COLUMN for American Motor Journal 
 

Well here it is, a week before we are supposed to leave for our Super Bowl of stock car racing, Daytona.  Daytona is hallowed ground and the holy grail to many of us in racing.

As a child, we spent most of our summers and winters thinking about the trip to Daytona, the mecca of all stock car racing. The legend would only grow as we heard Dad talk about Lee Petty going over the fence or our friend Marvin Panch getting burned in a Maserati and Tiny Lund winning as his relief driver. Imagine that mammoth that this place was to a seven year old.Later in years, NASCAR’S northern tour would bring “the big cars” to our home area. Trenton speedway would host the “NASCAR Grand Nationals”. We would see the Superbirds and Charger Daytona’s in person. The Torino Talladega. What awesome cars they were. Shiny Ramp trucks with race cars on the back, the Wood Brothers, the K & K Dodge, Bobby Allison’s famous number two chevelle, Bill Seifert, Elmo Langley, Cecil Gordon, Buddy Baker, Bill Champion, James Harvey Hylton. These were household names to us, bigger than Babe Ruth or Bart Starr, these were race car drivers.Mom and Dad first took us to Daytona in 1964. What a trip it was! Somewhere along the way, Dad came up with this old Metro Mail truck that had been converted to a camper. It was a tiny little thing, it looked like a greyhound to my brother and I. Bunk beds and a commode, we were set!

There was no easy way to get there. I-95 wasn’t done, so we went parts of I-95 then routes 13 and 17. Looking back, it must have been a miserable drive for Dad, who knew? We had no idea. Riding in the bunk beds that were held up by dinky little chains, we had our etch a sketch, our note pads, our checkers. Do kids today even know what checkers are? We stopped in Georgia on old 17. Dad asked the nice man behind the counter for a pound of bologna. The butcher pulls this huge knife, I mean a HUGE knife from his wooden table and sharpens it. Eight slices to a pound. Our introduction to fried bologna while Mom pumped gas!So for years, somehow Mom and Dad figured out how to get us to Daytona.

Sitting in the grandstands year after year, we could only dream of what it must be like to be on pit road. To see the cars cross the humps on the tunnel in turn four and peel off of the high banks and pass the “Pure” sign at the entrance to pit road. We would see it evolve to “Union 76” and now the familiar Sunoco. Binoculars in hand, we would eye the pit stops. Impact guns just like Dads at his repair shop. Pit crews wore uniforms that were shop clothes just like Dads. Oh, how we wanted to be in there! The cars would make music! To me, race car exhaust pipes are like long tubes on the calliope. Can you feel it?The first time we came through the tunnel as a competitor is hard to describe. Like a ball player walking into the locker room at Yankee Stadium. There was lots of emotion. This was a completely different view of Daytona than anything we had ever seen or experienced.

We unloaded our little baby grand “in the garage area”. Back then the Dash cars were still searching for an identity that they would never find in NASCAR. Baby Grand just didn’t fit either. In my mind, I had just seen Baby Grands not that long ago at Flemington. Stan Starr’s Camaro, Wayne Andrews’s Cougar, Paul Goldsmith was in Smokey’s Camaro and the great Tiny Lund…those were “Baby Grands” so we were just dash cars. Proud as a peacock and nervous as hell, the crew and I unloaded the car out of our fifth wheel trailer. It never occurred to me that our trailer said McCafferty FORD on the side and we were at a PONTIAC test session. We were dwarfed by the huge trailer trucks that brought Neil Bonnett, Greg Sacks, Rusty Wallace and THE KING. Think what you want, this was a dream unfolding for this kid from Langhorne, Pennsylvania and his volunteer pit crew. Fast forward a few years. The picture and the thought process are very much the same.

Everyone wants to win at Daytona. It validates or makes a career, it puts an exclamation point on your season, it puts your career into focus of your peers. Everyone wants their name at the top of one of the pages in the Daytona record book. We have led laps there with our “Baby Grand” and sat on the pole twice. We won there as a car owner. Daytona gives you these huge trophies, we have a couple of them. There is no victory lane like Daytona, period.We are going to Daytona for the ARCA 200. You may have heard of it, maybe not. The ARCA series is the big car training ground, the place where green rookies get experience, or as it is now called “driver development”. But they also get hurt.

Kyle Petty won his very first start in an ARCA stock car at Daytona. It seemed only fitting to me at the time. His Dad had conquered that place seven times when many failed to finish. More of the legend of Daytona.This year’s ARCA 200 will be under the watchful eye of the racing media and the “sports media” as a female Indy Car driver plans to make her first stock car start in this race. There is more than one female trying to run the ARCA race this season. Some of them actually have talent to do this, they just don’t have the marketing machine behind them. If only Louise Smith would be here. Wonder if the Indy Car set has any idea who Louise Smith is? The bloggers are in motion with predictions, there will be lots of caution laps. That isn’t rocket science, that is in the history book.  More times than not, the event is a wreckfest. Job security is being a rollback operator at Daytona during this race. Here is the formula. You put VERY Fast cars on an extremely difficult race track, with maybe half of the starting field sporting yellow rookie stripes on the back bumper. Most of these folks have minimal experience in a big car and don’t really know what they are supposed to feel like in the draft or otherwise. Frankly, they have to get the experience somewhere. “No time like the present” as Pop would say.Picture this. You are at the bowling alley. We are there with our young children. To stop balls from going in the gutter, we have bumpers (guard rails/soft walls) to stop the ball from falling off the lane. Our little guy pushes the ball as hard as he can. The ball wonders down the lane with no direction, bouncing from side to side and finally hits a pin or two. This is racing three wide, in the draft, at 180 miles per hour with no experience. You are bound to bounce off of something.

To those of you who get to be on this race track, honor it, cherish it, respect it. This is Daytona.

                                          - written by Andy Belmont for "The American Motor Journal", Jan 23, 2010