Trackside with Rick Minter

  I was at the Fayette County Historical Society the other night doing some research for a project on the history of the Fayette County Farm Bureau.  As part of my effort, I looked through several years of the Fayetteville Enterprise, the county’s newspaper back in the day.  The 1941 papers were fascinating. At that time Fayetteville was a small, relatively remote farming community.  Most of the news was related to agriculture, regular letters from the county’s Congressman, healthy doses of news from the local government and the county’s churches, along with reports from rural communities telling who visited who and when.   As 1941 rolled along, the number of stories on the war in Europe became more frequent, as did reports of the efforts of the United States to furnish equipment and supplies to those battling the Nazis.   I doubt many readers of the Enterprise were completely surprised that December when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. was drawn into the war.  One p

I’ve long subscribed to the theory that when it comes to motorsports and the varied disciplines, a rising tide lifts all boats.  In other words, NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula One, short track touring series both on dirt and asphalt, and Saturday night short tracks are all in the same boat, so to speak.  They all depend on one another, so when one does well, they all benefit, and when one suffers, the rest are in jeopardy of doing the same.  NASCAR seems to catch the most heat on social media, but the other circuits have their haters as well.  With that said, last Saturday’s SRX race at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola turned out to be a big win for all of motorsports.  With a live CBS network audience watching, Helio Castroneves, a Brazilian open-wheel racer who has won a record-tying four Indy 500s, took the win on a half-mile track in a full-bodied car.  Bubba Pollard, a short track specialist with wins on asphalt and dirt, dominated much of the event and finished second despi

   Being the old-fashioned old coot that I am, I put a lot of stock in old sayings, old folklore and other time-honored axioms.  I’ve made many a farming decision based on old sayings about the weather. On early mornings back in the day I’ve made work plans based on what I saw in the dew-covered fields. If spider webs were lying flat, it wouldn’t rain that day. If they’re arched up, rain was inevitable.  I’ve also found it to be true, as the late John Burch Harp told me, that when the weather is coming from the east, if it doesn’t rain in the first 24 hours it won’t rain at all.  One of my old racing buddies, former NASCAR team owner Tom Beard, likes to say that in every poker game there’s a sucker, and if you don’t know who the sucker is it’s you. That applies to a lot more situations than poker games.  There’s also some old thinking in racing that I once thought to be true but now believe otherwise.  Back in the day, some folks’ racing strategy reminded me of Aesop’s fable

   Reading Matt Dooley’s posts on Facebook about his upcoming trip to Kentucky as he chases a Southern All Star championship got me to thinking about some of the road trips I went on when I worked for the Atlanta newspaper.  Occasionally, the editors would agree to let me take a break from the NASCAR grind and accompany a short-track driver or a local driver trying to make the big time and write a story about a trip to the races.  Matt wrote that he’d likely be driving the truck himself and take on many of the at-track duties that others usually handle – then drive the race car on top of that.  That is similar to the scenarios that I wrote about back in the day.   For me, those trips were much more fun than a weekend at the Cup races. I spent time on the road with ARCA racer Mark Gibson, NASCAR Xfinity Series driver Ron Young, as well as short track racers like Bubba Pollard and Ronnie Sanders. I even spent a weekend accompanying David Pearson to some dirt-track races he ran late in hi