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The Greatest NASCAR Story Ever Told:Part 2

by Greg Engle
Cup Scene Daily
June 16,2003

Thanks for visiting and enjoy the Greatest NASCAR Story Ever Told!

He didn’t realize where he was at when he first awoke. After sitting up and clearing his head, he remembered. He smiled, feeling better after his little ‘catnap’. He walked from the hauler.

The air at the Daytona International Speedway was nippy. Well it was January, so that was to be expected. The man was grateful that he was there for only a test session. He didn’t mind signing autographs for the fans, it was just nice to be able to walk around without getting assaulted by the crowds. No media, no pre-race ‘hoopla’, just him and the car and that was how he liked it. He saw his crew chief coming towards him.

"Hey sleepy head,"he said with a smile, "You ready to get back at it...Junior?"

The young driver smiled back and followed him to the garage.

As he walked towards the garage area, the young man thought about how much he really hated that name. ‘Junior’, it made him feel like he was always standing in his fathers shadow.

Not that standing in his father’s shadow was such a bad thing. It’s just that he always felt he’d have spend the rest of his life trying to top his fathers record in the sport and that would be a mighty tall order indeed.

The young driver walked across ground as familiar to him as a person’s front yard would be to anyone else. He’d grown up at racetracks like the one whose infield he now walked across.

He’d known no other life than this, the big time world of stock car auto racing: NASCAR. His life had been a sheltered one. His childhood was filled with memories of sitting around a pit lane watching his father become a legend.

During his short life, he’d never been like other kids. He never went to public school, never lived in the suburbs or played with other, ‘regular’, kids. Owing to the millions of dollars his father had amassed over the years, the family owned a big private estate home in North Carolina,. His education consisted of race set-ups and the best way to tune a carburetor. His childhood playmates were those from the neighboring motorhomes at the racetrack. Their playground was the garage area.

The young driver had grown up as the sport had. NASCAR was now a multi-million dollar industry and the young man was one of it’s up and coming stars.

Living in his fathers’ shadow didn't scare him at all. On the contrary, that shadow was something he had used to his advantage, to open the doors normally closed to outsiders.

He had a lot of work yet to do and he knew it. There was a great deal for him to live up to. His father had been a relative unknown when he had started, but Junior had the advantage of being ‘the son’, the offspring of the legend. And he had the shadow, it seemed to hover over him wherever he went.

He’d started his rise in the minor leagues of the sport and with his fathers financial backing and the talent he’d inherited, he’d soon conquered that division, becoming it’s Champion, two years in a row.

Now, he was set to began his second full season in the sports top division. The previous season, his rookie one, had seen Junior win two races and run competitively in the others. He now felt he was just were he needed to be; positioning himself to be next in line for the throne.

Junior walked casually into the garage area. His sleek race car was suspended in the air by four jackstands. The tires were off the car and several crewmembers were laying underneath.

Junior leaned against a concrete wall at the entrance to the garage and folded his arms in front of him. He smiled and looked at his crew as they worked on his car.

Tony, the teams’ crewchief, held a clipboard as he stood at the front of the car. Tony looked the part of the ‘father’ of the crew. Short and chubby, he had a stubby white beard to match the short white hair on his head.

And oh, Junior thought, the knowledge stored in that head. Tony seemed to know more about a race car than anyone he’d ever met before. It was almost like he knew too much, Junior thought. He never understood how so much knowledge could be shoved in a head that size, but it was and Junior was grateful to have it at his disposal.

A long lean young man slowly wheeled himself out from under the car. He held a large spring across his chest. This was Alex, a friend of Juniors who’d learned enough by hanging around the ‘playground’ of the garage area as he and Junior grew up together, that he eventually earned a spot on the team.

Alex always reminded Junior of a young Abe Lincoln, minus the beard. Alex knew nothing outside of racing and race cars. He always had grease under his fingernails and was always working on something. His look of concentration and focus could downright frighten a person when they saw it. Junior had a nickname for Alex: ‘Captain Intensity’.

"What’s up dude." The voice came from behind Junior.

As Junior turned and looked over his shoulder, a middle aged man with a pony tail hanging down his back, walked by carrying a large spring in each hand.

Jimmy was one of the strangest men Junior ever met. He seemed as though he’d never left 1969. Although his face was hard to see under his bushy beard, the lines around his eyes and the gray flecks in his hair betrayed his age..

Originally from upstate New York, Jimmy had started in Juniors Fathers’ shop years ago. He had started out doing odd jobs around the shop, pushing a broom or taking out the trash, eventually earning a pit crew position on the team.

No one ever asked about his past and Jimmy never volunteered to tell. All Junior knew was that his father had seen something in the man and hired him. Jimmy was always joking around, if there was a practical joke to be pulled, Jimmy was usually involved. And for some strange reason, Jimmy always seemed to be smiling. Except on raceday. Then Jimmy would become deadly serious, he almost seemed at times to be like an animal. He was the front tire changer on pitstops and no one, at least that Junior had ever seen, could wield an air-wrench and change a tire faster then Jimmy.

A large man(he towered over everyone in the vicinity) with broad shoulders and a blond flat-top hair cut, turned from the workbench on the far side of the garage stall, where he’d been working and faced Junior.

Everyone, of course, called the man ‘Tiny’ or sometimes just,‘TJ’. Tony Jr. was the son of Tony Sr., the crewchief and looked just the exact opposite of his father.

How a young face could be a part of such a huge physique was a mystery. He had no facial hair and looked as though he were all of about fourteen, even though he was actually twenty four. On raceday’s he was the team’s ‘jackman’, jumping over the wall during a pitstop carrying a heavy hydraulic jack. Tiny would then slam the jack under the car and after two pumps have the car in the air before rushing to assist with the changing of the tires.

There were others, a lot of ‘others’, but this was the core of his team and Junior loved them as though they were family. Heck, he thought, the ARE his family.

Using his Daddies money and his shadow, Junior had amassed some of the finest talent in the sport today. Talent needed to help in his ascension. Not that he felt he needed all of it, he knew he could drive a race car better than anyone on the planet, it was what he’d been raised for.

There were times he felt that it was the only reason he’d been born.

Junior pushed away from the concrete wall and stared as his crew put the race car back together. He began to get a feeling deep down in his gut as the car was being reassembled. The more it came together, the more the feeling grew, warm and low in his belly. It was a feeling not unlike the lust of man when he looks at a beautiful, desirable woman.

When he’d first felt that warmth, it almost frightened him. It was just after the very first time his Daddy let him sit in a stock car. Junior could still remember the way the seat felt, hot and sticky on his back. The smoothness of the steering wheel as he gently caressed it.

As he’d sat in that racecar, realized the power it possessed and the places it could take him, he knew that he was in that right place, that the cockpit of that race car was where he truly belonged. It was then he knew that he was the heir apparent and the seat in the race car was his throne.

After he had climbed out, then stood back and looked at the lines of the car, the warm feeling began deep down inside him. It took him a moment to realize what is was; The feeling was a fire, a fire welling up from deep inside him. A fire lit by the thought of the power he had in the race car and the talent in his head and hands. A fire that could only be extinguished by being the best, by winning.

Over the years he’d learned he could channel that fire. He could cause the energy from it to spread throughout his entire body. From the top of his head to the tips of his toes, he could send that energy spreading outward until he actually felt warm all over. And by the time he climbed into a race car, the energy was at it’s highest and he would be well on the way to entering the ‘zone’.

The ‘zone’ is a place drivers inhabit when they are driving a race car at nearly two hundred miles an hour. All focus, all thoughts, their entire sphere of conscious lay between the two painted lines on a race track. If you were to see the face of the driver during this time, you’d see eyes that stared straight ahead a face frozen in a look of total concentration.. Their mouth is slightly open and their head will hardly ever move, instead their eyes occasionally dart around as they check the sphere around them. People in the stands, television cameras, announcers up in a press box all mean nothing. The entire world for them runs from one edge of the asphalt to the other.

By the time car was carefully pushed back out of the garage, Junior was ready. He was quite comfortable under his drivers suit, despite the chilly air.When the crew stopped, Junior, without saying a word, walked to the car and climbed in.

The first thing one notices inside a modern day stock car, beyond the obvious fact that you have to climb in due to there being no doors, is that while the outside of the car is made to look sleek and attractive, the inside is the complete opposite. Here it’s all business, no slick paint job, no fancy decals, nothing designed to be astitically pleasing. There’s nothing to take away from the fact that this is where the business of the sport all leads to.

With the steel tubes of the roll cage surrounding you, you begin to feel almost ‘cacooned’. The window net on the on left side of you restricts your vision somewhat after you buckle it in place.

The drivers seat itself seems to wrap around you. Two small pads molded into the seat extend outwards just above your waist, another just to the right of your head. This makes it seem as though the seat is cradling you. Then you belt yourself in using wide nylon straps. You cinch up the military aircraft style buckles tightening the straps to the point where they almost cause physical pain. This is to insure that in the event of an accident you remain firmly in place. Once the belts are tightened down, you begin to understand what fighter pilots and race car drivers mean when they say that you’re strapping the machine on and becoming part of it, because you and the racecar are now as one.

The gauges on the dash look familiar yet somehow foreign. There’s oil pressure and fuel pressure gauges, along with oil and engine temperature indicators all surrounding the much larger tachometer in the center of the dash just in front of you. A row of switches are to the left of the gauges. And after you flip up the switches in order and then finally flip the last one, the switch marked ‘primary ignition’ that the engine roars to life.

The noise is the first thing that hits you. Even with foam hearing protectors under the small earpieces for the 2-way radio taped over your ear to hold them in place and the added insulation of your helmet, the noise still startles you somewhat. It’s a low rumble, like having the bass on your street cars stereo turned all the way up. It’s when you first wrap your gloved hands around the steering wheel, though that you begin to actually feel the power of the 750 horsepower engine under your control.

Transmitted through the heat absorbing insulation at your feet, the rubber coated steering wheel in your hands, through the metal gearshift knob and the seat itself, the engine vibration courses through your entire body. It’s at this point you get an eerie feeling: It’s as though the machine is alive.

Only when the engine temperature reaches a certain point, usually 140 degrees, do you attempt to transmit the power under the hood through the tires and to the ground.

The clutch is smoother than any you’ve ever felt before. The engine takes hold as slowly as you release the pedal. The machine, once rolling, is hard to control at an idle, because this is a condition the engine wasn’t really built for. As you wind your way slowly through the garage area to pit road and the track, the race car feels as though it’s trying to escape from the cage it’s in: Like a beast ready to be unleashed.

When you turn onto pit road and look down towards turn one your excitement increases.

If you were to simply mash the gas pedal to the floor, the rear tires would only spin, so instead you gradually increase the pressure until the beast begins to escape from the cage and roll down pit road. Only when you reach the end of pit road and transition onto the track itself do you fully press the pedal to the floor. You’ve thrown open the cage door and let the beast run free onto the Daytona International Speedway.

It feels like someone hits you in the chest as you’re pushed back in your seat when the power increases and you roar off towards turn one. A race car has to be doing at least eighty miles an hour before it can even hold the steep 31 degrees of banking in the turns of the super speedway, so the first time you enter turn one, you’re on the apron looking up at the asphalt looming above you.

As you exit turn two and move up fully onto the racing surface, you’re in third gear and going well over 100 miles per hour. You’ve been pushed back in your seat as far as possible.

You shift into fourth gear about halfway down the 3000 foot backstretch, or as it’s called at Daytona, the ‘superstretch’. Now the engine begins it’s wind-up to full power. Since the engine is equipped with a ‘restrictor’ plate, the amount of air coming into the powerplant retards to horsepower somewhat, so it’ll take nearly a full lap around the 2.5 mile track to come up to full speed.

When you enter turn three for the first time, you can now hold the banking, so you enter at just about the halfway point of the 40 foot wide track. The trick here, to gain maximum speed, is to ease the race car down as close to the yellow line at the bottom of the turn as possible without slipping off and onto the apron below.

As the rpm’s of the engine go higher the vibration lessens. You now feel a new sensation, that of the tires contacting the asphalt, you begin to actually feel the track thundering by under you. Every tiny imperfection in it’s surface, every dip, even if not visible to the naked eye, is transmitted to your body. The sound of the air coming through the window netting begins to become apparent. You can feel that wind on your left side.

The ‘G’ forces are starting to take effect as you enter the turn. It’s almost the same sensation you feel when you’re on a roller coaster; your stomach drops slightly, your head begins to feel a ‘rush’. You now realize why there’s a pad built into the seat on the right side as your head is pushed up into it. If the pad wasn’t there, the muscles in your neck would soon tire from the effort of resisting the building ‘G’’s.

When the chassis are set right and the tires are gripping, you find that the amount of steering required to pull the car down to the line is minimal. It’s almost as if you simply apply a slight pressure to gently coax the car in the direction you want it to go.

You’re now exiting turn four. Your line takes you, what seems like, inches from the concrete wall on your left side. In reality you’re car drifts out to a point that can be up to a full twelve inches away. The roar inside the cockpit changes in pitch slightly as the sound reflects off the wall.

You set up your line down the 3800 foot front tri-oval banked at 18 degrees, to put you almost to the apron of the track, just off of the grass after you come past pit road. Then you drift back up to the middle of the track towards the start-finish line.

You’re at full speed now as your car rockets across the line and you get ready to do it all over again.

This time you try and enter turn one towards the top of the corner. You attempt to gently drift as close to the bottom as possible in the center of the turn. At your current speed, over 180 miles per hour, however you feel as though you dive straight down towards the bottom when you do. Your sustaining the maximum amount of G-force now and your head is fully pushed into the pad, you’re hands are tight on the wheel. Your stomach drops again, harder this time, the head rush is more intense.You feel lighter as you’re body seems to be lifted slightly. You also find you have to strain your leg muscles to hold your feet in place as the momentum tries to throw them to the side.

You are now fully into your ‘zone’. Your sphere is directed only on the track in front of you and on the areas directly to your left and right at about a 45 degree angle. Your mind is reacting without thought, your whole body is in sync, you too are a machine. Nothing else clouds your mind.

You are using a concentration unknown to most people, a part of your mind that once trained and cultivated, separates you from the average person. It’s a talent, a talent to use this part of the brain to react without conscious thought at near 200 miles per hour, that separates a great race car driver from everyone else. Later when you are done, you’ll find that the physical effort of this total concentration will tire you to the point where you’ll feel as though you’ve just finished a twenty mile marathon.

Exiting turn two you drift out as your speed carries the car towards the wall. In the backstretch again, you can finally take a brief moment or two to catch your breath and collect your thoughts. Then you get into your line to set up for turn three.

The actual sensation of speed is something you never really feel. Only because after your fully in tune with your ‘zone’, anything that doesn’t have to do with the operation of the actual race car is ignored. You become accustom to the stomach drops and head rushes, the only thing that reminds you of the speed is the ‘G’ forces that are constantly pulling at you.

Junior was fully in his ‘zone’ as he set up to enter turn three for the 29^th time that day. He dove towards the bottom of the turn like he’d done a few minutes before, trying to hit his ‘mark’, that point on the track, whatever it may be, sometimes only a crack in the asphalt or a dark smudge on the yellow paint, that drivers try to aim for to get to the point they feel, will give them the quickest way through a certain part of the track.

He eased the pressure on the steering wheel and the car began to drift up towards the outside wall. This move was as natural to him as walking would be to anyone else.

It was at that moment,that he noticed the storm from the corner of his vision.

The crew had been watching the gathering storm, but since it seemed to pose no immediate threat, they hadn't bothered their driver.

Besides thunderstorms in Florida are a common occurance and this seemed to be a small one. Far off, moving slowly. No sense in worrying Junior.

But now, suddenly, curiously, the storm seemed to almost sweep towards the track.

A dark funnel appeared in the center of the black wall now just outside of turn three and began to swirl, slowly at first, then faster and faster as it began to descend towards the track.

"Aww jeez," came a voice on the radio.

"Junior, you better back it down, looks like rain," Tony said over the air.

A rumble echoed across the infield, louder than the engine of the car.

Two things would occur to the crew chief later, one he hadn't seen any lighting amd wondered where the rumble had come from and two, thunderstorms aren't actually a common occurance in Florida in the dead of winter.

A flash of lightening streaked across the sky from the direction of the black funnel.

In a milli-second the bolt cracked and sizzled towards the start-finish line, there it struck, just as the car past over the line.

Inside the car Junior only felt a slight bump. He ‘sawed’ the wheel to the left. He lost all vision and could feel a tingle, a prickly hot sensation came over him.

The air seemed to be snatched from his lungs. A grunt escaped from his mouth.

His vision was blurred, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. A white bright, blinding light filled his vision as the car rushed towards it.The air began to swirl around him and his only thought was that he hoped that his dad wasn’t watc...

Thanks for your time

Greg Engle

An excerpt from next weeks Part 3:

He woke with a start. His vision was blurred and his head felt very heavy. He also had a funny taste in his mouth. He rose slowly, every muscle in his body seemed to protest as he did. It was like he had the worst hangover of his life. Not realizing where he was at, he looked around, the familiar interior of the hauler glared back at him. He tried to smile, but couldn't, jeez even his teeth hurt.

Junior felt like he’d just experienced a very bad nightmare, strange though, he didn’t seem to remember any of it.

The inside of the hauler was hot. Sweat dripped from his brow, it stung his eyes. He got to his feet gingerly. He had to get outside, into the fresh air, lord it was hot, man his head hurt.

He walked slowly to the door, when he opened it, he was stunned at what he saw....


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