Road Trips

  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 his career.

 All these years later, I don’t remember a whole lot about the actual races on those weekends, but there are parts of the trips that stick in my mind.

 I rode with Mark Gibson, the brother of long-time Cup Series crew chief Tony Gibson, to an ARCA race at Nashville Superspeedway.

 As we passed through Chattanooga, he pointed out the church where Grant Adcox’s funeral was held. Mark and I talked about Adcox, a frequent ARCA competitor, who died in a crash during a Cup race at Atlanta in 1989.

 I’ve never driven past that church in Chattanooga without thinking about Grant Adcox, and about Mark Gibson, who is one of the finest people I’ve ever met.

When we got to the track, we lined up with the other trucks waiting to get into the garage. Among those driving their own rigs that day was Bobby Gerhart, who won ARCA’s big race at Daytona an incredible eight times. Imagine the Cup Series now if the top race drivers also drove their tow rigs.

  It means a lot to me that the most space the AJC ever devoted to one of my stories was the one I wrote about that weekend with Mark Gibson and his team.

  The trips with Ron Young and his team were always fun. Ron and his family are good people, and his crew chief at the time, Ricky Pearson (David’s son), is a lot of fun to be around and as good a race strategist as I’ve ever been around.

 Coming home from a race one night, we stopped the hauler on the side of the road and made sandwiches at about 2 o’clock in the morning. Good times with good people.

 Photographer Ben Gray and I did a story about the Pollards when Bubba first started running bigger races on the asphalt tracks around the Southeast.

  Ben and I got lucky that weekend because Bubba, who had just graduated from high school, won the race. That all but guaranteed our story would get good play in the paper. That trip went a lot better than our dry run a few weeks before, but that’s a story for another day.

 A weekend on the road with Ronnie Sanders back in his driving days was worth the trip just to see how much energy he had. He worked on his car all day, raced at South Alabama Speedway in Opp, won the race, then drove all the way back to Fayetteville.

 We got back to his house just about daylight and would have been there sooner if not for a road-side discussion with a DOT officer who had his own interpretation of the rules for driving toter homes.

 There’s a part of me that would like to ride along with Matt Dooley this weekend. But that’s for folks much younger than me.

 I’ll get my racing fix hanging around trackside at Senoia Raceway for a few hours Saturday night.