The Good Ol’ Days at
(Click to enlarge pictures)
Ahhh,
those were the days…Chuck Barnes in his all-American number 5, ready to head
out for Figure 8 practice…now he’s turning the wrenches for his son Chuck Barnes Jr., who’s already won an
All-American 400!
Meanwhile, the driver of this car has gone
on to win nine ARCA titles…Frank Kimmel.
Joe
Williamson is one of the all-time nice guys of racing. Not only is he a past
champion at LMS (the little-remembered “Winter Series” of 1988) but he won a
lot of races there, including one the night of April 11, 1992…when he let me
drive this very car onto the track for my wedding! Here track steward Tom Ford
(another great guy) poses with Joe following a heat race win.
Of
course everybody loved the Late Models, but they liked them even more when the
NASCAR guys came to town and drove ‘em. Here is the ride normally wheeled in
those days by Preston Ford, on this particular night being driven by that guy
looking it over, one of my heroes, 1992 Winston Cup Champion Alan Kulwicki.
Dale Jarrett came to town too, and took a
turn behind the wheel of Joe Williamson’s 11.
Another Late Model, another Cup driver
taking the wheel: Sterling Marlin.
And here’s Buddy Baker talking with track
announcer (and current Monster Truck empresario) Scott Douglass before he climbs into Ron
Phillips’ racer. Ron was another nice guy who did what a lot of people tried to
do and failed: he took on the best at LMS during the heyday and won a feature
race.
Buddy, meanwhile, came back a few years
later and drove one of the Sportsman cars. He is another of my all-time
favorite drivers and is a genuinely nice person.
These three guys should require no
introduction anywhere in the racing world, but just in case you’ve been in
sleeping since the mid-60’s, they are, left to right, Cale Yarborough, David Pearson, and Richard Petty.
Left to right: Dale Jarrett, Richard
Childress (talking to David Pearson) and Geoffrey Bodine.
Davey Allison doing a TV interview, and later, accepting congratulations for his
feature win in Keith Gardner’s “Thunderchicken” (a
Ford with a Chevy engine.) Keith is second from the left in this picture, and
he is still racing today…and he’s still very
competitive!
Davey Allison, Hut Stricklin,
and Buddy Baker…
…Sterling Marlin, Michael Waltrip, and Dale Jarrett…
…Sterling, DJ, Hut, and Buddy…
…and Joe Ruttman with a “redshirt”…who
just happens to be me. The
1980 USAC Stock Car Division Champion, later Joe would race Winston Cup and
later still become a major hotshoe in the Craftsman
Truck Series with Bobby Hamilton Racing. He’s mostly retired now, but still
finds time to come out and run occasionally at Nashville…and he’s still fast.
NASCAR stars
notwithstanding, the big draw at LMS was always the Figure 8. And why
not? It was a crash-bang affair week after week, often drawing so many cars
that we’d have to run B or even C features!
Here’s that “redshirt”
again. Note the well-groomed appearance and casual attitude. Needless to say,
this is a pre-race shot. What follows would be a post-race shot…
…talk about being buried in work. The
paperwork involved in scoring a typical weekly short track is bad enough, but
at Louisville the workload was massive, as in a couple of hundred cars on any
given weekend. And that’s not hyperbole, folks; we’re talking thirty Figure 8
cars, 25 Sportsman, 50-60 Rookie Bombers, 25-30 (or more!) Late Models, 30 or
more Mini Stocks, 20 Rookie Figure 8s, and often as many as 75 to 80 Oval
Bombers. You do the math, I did it every week for more years than I care to
remember!
That said, I will gleefully
note that the time spent at LMS were some of the finest of my life, and I
sorely miss it and all the people involved with it. It has long since been
razed, but I have a chunk of the pit asphalt on my bookshelf, and a lot of memories.
Back to the
Pictures
Page
Back to the
Home Page