Fast Cars

  Charlie Loudermilk, best known for his founding of the Aaron’s Rents company and his philanthropy, died this week at the age of 95.

 You may be wondering at this point why you’re reading about Mr. Loudermilk in a racing blog. Well here’s why.

 I got to know Mr. Loudermilk through Tom Beard, one of the co-owners of the old MB2 race team that once fielded cars in the Cup Series. Mr. Loudermilk’s company was a big NASCAR sponsor at that time, but the company president, Ken Butler, was the face of the sponsorship for most fans and those in the industry.

 Tom kept insisting that I needed to get to know Mr. Loudermilk so I drove up to Atlanta and went to lunch with them.

 The first thing I found out was that Mr. Loudermilk was way smarter about modern-day racing than I ever imagined.

 He seemed to have a pretty good eye for driving talent or lack of it, even though he didn’t get involved in the day-to-day decision making at the teams his company sponsored.

I learned he wasn’t fooled a bit by the press releases his team would send him each week.

 He pointed out that there were always lots of positives in the releases even though the results didn’t reflect it.

 “If we had one of the fastest cars at the end of the race, why did we finish 25th?” he asked, quoting a line from his team’s race report that week.

I learned then and there that when you’re writing a press release that will be read by important people, don’t try to sugar coat things. People that are smart enough to start and run big companies don’t fall for BS.

 Then he got to telling stories from his childhood in Atlanta in the 1930s.

 As a young boy growing up in a working-class neighborhood around Howell Mill Road, he liked to hang out at the garages in the area, where the best mechanics of the day spent most of their time souping up flat-head Fords used by drivers hauling moonshine.

 Those same drivers and mechanics went on to become pioneers of stock car racing, and he knew many of them – Raymond Parks, Red Vogt, Lloyd Seay, Roy Hall, the Flock Brothers were just some of the racers young Loudermilk came to know.

 Like a lot of old-timers I got to know that were around in the late 30s and early 40s, Loudermilk was more impressed by liquor-hauling exploits of the mechanics and drivers than by what they were doing in the early stock car races.

 Ever since that day, when I thought about Mr. Loudermilk, I didn’t see a multi-millionaire and mover and shaker. I saw a man who grew up liking fast cars and the people who drove them.

 Any race fan can relate to that.

  


  

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