land down under with that, but there’s so much interest in NASCAR internationally that was not there.

These are kid cars. These are not sports cars. Well, when they put that kit car out on the racetrack and the thing hauled around Lamar at a very, very good grade speed, it’s like, well, [00:32:00] you know what? These are pretty bad ass cars. My garage 56 moment was probably not until October talking to Rick Hendrick about it.

And then the exposure, like some of these videos were in the millions. Of views. He said that’s the exposure for Lamont. He says that they weren’t getting prior to that, he said, so it was a win for everybody. Don’t know where the program is going beyond the ville a couple weeks ago, but what an amazing event.

And again, I think where we can integrate, whether it’s a Garage 56 at Lamont or Kyle Larsson in a midget race or anything in between where we can integrate the sport, I think is really, really cool. And that Garage 56 program, everything was so well done and not a shocker. Rick Henrik, when he signs onto a project, when Chevy signs onto a project, when Goodyear signs on a project, when NASCAR signs onto a project, we actually talked to Greg Ives over at Henrik Motorsports.

He’s next in command behind Chad Canals overseeing this project. And he shared the same thing being there and how it was a life changing moment. Greg had been Dale Earnhardt Jr’s crew chief and crew chief for [00:33:00] Alex Bowman and everything else. And he said to be over there and to be part of that was absolutely amazing.

Just everything from the driver lineup to the car, to the performance, to the reaction. What an amazing, amazing sequence of events. It was back there in June. And you mentioned van Ginsberg and the Aussies and gaining their respect. And I think what’s interesting about the garage 56 cars, it showed the potential that those cars actually have.

They’re not the old two frame kind of Conestoga wagon leaf spring set up that they were forever. You know, the days of thunder cars where it’s like they were the same for the longest time. Now they are more like GT three cars in a lot of ways. And the garage 56 car took it there. But I think what got the.

Is it took a NASCAR to the level of what they consider a V8 supercar? Because if you look at the Falcons and the HSV Holdens, those were a step above for a long time than our NASCAR. So they were still production based, things like that. There were awesome cars running around Bathurst. But you never saw them leave the islands.

When this generation of race car came about last year, [00:34:00] people said it’s probably closest to the V8 supercar from Australia. You know, people always say, well, except for this and except for that, we, it’s easy to do the except fours. And so it’s its own car and NASCAR wanted it to be its own car, its own identity, and we get all of that.

When he came over, it was the perfect sequence for an international event like that. It was a racetrack that nobody had any seat time. It was a street course where he has far more seat time than any of the NASCAR drivers. It was a wet track condition. And it was a car that he was more similar to than he would have been the old 1956 Ford rear end truck arms that we run forever.

And so it was a perfect storm. But what an amazing sequence of events. June 15th, approximately, we’re in Le Mans with Garage 56 and we get to July 4th weekend and an Australian supercar champ is winning a NASCAR Cup Series race. What a year for NASCAR, what a three week period it was. And when Shane gets out and talks about how that car drove and how that car raced and how it went and [00:35:00] everything like that, I don’t necessarily care for all of the stock parts.

I’ll just be honest with you. I like the engineers and the crew chiefs to have a little creativity. I also get why we don’t have that because enforcing it and policing it becomes a whole lot of gray area. I get why we do it. I’m not necessarily sure that I’m in favor of it. I like a little creativity and ingenuity.

But I talked to Mike Rockenfeller as well and he said this car is just incredible to drive. You guys take for granted this car that is just a stock car. He says this car is absolutely amazing. And So when you have guys like Rockenfeller and Shane and Jenson Button has talked about the car as well, because he had some starts and you talk about that.

And it’s like, you know, it’s probably pretty good. It’s probably a pretty cool beast that we have here for this generation of race car. Then we had a want, want moment this year in NASCAR. We brought over famed Formula One driver, Kimi Raikkonen. Yeah, it’s just. They’re not all going to win in Chicago, but this is what I love where we’re at with NASCAR is we have team owners like Justin [00:36:00] Marx that’s willing to do this Project 91 call.

That’s what Kimi drove. It actually was weird, was it his first effort at our Watkins Glutton last year. Uh, two years ago or 2022 was better than what it was when he ran it this year, but I think that’s racing. I think that there’s so much involved with racing when you have guys like Kimi or Shane or any of them They get out and they’re just freaking kota going nine wide into turn number one shoot nascar drivers.

I’ve never seen that There’s just such a uniqueness to nascar style of racing And I think in some areas it jumps out as a good thing and other areas, it’s like, Oh, that’s a little more difficult. But the project 91, I really can’t wait to see where this goes. And there’s other teams that have the international development programs as well.

And it’s going to be fun to see who else might climb aboard some of these cars as we go forward. The problem is seeing him in Ginsburg and he kind of set the bar pretty high for this thing and I’m not sure. I think he’s a very talented race car driver. I think that’s a really, really good team. If there’s practice, I think that gets a little bit weird.

If it’s dry, I think it gets a little bit different not to take anything away from him. He is a cup [00:37:00] series winner and he earned that cup series race and all respect in the world to him for winning that cup series race. But the reality of it is, is the stars did align for him. Well, as the stars of the line for NASCAR cup series drivers, winning cup series races in the 75 year history of the sport, it’s fascinating times where we’re at with NASCAR when you think about it from an international perspective.

You mentioned during COVID things changed again, right? And it’s always in a constant flux and growth, but we also introduced, sort of took a shot in the arm to the virtual world and that brought in iRacing as a replacement for racing at the real tracks because they were all closed. We couldn’t be there.

Did you find yourself calling races in the virtual world too? I did not do any of that. I’ve not done any virtual races at all. The TV crew, Fox, they just went with their normal Fox crew when they did those races, which they should have, and we didn’t call any radio races. What we did with MRN, we went in a total different direction with MRN and created a whole new product.

On Sunday afternoons, we’d put together two hour classic [00:38:00] And we started with like nine stations grudgingly taking them. Well, then the next thing, you know, 15 stations. Well, I think now we have a classic race that airs every week and it’s distributed to radio stations. I think there’s 70 or 80 radio stations that are taking them.

Now they might run them at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night. So we went that way, but when it comes to the virtual stuff, I think the virtual thing was so fascinating. And we got into this also with the world of outlaws. They were even maybe a step ahead of where NASCAR was. I don’t remember. It all runs together now.

Comparable time wise, because we were in that short window of time in 2020. What it did was. First off, it was entertaining. Those early days of COVID, we didn’t know if we were all going to live or we’re going to die. Couldn’t go anywhere. If you had to go somewhere, everyone was masked up. Nobody wanted to talk to anybody.

Nobody wanted to do anything. And here it is on our TVs. Here is NASCAR on our TVs, running virtually. Here is… Alex Bowman’s dog tripping over the outlet and unplugging his system while he’s [00:39:00] leading the race. The drivers and the commentators all being able to play on social media as well, I think it was fascinating.

Obviously what it did for iRacing was, you want to talk about buying a Super Bowl ad for iRacing, this was a Super Bowl ad. Times thousands for iRacing because then everybody was on it. Everybody was playing the games and we gathered together on, I think it was Wednesday nights for these iRacing events that we had until we could get up and running at Darlington of all places to get back to running.

But the iRacing thing was absolutely amazing. And again, where we were at as a society, we just wanted to not. Be hunkered down and scared to death for two hours. And that’s where NASCAR really filled a gap with the NASCAR fans is you literally would have CNN or MSNBC or Fox news or whoever your news source is.

You would have those on for 22 hours. We had that two hours of [00:40:00] Fox with NASCAR coverage, where instead of seeing the latest numbers from the CDC and seeing this and seeing that. You were literally laughing because Bowman’s dog did this and Boyer was drinking beer and got hammered on the broadcast and forget what happened to Denny Hamlin.

Something happened with him where one of his kids came down and flipped the switch on the TV or something. And what they did though is also showcase the personality of the drivers. I’m sure it didn’t hurt some of their personality when fans started to see that, you know, I kind of thought that guy was a little bit of a jerk, but then when you see this and you see that he’s kind of a cool guy.

And I think they did a really nice job with it. The virtual racing during that time period was amazing. It humanized them. That’s for sure. Right. Because a lot of times they’re the figure on the poster and you idolize them for their feats and their triumphs and even their defeats, but to see them vulnerable in their own home, it’s a whole different story where they’ve become very real.

Yeah, it really was. You see them in their own home. We met Alex Bowman’s dogs. Alex Bowman’s dog cost him a race win. We got to put the personalities and you’d get out of that and you’d be like. And that was funny. And this guy, and [00:41:00] that was hysterical that this guy did that. And that guy did that. And it was really, really good at a time where we needed really, really good.

There was two hours of entertainment on Wednesday nights. That was much needed for where we’re at as a culture, as a society. At that point, when you look at your bigger story. And how COVID plays into it. You know, as I got through part one, you basically started to tell everybody, you know, my life has finally settled down the turbulence that was there up until that point.

It’s all good. And then COVID hits and here we go. We’re shaking it up all over again. Now, as we’re on the other side of it, do you find yourself finally sort of stabilize, but also what else is going on? First and foremost, big picture NASCAR. I find it absolutely amazing and ironic that of all places Darlington.

brought us back from COVID. Darlington, 20 years ago, lost the Southern 500. They’re going to shut the place down. It’s going to be over. It’s going to be done. And this is bigger than NASCAR. The Darlington race was the first sporting event in COVID. That grand old [00:42:00] racetrack brought us back from COVID. And so we came back from COVID and yeah, you’re right.

It upset everything. My instructions when I went to Darlington is you go in the infield. You get your gear off in the truck. You go to your turn position. You don’t talk to anybody. You don’t say anything to anybody. You go to your turn position and you leave your gear there and you get in the car and you go the hell home.

That’s what I was told to do. What we had was we had a North Carolina based crew. Alex Hayden and Dave Moody in the booth. I was in the turn. Dylan Welch was in the turn and Kim Kuhn was on pit road. We were all Charlotte based. Well, all the races for the first month were all Martinsvilles and Darlingtons and drive by places.

We would go, we would never drive together, and do those races on our own, drive four and a half hours to Atlanta to do an hour and 15 minute truck race to drive four and a half hours back home. Don’t stop anywhere. Don’t say it. So what was funny about it is, is we want a phase where Alex, Dave and I, we were the three that did every one of those races.

Alex, Dave and I did six weeks worth of [00:43:00] races and never saw each other. Never saw each other because we were instructed. You go home. It was fascinating from that perspective, what COVID did as far as the MRM broadcast goes and the scheduling goes. Andy Petrie, the longtime competition director at Richard Childress Racing.

They told him they were going to go to Darlington and race with no practice. He said, that’s going to fail. That’s going to be the biggest mistake we ever made. We’re going to be the first sporting event back. And we’re going to look like a bunch of buffoons, the ringing of the hands, that’s what it was, 20 laps into the race, when everyone is wheeling it around Darlington, everything is good.

So COVID was fascinating from that perspective. It really, truly was. The other perspective I have on COVID was we were running Tuesday night truck races at Martinsville and Saturday afternoon truck races at Atlanta and we were at Charlotte Motor Speedway doing this. I don’t know where I’m at. You get up the next day and it’s like, okay, I got a truck race tomorrow.

I got to do notes. I got this. I got to do that. I have a friend that is a basketball commentator for the University of Kentucky or he was at the time. He’s still up there. And so he sent me a note, how are you doing? So I called him, I said, [00:44:00] dude, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I’m wore out. I’ve got so many races.

I’m just going crazy. This is unreal. Not complaining, running us into the ground. And so finally, after I talked about being busy for like five minutes to him, I come up for air and I said, so how are you? And he said, a whole lot different than you. And I said, why is that? And he said, if the sec decides not to play football this year, I’m unemployed.

I’m like, well, you don’t do football. He said, no, but football in the sec pays for everything else. And if the sec decides not to play football this year, I’m unemployed. I’m like, Oh, so I guess me whining about all my work is probably not necessarily what you needed to hear today. We had a good chuckle over and everything like that.

So I’ll never forget that COVID time period. And what that was and how that changed the sport, how it changed zoom calls prior to COVID. Nobody did zoom calls during COVID. That’s how we did all of our media sessions was via zoom call. We still use the zoom call regularly, frequently. So as far as we went through COVID and you’re right, things have settled down a little bit.

Now we’re back into the routine of [00:45:00] NASCAR. And this year I’ve enjoyed my NASCAR time this year, maybe more than any other year. First and foremost, I love traveling. So I’m, I’m grateful that I still have the love for traveling. Next year, I’m even going to enhance that a little bit by going into town a few days early.

So I’ve targeted a few races and one of them is Watkins Glen. I’m going to come up on Wednesday morning because in September, the Finger Lakes region, Watkins Glen, there is some wineries. There are some breweries. There’s some hiking. There’s some places that I’m going to check out. When I look at this year, the NASCAR stuff was a blast.

It just was really fun. We have the new, the old Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Michael McDowell winning races. Just when you thought you understood what was going on, the wheels would fall off from somebody. And, you know, you’d be like, well, I guess they’re not what they are. Beyond that, probably since 2017, I’ve added kids racing.

I do stuff at Millbridge Speedway, which is a great little dirt track that runs a kid’s program. And this was where the Brexton Bushes and the Owen Larson’s and all of the kids. They run these little box stock [00:46:00] carts and on a Tuesday night, we’ll have a hundred kids out there racing cars. So I do that program is what I’ve added to it.

And the other thing I probably added from a racing perspective, I’ve added some health and fitness projects that I’m doing. I’m dabbling with my own blog site called Postman 68. The 68 is for Pete Cordes, as a matter of fact, I’m working on that. I’ve got two or three different ideas. This is never going to be NASCAR.

com. It’s never going to be huge. It’s little things that I enjoy. Started writing, started blogging and writing some columns. And I really enjoy that. I’ve got a couple other things I’m going to do and just kind of develop that a little bit. So, uh, it’s out there at postman68. com. It’s funny. I get working on one thing and I get behind on another.

I have my race coming on there. I was, I’m at 129 races this year. I haven’t got caught up with that. So I need to spend some time to get caught up with all of that and really to share my passion for short track racing. I absolutely love. The short track world. I’m so blessed to get to work within NASCAR, but I also get to go to short tracks.

The blue gray, [00:47:00] 100, I went to a Cherokee was race number 129 of this year that I’ve been to last year. I actually went to 160 races. I vowed I would never do that again because that just became a stupid obsession. So doing all of that, the short track stuff in some pay per view work, postman, 68 wing nation.

And MRN, between all of that, I mentioned right off the top, I mentioned about losing 60 pounds, I’m actually running, I’m doing a half marathon in February, doing a lot of that as well. Between all that, it takes the 28 hours in every day and fills most of them up, that’s for sure. Every story, Postman. I am always left going.

Wow. I don’t know how you do it. And you know, I thought I talk fast and I thought I jammed a lot of stuff in a five pound bag, but you got me beat. That’s incredible. I have to ask, here we are. Where is he now? We know where you’re at, but what’s next for Steve post? Enjoy the ride. You know, I’m that little kid that announced my matchbox cars.

That I shared back in 2017, I think part of it is just that I’m that guy that caught my dream. First and foremost, I’m a radio [00:48:00] guy. I don’t even own a television. And there are about six or eight people on the planet that make a living calling NASCAR races on radio. And I’m one of them. That’s something to be grateful for.

And so I really have worked hard to enjoy the ride. Enjoy my passions with sprint cars. Enjoy my passions with short tracks. Enjoy my passions with running and health and fitness. If I’m going to do this and enjoy it, I might as well try to live a little bit longer and enjoy it a little bit longer as well.

I’m at a really good spot. Our leadership at MRN, it’s never been bad, but there is a significant level of respect that we have from our leadership at MRN. If you have the respect of the people you work for, Boy, I’m telling you what, life gets a whole lot easier. I could use a few more bucks in the quarterly pay.

Yeah, it’d be nice if they’d give me first class tickets on a plane instead of steerage where I ended up going. But the bottom line is, is that we’re at a really good spot with our team. So here’s a fascinating little MRN factoid. If it’s Jason Toy and I on Pitt road, I’m the new guy at MRN at 21 years.

21 years. We have [00:49:00] people that have been there for more than 30 years. We have Alex Hayden, Jeff Striegel, Dave Moody, Mike Bagley, part timers Kurt Becker, Dan Hubbard, Jason Toye have all been there longer than I have been. I’m the new kid at 21 years. Now we’ve added Kim Coons and Dylan Welch’s and Chris Wilmer.

We’ve added some really good young people. I think that’s part of it too. I love the guys I work with. It’s so fascinating this time of year. Because we get done with Phoenix and we don’t want to talk to each other. We don’t want to see each other. We’re sick of each other. We’re never going to talk to that person again.

And then usually about Thanksgiving morning, someone will send a note. Hey, you big, dumb Turkey. Happy Thanksgiving. Well, the next thing you know, the barge is flying and everyone is doing it. I think that’s what’s next is just, I’m very, very fortunate with who I work with, who I work for, what I get a chance to do, where I get a chance to go.

Kids are great. Life is good. I’m just, uh, sitting back and enjoying the ride. That’s for sure. So Steve, you mentioned something really, really important, and it’s fundamental to the show as we try to inspire young petrolheads [00:50:00] trying to find their way in what we call the autosphere. And you mentioned more than once that you’ve caught your dream.

So if a young person came up to you and said, Steve, how do I get your job? What piece of advice would you give them? Get a microphone in your hand and start talking. It sounds really, really elementary, whether it’s high school volleyball or your local short track or college softball, get a microphone in your hand.

Because inevitably when you talk for 11, there’s that catch phrase, that’s going to be the greatest catch phrase in all of the world, you’re going to get your key Jackson, all Nelly, and then you say it the first time and it’s not nearly that good where you get that out of the way. And then you’re going to learn some other phrases, but.

Get microphone in your hand. If you want to be a broadcaster of any kind, get a microphone here. We live in a fascinating time. Back when I was a kid, you had to get a job at the radio station. Now with podcasting and blogging and vlogging and social media, there’s so many neat opportunities. Get out there and start telling the story.

Start doing it. [00:51:00] And boy, the other thing is, and this goes back to Barney Hall, our legendary iconic broadcaster, our lead voice of MRN for years and years and years. Get in the garage area and do your homework. I do all my notes during the week so that I don’t have to sit there on race morning doing my notes.

So that I can be in the garage area talking to crew chiefs or talking to drivers or doing things. So, roll up your sleeves and have fun. Motorsports is supposed to be fun. I know sometimes we work diligently at making it not fun. We work hard at making it not fun, but you know what? If you’re having a good time, you’re likely going to have success with it.

I tell everybody have fun with it. Just yuck it up, have fun with it and enjoy it. And I love new people coming into the sport. There’s going to be one of them. It’s going to take my job someday, and I may not necessarily like that person at that time, but you know, up until then. I love all the young people coming in the sport and everyone trying to follow your dreams.

That’s the whole thing. You follow your dreams and you catch it. It’s well worth it. It really truly is. I can speak from experience. Well, Steve, we’ve reached that part of the [00:52:00] episode where I like to ask my guests any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we haven’t covered thus far.

I’m just so, so fortunate and I have so many good people around me professionally and personally. And the shout out is to the young person that’s trying to pursue their career gig, whether it’s an announcing gig or whether it’s a driving gig or whether it’s a mechanic gig or whether it’s an official gig, get out there and do it, get out there and do it.

Life is meant to be lived. That’s for sure. Steve Post is currently one of the pit road reporters on MRN’s race coverage. He’s the co host of Wing Nation, an audio and television program covering sprint car racing. He’s the weekly contributor to Raceline, a nationally syndicated motorsports television program.

And for the past 20 years, he has been the lead announcer for the popular summer shootout series at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He also hosts many corporate hospitality events over the course of the year at tracks and events away from the track. So if you’d like to learn more about Steve, be sure to visit stevepostcommunications.

com or follow him on [00:53:00] social media at ThePostman68 on Facebook and Twitter. And don’t forget about his new website, postman68. com. And with that, Steve, I can’t thank you enough for coming on break fix and wrapping up your story here with part two. You know, you talked a lot about Pete Cordes and how he changed your life and he was your hero.

I want to take a moment to remind you that don’t forget that you’re a hero to many petrol heads out there as well in various disciplines of motorsports. And on behalf of all those folks, I have to say, it’s been an honor to share your story. Really great to catch up with you. I thank you for the kind words and I’m fortunate and I think I understand a little bit of that and I appreciate it.

I’m just a kid from Halsted, Pennsylvania. That’s living my dream. This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes [00:54:00] serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

org. This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers. Organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard as well as to broaden and deepen the understanding of motorized wheeled land transportation through the modern age and into the future.

For more information about the SAH, visit www. autohistory. org.

We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media [00:55:00] platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

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[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

We have a very professional speaker here who is used to commanding a classroom. George Webster was a teacher for many years, and I think this is going to be a very scholarly presentation. He’s from Oakville, Ontario. And he has been a friend of the center since the day it opened in 1999. He’s been here at all of our activities and been a big supporter of ours and we’re delighted he’s going to speak.

Now George has been coming to Watkins Glen since 1959. I think you were about four that year, weren’t you? He also was present at every U. S. Grand Prix. You might wonder how George got into this and he’ll probably tell you. Land speed records are something that we all like in motorsport, but many of us…

Have been to road races, and we’re aware of land [00:01:00] speed. George was originally interested in road racing. Since he retired from teaching, since the 70s, he’s been a motoring journalist. A number of magazines he’s written for, Auto Week Canada. He’s covered NASCAR and car for other publications. PRN Ignition, National Speed Sport News, the website Go Racing Inc.

He’s also been a photographer. He’s very, very knowledgeable in this field. I asked George, now how did you get interested in land speed? He got interested in model cars, but realizing there were thousands and thousands of model cars, his interest turned to, uh, land speed cars, because there weren’t so many.

It wasn’t gonna clutter up his house, and he wanted to keep his wife happy, and I know some guys, though, I say, my God, you got 1, 200 model cars. How does your wife tolerate it? Well, you know, those model cars are worth 800 to 500. So, the wives say, fine, keep those, I’ll have them when you pass on. He started to read more about land speed.

So, when we talked about this presentation, I said, Oh, that’s such a great [00:02:00] field. What aspect are you going to talk about? He said, well, If you give me four days, I can start at 1900 and George is going to concentrate on what happened after world war II and quickly go on to the sixties. And there’s been so much in that area and I know all of us are interested in it and I don’t know how many are experts in it.

George said, you know, I’m not an expert. But the guy is thorough. He is a great researcher. It brings to mind what an expert is. An expert is somebody that nobody can question. I had to talk to a hundred judges who came to town, and we went up around the race course in two school buses at great speed, and then I went up to the press room and I talked to these 100 judges about the history of road racing in America and Watkins Glen, and I did not have one.

contradiction from them. Now, I would never go before that group and talk to them about how to run their courtroom, or the rule of law, or the constitution. So, there may be one or two of you who may have a question or two, George, and he’s expecting it, and he’ll be very glad to hear from you. Thank you.

This is the [00:03:00] poster they put together for my speech, and it’s based on a picture that I sent to them, and it kind of tells you a bit about the evolution of the presentation. As JC said, my original idea was to do the land speed records. Quickly, within a moment, I realized that that would never work and I thought, well, maybe you could split it into three parts.

Two before World War II and one after World War II. And that was my idea that Most relevant to us would be the part that many of us lived through, the post World War II part. So, originally that was my plan and the original publicity for this gave that as the title of the presentation. I realized once I got into it that I could never do that justice.

I trimmed it down to what the title you see there, the Battle for the Landspeed Record in the 60s, Campbell, the Irfons, and Breedlove. But the picture is Gary G’s car, which is from 1970 approximately. That’s from an earlier version of the speech. Now I’m Watkins Glen. I don’t think I can do a [00:04:00] talk about the land speed record without at least mentioning Glen Curtis from Hamport.

I assume everybody knows where Hamport is. It’s over towards the three 90, but it’s not very far from here. And he started the Curtis Aircraft Company from here. In 1907, there was a speed week at Ormond Beach, which is just up the north end of Daytona Beach. And he had this V8 motorcycle with a aircraft engine in it.

And he was timed at a speed of 136. 364 mile per hour in the mile. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an official timing. So, it’s an unofficial land speed record and whenever you get these unofficial records, they’re controversial whether you should recognize them or not. Come daylight the next day when the official timers were there, he broke something in the engine, and he got that repaired, and then the chassis, the frame of the bike got bent, and he wasn’t ever able to do an official run.

So, this was considered to be the fastest speed of anything at [00:05:00] that time in 1907. Car, boat, airplane. And it has a motorcycle record as such. It’s not official. It stood for about over ten years. Anyway, that’s the local reference to the land speed record. And a reproduction of that bike is in the museum here.

And the original is in the Smithsonian. This period, post war to 66, involves the Bonneville Salt Flats, and I’m sure you all know that the Bonneville Salt Flats is, uh, the remains of an old salt lake to the west of Salt Lake City. 1949, there had been runs on the Bonneville Salt Flats pre war. The most notable was when Malcolm Campbell decided that Daytona Beach was not suitable for him to try to go any faster.

One of the big problems, if you’ve been to Daytona, there’s piers that go out and he had to shoot through the eye of the needle underneath the piers to get enough distance. The beach is sometimes good, sometimes not so good because every time the tide goes out, you get a new beach. Sometimes [00:06:00] it’s good, sometimes it’s not, and you need a long run.

Bonneville had been used before that so he went out to Bonneville in 35 and at Bonneville was able to break 300 miles an hour. For that, there were a number of other speed runs, particularly Easton and Cobb on the Bonneville salt flats in the 30s. After the war, and actually I guess it precedes the war, what we call now, we’d call hot rodders, in California who were running on Lake Muroc.

Which is Edwards Air Force Base now. So it’s the same thing, it’s just the government took it over, so it’s now called Edwards Air Force Base. So they ran there, and then they decided to come out to Bonneville in 49. And they ran a week, a speed week, late August. And they’ve been running a speed week there ever since.

And so they were making runs at that time. Other people made runs over the years as well. But those are two kind of separate things. The next thing I want to talk about is the question of official landspeed records. I’ve already mentioned that Curtis’s record wasn’t official. It wasn’t official, his wasn’t official because it wasn’t [00:07:00] officially timed.

It was timed by a buddy of his with a stopwatch. It wasn’t officially observed. So the FIA, and I assume you all recognize the FIA, is considered to be the ultimate authority in automobile racing. Particularly in the United States here, not all automobile racing comes under the FIA, but FIA considers itself to be the ultimate authority.

We’re talking about superlatives here. The fastest. And you have to have rules, so that everybody’s on the same playing field. If, for example, I said, Who is the oldest person in this room? Well, we know what the rule there is, right? The rule is birth date, and if we go and pass birth date, it would be the minute of birth.

We wouldn’t have to be in a big debate about what the rule is. However, if I said to you, What is the fastest drag racing record? What is the rule? Could somebody tell me what the rule is? Standing start over a quarter of a mile. Standing start over a [00:08:00] quarter of a mile. How many agree with that? Anybody know why that’s wrong?

No, I don’t think so. There are eighths in a mile. But standing start quarter mile used to be the standard.

So now it’s a thousand feet. So you can’t compare the old quarter mile with the current thousand. Not every class is a thousand feet. It’s just the fastest ones. And it’s a safety question. They don’t go as fast at the end of 1, 000 feet instead of 1, 320, right? It’s to get the speeds under control. So the current NHRA records for those fastest classes are based on 1, 000 feet.

Well, that’s the rule. There’s nothing magic about the rule. NHRA is the authority. They set the rule. And it used to be a quarter mile. But those old quarter mile records can’t be compared to… That’s an example of how you have to have a rule and you have to know what the rule is, and everybody has to run to the same rule.

If you’re in another place where they’re running eighth of a mile, then that’s the rule. So here’s the [00:09:00] FIA rules, and the first one is the most important in this discussion. A car has four wheels or more. And it’s driven by at least two of those wheels, transmits the power to the ground. It also has to be steered by two wheels.

It has to be timed over a measured mile or a kilometer. And this is a funny thing that you can have one mile distance or a kilometer distance and there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule which one, you sort of take whatever you want. England and the U. S. has been at the forefront of land speed records.

In both countries, you still talk in terms of miles. So the focus is on the mile distance rather than the kilometer distance. But you can set a speed record over a kilometer and claim that as a land speed record. The speed is based on the average of two runs in opposite directions. And you have to complete both the runs within an hour.

Now, if you go to the SCTA speed week in August, they do two runs. I think they do them in the same direction. They [00:10:00] do the second one the next day. So there’s no way those runs can count as FIA records. from the SCTA Speed Week. In addition to that, they average the two speeds. The speed of the first run, the speed of the second run.

And most of you probably did high school physics. And no, that’s not the way you calculate average speed. You have to take the total time, and divide it by the total distance, not the average of the two speeds. So, here you have an organization that is blissfully using an incorrect method to average the speeds.

But that’s their rule! And it doesn’t matter that they’re wrong, that’s their rule. The FIA uses the correct method of averaging the speeds, but they have another thing that I stumbled on, that they have a co*ckamamie way of rounding off their numbers. So, that’s the way they do it. That’s their rule.

Everybody has to work to that rule. Pre war, John Cobb set the fastest time. He was convinced that he could go over 400 miles an hour any time the clock had kind of run out on him before the war. So he [00:11:00] reconditioned the car, got some mobile sponsorship, came back to Bonneville in 1947, was aiming for 400.

He did one run over 400, but the average ended up at 394. So, that. became the new goal. And so for the rest of this, land speed record, 400 miles an hour is the goal. You gotta beat 400 miles an hour, basically. In those days, you had to do 1 percent better to get a new record. So I think 1 percent would actually be over the 400.

Now, in 1952, he was trying to set a water speed record, uh, on Loch Ness, and was killed. During the fifties, all these SCTA speed weeks, other people making runs, other independent people, so BMC came over three or four times, Donald Healy, Phil Hills, Sterling Moss, those of us who are Canadians probably remember Ed Levins, Ed Levins was involved in that.

We get into the 60s, and finally, people start challenging that 400 mile [00:12:00] an hour mark. Art Arfon said, this is like playing Russian Roulette. I set a new time to breed love, and you’ll come back and set a higher time. And I guess then I’ll have to come back, and then you’ll have to come back, until one of us gets killed.

And it kind of played out like that. The whole thing is playing Russian Roulette, where one guy is topping the next guy. They’re all at risk, and you’ll see that some fatalities along the way. These are the eight players. Donald Campbell, the classic. He’s the son of Malcolm Campbell, who set the records in the 30s.

He went the classic route. He read the rule book and followed it to the letter. Thought if I use a turbine engine instead of a piston engine, I’ll get a lot more power, 4, 000 horsepower. But it’s a four wheel drive. Tremendous amount of effort. Kind of the same people who did the BRM 16 cylinder project.

You remember how well that went in F1, right? Tremendous amount of industry involved, tremendous amount of money involved, tremendous amount of everything involved. Mickey Thompson, the classic American hot rodder. I’m sure you all know Mickey Thompson’s name. Hot [00:13:00] rodder, drag racing, speed runs at Lake Muroc and at Bonneville.

Had a lot of experience in that. He built the car he called the Challenger 1. He tried for Chryslers, because he thought the Hemi’s were the best way to go. And he got Pontiac to give him four big engines. Probably not quite as good a choice, but that’s what he had. Four wheel drive again. Very low, very streamlined car.

Craig Breedlove, one of the biggest names in there. Another hot rodder from L. A. He built a car up called the Spirit of America which had a J47 jet engine. In those days, the late 60s, they were scrapping the early generation of jet aircraft and these were available at the scrapyards. Didn’t know this, but these guys knew where they could find them at scrapyards and they would go to the scrapyards and they would get these engines for 500 bucks.

Driving onto Erie on the I 90, you see a jet fighter up on the pylon there. Well, there was one being installed in Oregon. One of these guys found that out and he says, you [00:14:00] know, it’ll be very heavy to mount that plane up there with the engine in it. I’ll do you a big favor. I’ll take the engine out of there and I’ll take it away for you even.

You won’t have to build a strong pylon to build on. So he got a complete engine, undamaged, all the ancillaries, basically for doing him a favor to take this scrap away. The J 47 had a lot of power. It’s 5, 000 pounds thrust and it’s a three wheeler. So on two counts, there’s no way he can get an FIA record.

It’s thrust, not wheel driven, and it’s only three wheels. Later, in 65, he built up a second generation car, which had three times more powerful engine than a J79, and it was a four wheeler, and he set a record in that. Now, Walt Arfons from Cleveland, from Akron, he and his brother Art, they actually had a feed mill.

You’d take in your grain, and they would grind it up into chop to feed your animals, and they’d mix in supplements. And that was their business. They also had a hardware side to it. Well, they got into drag racing with [00:15:00] the V 12 aircraft engines like the Allison and we’re doing demonstration runs with the Allison engine.

That’s about a thousand fifteen hundred horsepower engine and we’re doing that and then they got into doing it with jet engines. Just demonstration runs basically. I think they would go, they get paid money by the promoter. And they would go and do it. These involved him taking the salt flats and seeing how far they could go if they could really let them out.

So, Arfons had two different versions. He had the Wingfoot Express, which was an evolution of the drag strip car. And Tom Green drove that. Arfons had a heart attack, or supposedly had. He had some kind of problem and decided he shouldn’t drive. So he had Tom Green drive the Wingfoot Express. Later on, he went to a rocket powered car, and it’s Bobby Totro, you see in the photo here.

Ardar Franz’s younger brother was working with him, and they were building these drag strip cars. Because it was a promotional thing, the fix was in, of course. And the fix was supposed to be that Walt won. However, they were staging this [00:16:00] supposed competition, that once Walt had won… Art was supposed to back off.

Well, I guess art didn’t buy into the fix. And so art kept competing with him. At any rate, there was a falling out. So even though their houses were side by side in Akron, they basically never spoke again and they just went and did their own thing. I think that’s part of what fueled their rivalry on the assault.

Now he started out with what he called the anteater, which was clearly a drag racing evolution. It had the V12 Allison, 28 liters supercharged somewhere between a thousand 1600 horsepower. But that was really a drag racing car. And then he went from there to, uh, another drag racing car with a J 47 jet. He was the first to get the J 79 jet, which was much more powerful.

All the series just has green monster number 17. Actually, they were all called green monster. That was in the era of the fastest car. Then there were the Summers brothers, Bob and Bill classic hot rodders, classic Bonneville speed merchants. Bob was the driver and they built. [00:17:00] Four engined car with seven liter Chrysler Hemi’s.

So they showed up in the middle of it and created some excitement because they were quite different. They were in the middle of all these jet cars. A fellow by the name of Ethel Graham, a mechanic in Salt Lake City. I think his wife’s name was Zelda. He had a car similar to the Anteater with a V12 Allison.

Dr. Nathan Austy is a physician from L. A. He had a J47 jet, the flying Caduceus. Caduceus is the doctor’s symbol with the snakes around it. A driver by the name of Glenn Leasher, shown on the right here. The owner in the center, Romeo Paladimes. He had a J47 jet car called the Infinity. It looks pretty crude.

Notice he had the wheels fared in. And that’s the co*ckpit right out the front. That’s the drag racing style. 1959. Mickey Thompson shows up with this really pretty car, the Challenger. They got up to 363. Remember, 400 is the goal. So the fact that it’s only one way doesn’t matter. He’s not fast enough. Athol Graham shows up.

[00:18:00] He does 344 with the Alice edition. Pretty crude looking car. 1960. Athol Graham comes back. He had the car painted red, but you wouldn’t know it there. That’s what was left of it after he flipped it a number of times. And he really didn’t have any proper roll cage or seat belts or anything. That was the end of the line for Athol Graham, but not for the car.

Here’s Ostich. He showed up 237. Nowhere near 400. Arfon shows up in his anteater, open co*ckpit, 223. Again, nowhere near 400. Other than that funny seat out at the front, it looks good, but it doesn’t get enough speed out of it. Thompson comes back. It was speed week at the end of August 1960. He shows up, he did a 354.

I think it was one way. Again, nowhere near 400. The next week, Ostiches comes back, 259. Nowhere near 400. But Thompson, basically the same week, four days later, he’s back and he hits 406. 6 miles [00:19:00] per hour. Better than 400. Meets the FIA rules. Wheel driven car. Four wheels. Unfortunately, when he turned around and came back, he never completed the run.

So he gets out of the car and he says, Uh, I broke a driveshaft. Every book but one reports it that way. I broke a driveshaft. Well, if he just broke a driveshaft, why didn’t he fix it and run the next week? Well, he didn’t. One author, most recent author, and the one I think has done the best job, says that he actually blew an engine, and that he just told the reporters that he broke a driveshaft not to embarrass Pontiac.

And Pontiac, I don’t think we’re giving them any more support, and that was kind of the end of it. He didn’t have another engine to drop in there, and I think that’s the reason why he only did it one way. Goodyear blows all the trumpets for this 406. 6, but it’s not an FIA record. It’s not a two way record.

So, it’s nothing. Campbell shows up, 50 vehicles, huge entourage like an invading army. He goes out on the [00:20:00] salt. They think he got up to about 300 miles per hour. The car lost control, flipped over. Car was written off. He was lucky to survive. Project was done. All that BRM style money, all those British companies.

And it was embarrassing because you’ve got Thompson, he’s there with a station wagon and a trailer. And you’ve got Campbell with a whole entourage. Military people, you know, from everything. And he just goes out and wrecks the car. It was really embarrassing. Even though Thompson didn’t beat the old record, he kinda did.

So, 61, the orphan shows up at speed week, he does 313, and the old anteater, nothing special. That year the salt was bad, in the winter time it rains, and the water comes up, then the water evaporates, and it comes down, it gives you a new, flat surface come summer. And that’s why the speed week’s in August, once you get to August, then you’ve got the surface, and the surface will last until the rains come.

This time, the rains came… early September, and that was it. The [00:21:00] salt went soft and rough, and they just couldn’t do any more runs. So that year, basically, 61, the thing got rained out. I think 2013, the thing called the Bonneville Nationals in October were just wiped out for the same reason. At any rate, 61 was the last year.

So we come to 62. Thompson decided he’s coming back. He’s got another engine, I guess. In the meantime, he’s been doing some drag racing on the water. He’s had a crash. He’s broken his back. He’s had a whole bunch of vertebrae fused. So we don’t know quite why. Whether it was the rough course or his broken back.

Or something wrong with the car. He tried to blame it on the car, but he couldn’t get up to speed. That’s the end of the line for Thompson and speed records. I’m sure y’all know that there’s a lot more story to Thompson after that, but not here in the salt flats. Hostage is back. He gets up over 300 miles an hour, we think.

Wheel was torn off. That’s the end of it. He’s got to go back [00:22:00] and fix the car. Here’s Arfonz in his Cyclops. This is a drag strip car. Look at that fake rocket on the side. That’s not for speed. That’s just for you guys at the drag race to say, wow, look at that. But it’s just a fake rocket on the side, open co*ckpit at the front.

Cyclops, cause he had a headlight in the front because the shutdown areas of the drag strip sometimes weren’t very well lit. And he’s just brought it out. He got 330, which isn’t anything special, but it is the fastest ever for an open co*ckpit car. In speed records, people claim all kinds of speed records.

We’re trying to talk about the absolute here. Breedlove shows up. He’s got his car ready, 62. The car’s undriveable. He can’t control the car. He can’t keep it on course. He can’t steer it. They were steering it by having two brake pedals, one for each of the back wheels. That was basically the method of steering it.

After that, there’s a little fin at the front that was supposed to steer it. It just didn’t work. And Brelav went out, didn’t get going very fast at all, and said, I, that car’s [00:23:00] undriveable. Well, the designer, Ron Schapel, said, The problem isn’t the car, it’s you! You’re chicken. And a tremendous conflict arose between Breelove and Schaepel.

And Schaepel got all the volunteers, it was all volunteers, who were working on the car, on side with him, and you read about it now and you think, I don’t know why the project didn’t just fold at that point. I think the reason it didn’t fold was that at the very end of the week, they found that there was a bad problem with the bearing, and the front wheel was kind of flopping this way, and there was another problem with the steering, the way the steering was set up, it didn’t, the wheel didn’t turn as much as they thought it was, and so they demonstrated at the very end of the week that they could go faster, but remember, you rent the salt for a week, end of your week, somebody else gets the salt, the weather can come in, and you can get chopped off, so he ran out of time.

But now Goodyear had seen the potential and Goodyear really got on side. Breedlove spent about three months sitting in boardrooms meeting with engineers from Goodyear and they worked out a [00:24:00] redesign of the car. The fin at the back and made that front wheel steering, abandoned that the rear wheel brake, getting ready for next year.

Glen Leashier had Infinity, a fatal crash. So, that’s two fatal crashes. People seem kind of incensed about this. I guess they towed this up by the highway, dropped it there, and may still be there. Every time you come in to do a speed run, you see the wreckage of this car from this fatal accident. Good way to start off your week at the Sol.

Now, in November, Art Arfons, who had that Cyclops drag strip car, Found a J 79 jet engine. This has three times the thrust of those J 47s. Power’s the name of the game, isn’t it? He was working on it, and he discovered that it was scrap. It had ingested something, maybe a bolt, or a wrench, or a rock. Anyway, it had ingested something, and a bunch of the blades had been broken.

So he took it apart, took out the damaged blades, sort of moved them around so they were balanced. Not all the blades were there, but he [00:25:00] put them in balanced. So I’d run, he calls GE, it says You got a manual for that engine? I got a J79. You got a manual for that? Next day he gets a call from the government saying, What do you do with this engine?

This is a classified engine. Nobody outside the government, outside the military is supposed to have one of these. We’re sending a truck up there to pick it up right now. So he kind of just ignored them and… Anyway, he managed, he built the engine, got it going, and eventually other seals, you’ll see some other J79s trickled onto the market from various scrap dealers, but he was the first.

I guess what had happened was they had written it off as un air, not airworthy, so they just scrapped it. And he got it for 500 bucks from a dealer, and I think eventually he got two others. I think he actually had a total of three that he used to cannibalize for parts. He said he had 5, 000 total in the three inches in cost, obviously not in time.

Now we’re over into 63. The season is in Australia and Campbell after his bad experience in Bonneville said, Oh, the salt’s no good. And that’s true. The [00:26:00] salt is degrading. The length of the salt run gets less. And as I’ve already told you, if it rains, then you can lose a season like they did in 61. So he said, I’m going to do a search around the world.

And he ended up in Australia. Remember, this is a Commonwealth country, so I think that was probably another incentive for them to go to Australia. So they went to this place called Lake Eyre, or Lake Ear, which was way, way out in the middle of the wilderness of the Outback. He went out to Australia in 1963.

Despite this Lake Ear supposedly not having had any rain in human memory, it rained. And the whole season was rained out. It was flooded so much, they were lucky that the car didn’t get flooded. They only just barely… Got it loaded onto a trailer and got it out on a high ground before the floods came.

Later July is a bit early in Bonneville, but there’s Walt Arfons. Now he’s got his drag strip car. He used a J46. I’m not an expert on these aircraft engines, but that’s a Westinghouse engine. Similar in power, maybe a little bit more power than a J47G. He, for whatever reason, probably because that’s what the scrap [00:27:00] dealer had, had this J46.

And he enclosed the co*ckpit, which seems like a good idea to me, and he closed the front wheels. So he got over 300 miles an hour, but what good is that? Breedlove, now he’s back, new rear fin and the front wheel steering, and he did some test runs on the Salt in July. August 5th, 63. This is an important turning point.

Remember, land speed record has stood since Cobbs in 47, just under 400 miles an hour. He does one run at 388. He does the other run at 428. 37, which gives him a 407. 45 mile per hour average, over 400 miles per hour. This is a big event, a really big event in this chronology. But it’s not an FIA land speed record.

Three wheels, Thrust engine, it’s not FIA. However, the FIM, the motorcycle equivalent, said, You got three wheels, you’re a motorcycle. You belong to us. We don’t have a problem with thrust engines. We’ll give you the land speed record. Question is, who cares [00:28:00] whether it’s FIA or not, right? Particularly those of you Americans.

In Canada, I kind of feel caught in the middle of this, but You Americans. Who cares? He beat Cobb. He’s the fastest in the world. And so they’re saying, in the eyes of the world, he had the land speed record. There’s Campbell back in Australia, fighting away, struggling on Lake Erie, not getting any speed run, having spent millions and millions.

Now Breedlove has beat that record. And I remember the feeling like, what a loser that Campbell is. That’s it. You know, Breedlove’s done it. This car is so beautiful on top of everything else. At least in my opinion, it’s the most beautiful of all the cars. Well, later on, a guy by the name of Henry Malbach had rebuilt the city of Salt Lake.

It’s now named the Graham Special. It only reached 293 miles per hour, so that’s kind of useless. I think that was more had to do with his relationship with, uh, Graham’s widow than anything else, but that’s probably for another time and place. Osty shows up with his car. He can only get it [00:29:00] up to 350 miles per hour, even though Breedlove with the same engine had gone over 400.

Ostrich can only get up to 350 miles per hour. Perhaps the open wheels were creating more drag. Perhaps this junk engine wasn’t as good as Breedlove’s junk engine. Whatever, he couldn’t come close to Breedlove’s speed. And I should at this point say, I think most of you realize that when you’re talking about top speed, to increase speed, the drag increases exponentially, not linearly.

So if you go twice as fast, you have sort of four times the drag. So, it increases exponentially. So, as you get going faster and faster, you hit a wall. So, the difference between 350 and 407 is huge. It’s huge. It’s not just, like, that percentage difference in the speed. Huge difference. So, he’s just nowhere near.

And that’s why these cars, with the big, huge thrust engines, were good cars, because they had a lot of power. But this one never worked and he gave up. So, Maulbach comes back. He crashes at about 300 miles per hour. That was it. [00:30:00] Give up. So 64 is the first of the two big years. Campbell’s goes back to Lake Erie, try again.

Once again, rain. How unlucky can this guy be? Course is soft. Now April’s the season for him. And they frig around, frig around. And they’re basically on the verge of giving up. The season is pretty well run out. Again, look at all the logistics there. Season is basically given out. And he says, I’m gonna do one last run.

Gonna make one last attempt. So he goes out and he does 403. 1 mile per hour. Breedlove was not FIA recognized. This is faster than Cobb’s speed. So he’s got the FIA land speed record. Well, as they say, that buck might buy him a cup of coffee. Interesting thing at that time was in the U. S. That was like, ho hum, who really cares?

And whereas in Britain, they were waving the flag like crazy. Woo hoo hoo! Over this 403. And Breedlove doesn’t [00:31:00] exist. Walt Arfons comes back with that Wingfoot Express. This time he gets up faster than Breedlove. Thrust engine, remember. It’s not an FIA record, but he sets a new speed record. That’s recognized, well…

What, by the American public, by USAC, but who’s going to quibble? Our Fonz comes back, now he’s there with his J79. This is the powerhouse. This is just a monster engine with four wheels strapped onto it. That’s it. And a little co*ckpit on the side. So he gets up, remember Walt got 413 and got this unofficial LSR.

Art gets to 434, again thrust, so nobody’s recognizing it. Nobody but everybody, but the eyes of the world, he’s the lead speed record. Two days later, he has a blown tire, as you see, and so that ended his season. Car didn’t crash. There’s October the 7th. His week on the salt ends, Breedalove gets the salt. On October the 13th, he does a 4.

68 mile per hour [00:32:00] average speed. That is a FIM because it’s three wheeler land speed record. The next day he goes out and on the second run, he loses his chutes. He can’t break, he ends up in a dike of salt water. But he had a recorded speed, so he said it’s… time, speed of average 526, which was an F I M motorcycle land speed record.

The car is destroyed. Now, if you go to Chicago, the science technology museum, you’ll see the car there because Goodyear paid them to rebuild it enough to put it on display. And it’s still there in Chicago. At about the same time, the FIA each year has an annual meeting of all the member clubs. ACUS is the U.

S. club. And they set the rules for the next year. And at that time, they recognized reality that they were looking like fools. And said, okay, what we’re going to do is we’re not going to change the rules, we’re going to add to the rules. So we still have the rules, as they always were. But we’re going to add another [00:33:00] category called special vehicles.

So thrust driven. So that could be rocket, it could be jet. Otto Anzon, who was a young kid, a protege of Athol Graham, worked on rebuilding the city of Salt Lake. He rebuilt it, and he did a speed, but not a very good speed. And then he died of leukemia. I think in Salt Lake City, this was a big one of those ongoing newspaper stories.

But other than that, he didn’t do much. So, we’re in 64. October 14, Breedlove has set a land speed record over 500 miles per hour. Whoop de do, whoop de do. You’ll see over there, there’s a great big model of the car. Goodyear commissioned this model, and the idea was they’re going to sell it in all the Goodyear stores across America.

The box says, Breedlove has set the new land speed record 526. 277 miles per hour, fastest man in the world. October the 14th, rush it into production. Those days we made things in the U. S. They get it into production and I’ve got one of them. October 25, [00:34:00] two weeks later. Art comes back with his green monster, with the big J 76 jet, see how it’s just a jet edge with four wheels.

He comes back with that, he hits 536. And now FIA recognizes the thrust, so it is an FIA record. So where’s Breedlove’s record? Breedlove overcomes. So they supposedly they abandoned plans to sell that model and I bought that my model paid a premium price for on the basis that this is going to be worth a lot of money one day.

Well, I think they’re rare. Nobody cares. I paid 200 for it about 20 years ago. I saw one on eBay that sold for about 100 this year. There’s a handful of them out there, but there’s not very many. And in general, my experience with models is, I think that my model collection, which I thought was going to be worth a fortune by now, and be an inheritance for my grandchildren, they’re worth about what they were retail originally.

But, I’ve given up on that. I’m just gonna donate them to the center when I die. So, Walt Arfons comes back. He was having trouble getting up [00:35:00] to speed. This is the brother who doesn’t talk to Art. So he thought, I’ll fix it. Get some Jato rockets. He strapped some Jato rockets. USAC said, well you can’t control those from the co*ckpit, so we won’t allow that car.

They wouldn’t, it wouldn’t go through scrutineering in effect. He seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t work for him. And October, we’re getting late. The end of the season. So 65. Here he’s back. He’s built a new car. It looks like a torpedo. You can only see about a dozen JATOs in there. It actually holds 15.

Tremendous acceleration. Instead of using a few miles of run up, you only use 9 tenths of a mile run up. Well, there’s a reason for that. Because these rockets only lasted for 15 seconds. The problem was, he’d get up to a tremendous speed, and then the rockets had cut out, and then he was coasting for the rest of the way.

So, he claimed that he had got as fast as 500 miles an hour, but he only had a recorded speed of 247 for the mile. Now, one of the things is, a lot of these claimed top speeds were airspeed. And it seems like, at Bonneville, the [00:36:00] airspeed readings, and if you’re into aircraft, you probably understand this. are all 10 to 20 miles an hour high.

They’re just not reliable in the context of what we’re talking about. So only the timing from breaking timing lights is all that works. That’s September. And he didn’t get a decent speed. Breedlove shows up, he’s got a new car. Four wheeler. Now it’s FIA, for what that’s worth. And he’s got a J79 engine. So that’s the main thing.

He got up to 590 miles per hour. He claimed, but he timed to 518. Then the next time he got up to 534. But there was a lot of damage to the bodywork. This looked speed of sound, but it really wasn’t. There was, this was a really bad aerodynamic design. Took it over to Salt Lake City to an airbase that was National Guard.

They worked on it and they told the commanding officer some co*ck and bull story of what they were doing. And they worked on it and fixed the body, did a lot of fixing to the body work. Meanwhile, Waldorf Franz shows up and he’s strapped 10 more rockets. Somehow he’s satisfied [00:37:00] USAC this year. The rocket bottles started falling off.

At least one of them pointed in the wrong direction, burned the car and so on. But they were able to repair it. So on October 22nd, they had another run. And again, the rockets don’t go long enough. So even if you stage them, it just, it didn’t work. So we got up to 476, but now we’re over 500 is our target.

Walt says, leave it, go. Breedlove, now he’s got his car modified. In this picture, maybe you can see the louvers over the wheels, and there’s some dots, those are holes along the roof where he’s done it. You can see that the cowling at the jet engine’s been replaced because only half of his name is there.

So he got up to 555, a new land speed record in Sonic 1. Okay, we’re happy, right? It’s November the 2nd. Season’s over. We’ve got the salt for a week. Art is down in Las Vegas, just cooling his heels, ready to pounce. So I said, okay, well let’s get my wife in the car. Puts Lee in the car. Supposedly the PR said she’d never been over 75 miles an hour before in her life.

So she does [00:38:00] 308 miles per hour, what they claim is a women’s record. There’s no such official thing, of course, but that doesn’t use up all the time. So they called Shelby up and said, well, can we borrow one of your Daytona coupes? So he ships it up and Breedlove and Tatrold, those two different drivers for two different teams, right?

But they’re both Goodyear. So they get in the car. They ran around in circles, 12 hours, 24 hours. Well, you can imagine what this is doing to the salt. So Art shows up and says, what the hell have you guys been doing? You’ve been screwing me up. You wrecked the salt. What could I do? So anyway, he goes out. He claimed he did 625 by airspeed.

At any rate, he ends up with an average speed of 576, which is a new land speed record. So once again, Breedlove is screwed, right? Remember, this is November the 2nd, pretty late. He delays and delays. But November the 7th, Arfons is on, but Arfons, his time runs out, and if you’re not using it, then you lose [00:39:00] it.

Two days later, on November 7th, they didn’t have much Firestone on the car, but this is on Firestone’s time. Summer shows up with a Goldenrod. This is four Chrysler engines. Does 409 average, which is an official speed record for wheel driven cars. Again, it’s not the same kind of thing, but everybody recognizes that there is such a record.

Breedlove, November the 15th. That was really lucky that he could keep going. But he’s back on November the 15th. And he gets in the car and he averages 600. 601 miles per hour. That’s it. So he’s the first to have reached 400, 500, and 600 miles per hour. So that’s the end of the season finally. Breedlove’s got the record.

Art is out of luck. 66, Art comes back, he’s had problems with blowing the rear tires, too much loading on the rear, so he went to dual rear wheels, but that had added weight and drag, he was having trouble getting up to speed, November the 17th, he was probably doing well over 600 miles per hour, the right front wheel bearing broke, [00:40:00] there was a massive crash at over 600 miles per hour, car was destroyed as you can see, Arfon survives.

Amazingly, nobody thought there was going to be any ambulance needed. Firestone had lost, pretty much lost interest in supporting any more land speed record attempts. They weren’t going to sponsor our funds anymore. Goodyear was pretty happy with 600. They couldn’t see anything to be gained in setting a record of 650.

Particularly when there was, nobody else was attempting it. So, Goodyear said to Breedlove, that’s the end of the funding from us. Firestone, the same. And so that was the end of that era. There have only been three speed records set since that time, and the most recent one in 97. And that’ll be it for today.

Certainly.

He popped the [00:41:00] canopy, he, uh, he undid the belts, and he swam out. He was underwater. They didn’t play up how close the thing that was. They didn’t, but they didn’t play up how… Well, that’s Breedlove, I think, that he combed his hair. But it was under his helmet, right? Well,

it’s actually Andy Green again. Went to the website this morning, and found a list of seven different possible people who are attempting it. The most promising is the bloodhound. Which is really an extension of the British efforts from the Thrust II to the Thrust SSC. Andy Green is slated to be the driver of this.

It’s another one of those multi, multi million dollar British efforts in that style. George, there seemed to be a big boost in speed from 61 and then about 63 and 4. I think they finally got their act together. Those jet engines had so much power. Just had so much power. You figure, Thompson gets out [00:42:00] there and does 400.

With four Pontiacs. Jet engines had like, multiples, multiples of the power. Just seemed like a big boost. But it showed that Breedlove, if he could get the rest of the act together, there was so much power. And of course, with our Fonz, he had three times, again, as much power. Now they’ve got even more. Yes, sir.

What’s the current record? Where was it established? Was it a thrust motor? Two Jets. A car called Thrust SC, supersonic, driven by Andy Green at Black Rock. And it’s Speed of Sound. It’s west of Bonneville. So it’s over, sort of, near, uh, Reno. Somewhere over that direction. You know, Bad Day at Black Rock?

Didn’t you see the movie? It’s not salt. It’s a different kind, slightly different formation. But it’s Speed of Sound. About 720, I think. I’m just curious if Art Armstrong and Fred Breedlove were… Quoted earlier that Art said to Breedlove that this is Russian Roulette. You can see that for… Our fawns, it [00:43:00] came pretty damn close, and for breed love, in fact, even earlier, that they were playing with death, and they were pushing each other.

This is all second hand. My impression is, other than Walt and Art, where that was family, that was a personal family thing, I think these people, like competitors out here in the paddock at the Glen, They’re all competitors, they’re competitors, but they’re all in the same business. They all have common interests.

You get them a hundred meters away from the paddock and they’re friends. You get them down to the Seneca Lodge and they sit and have dinner together. I think it was very much that way with Breedlove and Art. Was Donald Campbell’s car thrust or wheel driven? It was a turbine. Was it wheel driven? Like the cars that ran in Indianapolis.

Like the turbine cars that ran in Indianapolis. It would be very similar to that. I’ve got to defend the, uh… But you were talking about the FIA. I grew up listening to them. Although

you talk about, you know, the amount of money they were spending, the difference was, they were [00:44:00] building cars to drive the wheels for the ladder speed record. A jet engine, or a fighter plane, when all you were basically trying to do was keep it on. Which I know is not the way it was. But that was the way it was reported in Britain.

That the original rules… Was to have a car, which was, and that was the land speed record. Now admittedly, they’ve now changed it, and of course the latest British car is, is also a thrust, but that’s why the money was involved. Plus also British industry. And remember, after the war, they didn’t have the money.

There is a comparison. I’m not taking anything at all away from breed level. It was a different type of race, different color. Yeah. I did try to say one against the other. This is an American audience. And I’m speaking to an American audience. I have been trying to remember how I felt in the 1960s. In the early 60s about this.

I think most of us got our start in road racing. As a Canadian in road racing, I read all the British magazines. [00:45:00] So I’m kind of an anglophile when it comes to racing. And I’m kind of on that anglophile side. I’m not trying to take anything away from what you said. But it’s interesting to hear the difference between…

To this day, the attitude towards the thrust projects and to the bloodhound project in Britain is much different than here. And it’s a much different approach, but I’ll tell ya, anytime some guy can haul his car, like Thompson did, out to the flats, behind his station wagon on a trailer, and, and Bess Campbell, who’s got 50 vehicles on the salt, It’s embarrassing.

Just like the BRM project was embarrassing. I’m not old enough to remember that from the day. But I certainly, I’m enough of a historian of Formula 1 to know how embarrassing that BRM project was. I just got to finish and say I was at Silverstone when they were trying to run the BRM and it never came by.

But it [00:46:00] was embarrassing. Had they not blown their horns so much? You saw the newsreel, like, man, the newsreel, you would never know that Bonneville ever existed. Was that the age 16? Yes. No, no, not the age 16. This was a V 16 from 1950. We just tried to match the old four and a half litre, one and a half litre and a half supercharger.

The BRM, the old BRM. Yeah, so this. Oh no, this was, it was the same as this. It was all, all those companies come in and poured in a tremendous amount of money. It’s also a matter of politics, the way you do things. And even though it’s industry, it’s kind of a government, socialistic kind of thing, what they did in Britain.

And here it’s free enterprise, the little guy. Uh, I’m in the middle of that. I, I see both sides of it myself. Alright, thank you very much. Thank you. Great, great storytelling.

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