Historical Context

I like to look at race cars.  Especially old race cars, but also just race cars in general.

I have books full of pictures of old race cars, I search for videos of old race cars on YouTube, and I peruse Google Image searches of old race cars.  And pretty much any time that something with wheels and an engine is on a racetrack, on my television, I am going to watch that.

This all began, as best as I can tell, on Sunday, April 13th, 1986, my earliest memory of seeing a race on TV.

I'm not sure what it says about me as a person that I saw a man jump out of a car on to the ground, being burned by invisible fire and gesturing for his crew to put it out, and it made me think, "This is great.  I want to see more of this," but for better or for worse, a seed had been planted.

Literally the only thing that I remember about the race is the guy laying on his stomach in the pit stall and slapping the backs of his legs to indicate to his crew that the alcohol fuel was still burning him.  But, I also remember spending the rest of the afternoon riding my bike around the block while wearing my Chicago Bears football helmet, and imagining that I was a race car driver.  And I remember that in first grade we were supposed to practice writing by writing down what we did over the weekend, and I remember writing about the race and riding my bike.  So, through the modern miracle of the internet, I found that someone has actually uploaded dozens and dozens of old CART races from the 1980s, and I actually only had to watch three races from the Fall 1985-to-Spring 1986 time frame before I found the pit fire that I remembered.

As kind of a strange coincidence, the driver who was on fire was Dale Coyne, who is from Minooka, Illinois.  He now owns a race team which is based in Joliet, and when I was in college I drove down there one summer and dropped off a resume to see if they had any need for summer interns.  Not surprisingly, I didn't hear back from them.  But in an effort to illustrate my love of racing, and to put a personal touch on the cover letter, I briefly described riding my bike around the block in my Bears helmet, pretending to be a race car driver when I was in the first grade.  I didn't realize at that time that the guy who I was applying to for a job was the same guy who I had watched on TV on that afternoon in 1986.

One other thing that I think I can vaguely recall from that afternoon is my dad commenting to a neighbor, "Well, Arden discovered a new sport today," and then telling him that we had watched the race on TV.  That same neighbor's wife was a smoker, and I guess Winston cigarettes sent her a VHS video of highlights from the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (later known as the Nextel Cup Series, now known as the Sprint Cup Series), which she gave to me.  I think maybe she sent in UPC codes to get it.

I think I had seen stock car races on TV here and there before that, but almost all the NASCAR races were still on ESPN back then, and we didn't have cable.  But stock cars appealed to me quite a bit, and I loved that VHS tape.  Actually, I still have it.  That was where I first started learning about Richard Petty and David Pearson, Cale Yarbrough and Darrell Waltrip, and of course:  Dale Earnhardt.

Another name that I learned from that tape was Bobby Allison.  Bobby Allison was a great stock car driver, but he would later become significant to me because I found out that we have the same birthday, and because he drove for Junior Johnson when Johnson started running first generation Monte Carlos in the early '70s.  That was significant to me because Bertha was a first generation Monte Carlo.  And now I also recently found out that Bobby Allison was one of the drivers who drove one of the 1965 Impala stock cars that Smokey Yunick built, which strikes me as another small coincidence.  I even once found a photo of a Corvair race car that Bobby Allison raced.  This either illustrates that Bobby Allison and I share a common taste in cars, as well as a birthday, or else maybe just that Bobby Allison has raced a whole lot of different race cars.

I guess if you spend as much time as I do looking through old racing photos, stories and records, you are bound to happen on to a few coincidences here and there, but here's one more:  one of the most successful drivers to compete in a 1965 Impala was J.T. Putney, whose hometown is Arden, NC.

And all of this and a dollar-fifty might buy you a cup of coffee.  I don't really know, though, I don't drink coffee.