This NASCAR fan has plenty of favorite drivers
I was on the hillside at Phoenix many years ago, watching my first NASCAR race, when this good ol’ boy from one of the Carolinas or Tempe asked the identity of my favorite driver.
This would have been in the 1980s, when most of the drivers were named Dale or Rusty.
I said I didn’t have a favorite.
I was told I better “git myself one,” because one isn’t truly a NASCAR fan until one has a favorite driver.
By the time I got to Phoenix for the next year’s race — actually, by the time I got to Wikieup — I had a bunch of favorite drivers.
I also had a grandstand ticket, owing to those hillside porta-potties.
At the top of my list are — what else? — a Dale and a Rusty.
I wanted to go with Jarrett, because this one time at the Imperial Palace, when Dale Jarrett was supposed to be chewing fat with his sponsors, he chewed it with me instead, saving me an hour and a half on deadline.
Instead I went with Earnhardt — not for those seven championships and the awesome Yosemite Sam mustache, but because he once said that two of his favorite things were his steering wheel and his Remington rifle.
“The only thing I think about is winning races,” The Intimidator said. “It’s like shooting the most ducks with the least shells. You don’t want to be standing there with a whole pile of shells on the ground and one duck.”
This is how all NASCAR drivers should speak.
The reason I have Rusty Wallace on my list is because when I edited a column he would write for the newspaper, he used “obsolete” as a verb and “floatier” as an adverb.
“We obsoleted that T-Bird because it was running floatier through the turns,” Rusty wrote. Let Hemingway try that without pulling a muscle.
I have Ned Jarrett, Dale’s old man, among my favorite traders of paint because when I wrote about him a couple of years ago, the next day when I arrived at the track, he was waiting in the press room to say, “Thanks.”
Marty Robbins makes my list, because he’s the only guy to have a No. 1 hit record (“El Paso”) and drive at Daytona. And “Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy),” the imaginary pal of another late, great balladeer, Jim Croce, who sang, “Roy so cool, that racin’ fool, he don’ know what fear’s about. He do a 130 mile’ an hour, smilin’ at the camera with a toothpick in his mouth.”
Earnhardt and Rapid Roy would have made excellent drafting partners.
Alan Kulwicki was the first guy to drive around the track backward after winning a race — the so-called Polish Victory Lap — and when asked about the difference between nighttime racing and daytime racing said, “It’s basically the same, just darker.” So he makes my list.
And Fast Eddie Hoffman, the former track champion at Illiana Motor Speedway in Schererville, Ind.
Back in high school, my pal Flip and I would load up a Styrofoam cooler with Old Style beer and head out to the paved bullring tucked among the cottonwoods, between U.S. Highway 41 and Interstate 65, where we’d chase farm girls who wore cutoff shorts with fringe on the bottom.
Fast Eddie Hoffman, who drove a black Late Model Camaro with a big gold No. 1 on the side, did a lot better than we did, though Flip once did get the phone number of a cute girl with freckles from Valparaiso.
As for the current crop of Sprint Cup lead foots, I have taken a shine to Kevin Harvick, because he never acts put upon when you ask a question he has heard 78 times before, and because he admits that his wife, DeLana, does wear the firesuit in his family.
And Juan Pablo Montoya. Because when NASCAR was looking for a volunteer to drive his car into the track dryer during prime time at the rain-delayed Daytona 500, causing a big fireball that would have everybody talking about it at the water cooler the next day, Montoya was the only one who raised his hand.
The last driver on my list of favorites would be this guy who literally drove the wheels off the No. 77 jalopy during a figure-8 race at Raceway Park in Blue Island, Ill., around 1964 or ’65.
When the wheels came off the 77, there was a shower of sparks, followed by a crash, and then a lot of acrid blue smoke hung over the track. It looked and smelled of mayhem out there.
I must have been 7 or 8 years old, and I’ve been fascinated by stock car racing ever since.
Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.
