Guest Column by Cathy Elliott
When Jimmie Johnson accepted his 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series winner’s trophy in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, it seemed that all of our champions had received their just rewards; NASCAR Nationwide Series victor Brad Keselowski and Todd Bodine, who took home the NASCAR Camping World Series title, celebrated their victories back in November.
But we are not quite finished. On Dec. 10 and 11, NASCAR will celebrate six more of its hard-charging champions. The NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Awards Banquet will be held Friday, Dec. 10 and the NASCAR Touring Series Awards Gala will be held on Saturday, Dec. 11. Both events are hosted by the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
The honorees include:
NASCAR Whelen All-American Series champion Keith Rocco. NASCAR’s touring series don’t use a Chase format to determine their champions. It is strictly points-based, and Rocco racked ’em up, clinching the title — his first — with more than a month remaining in the season, racing at places like South Boston Speedway and Bowman-Gray Stadium.
NASCAR K&N Pro Series West champion Eric Holmes. Holmes is three-time winner in this series, which competes at a couple of venues that also host annual Cup Series weekends, including Infineon Raceway and Phoenix International Raceway.
NASCAR K&N Pro Series East champion Ryan Truex. The younger brother of Martin Truex Jr. won five races in 2010 on the way to his second consecutive championship in this series and will compete in the NASCAR Nationwide Series full-time in 2011. Can the kid brothers of successful NASCAR drivers hope to find success when moving up the ranks? Let me call Kyle Busch and get back to you on that.
NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour champion Burt Myers, another champion from an influential racing family, if you take the time to sort through the family tree, you will discover that Burt is a relative of Chocolate Myers, former fueler for Dale Earnhardt. Apparently getting on the gas runs in the family.
NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour champion Bobby Santos III. At 25, Santos, a third-generation racer, is the youngest champion in the history of the Modified Tour. He also has a golden opportunity to be the guy with coolest nickname — B3, which sounds like a cross between a BINGO game and a character from Star Wars.
NASCAR Canadian Tire Series presented by Mobil 1 champion D.J. Kennington. Racing is extremely popular in Canada, and Kennington has done our neighbors to the north proud, winning his first championship and giving them something a little more exciting to watch than those guys pushing rocks around on the ice with brooms.
The median age of drivers in NASCAR’s top series seems to be trending younger all the time. Although Mark Martin continues to do his best to blow the curve, the sight of guys strapping themselves in and maneuvering their way around the world’s most famous speedways when other kids their age are still trying to figure how they’re going to maneuver themselves through high school algebra has now become routine.
The result is that many of us are starting to think that drivers practically go straight from sippy cups to stock cars.
A big part of the reason for this is media coverage. Until a driver makes his way to the top of the totem pole, we just don’t hear or read that much about him (or her). Unless, of course, you live in the vicinity of one of North America’s short tracks, and there are a lot of them. In fact, if you believe everything you read on the Internet — and who doesn’t? — there are upwards of 1.500 short tracks in North America. They host competitors ranging from future superstar material with serious sponsorship and quality equipment to drivers who work all day at their ‘regular’ jobs and all night in their backyards and garages, just to be able to go racing on the weekend.
Like the racers themselves, NASCAR started small and worked its way up.
A research project I worked on recently involved gathering media coverage of racing events in South Carolina from the early 1960s. Here’s a sample, from the Columbia Record in June 1961:
“A 100-mile race at the Piedmont Interstate Fairgrounds track at Spartanburg, S.C. Friday night launches the week’s stock car program in the Carolinas. A field of at least 20 cars will be on hand for warm-ups and trials at 6:30 with the race starting at 8:30. David Pearson tops the drivers. Others entered include Joe Weatherly, Junior Johnson, Cotton Owens, Rex White and Ned Jarrett.”
That’s the end of that particular story, but it was only the beginning of NASCAR’s story. These drivers who went out and ran the 100-milers on summer nights ultimately became the foundation of the sport, the names on which it built its popularity and reputation. In the final two lines of that four-sentence sports brief, there are three NASCAR Hall of Famers. And I wouldn’t bet against the other three.
To end up in NASCAR’s Hall of Fame, you have to start somewhere, and in the vast majority of cases, that ‘somewhere’ is the short tracks of America. They stretch from the Carolinas to California, from Texas to Iowa. They are dirt, and they are asphalt; some are rustic, while others are surprisingly high-tech. They generally run five or six races per evening, in various classes, and if you’re wondering where the ubiquitous phrase “Boys, have at it” came from, look no further. These guys would take one look at the Cup Series antics of drivers like Carl Edwards, Brad Keselowski and Kyle Busch, sniff and say, “Amateurs.”
On this weekend, there are no amateurs. There are six new NASCAR champions.
If you visit http://hometracks.nascar.com, you can find a series of photos of all six touring series champions, each taken with a legend of the sport — Bobby Allison, David Pearson, Richard Petty. Lloyd Dane, Junior Johnson and Jerry Cook.
As you admire these wonderful shots of the heroes of NASCAR’s past, it is interesting to note that you may well be getting a look at its future at the same time.
The opinions expressed in this articles are solely those of the author and not this website.
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