Trackside with Rick Minter

 The 25th annual Inman Farm Heritage Days, held each year on our family farm, wrapped up last Sunday.  By most all accounts, it was one of the best, if not the best, Heritage Days yet.  Like most everything else in my life, Inman Farm Heritage Days has strong ties to the racing community.  As we get back to Senoia Raceway after a few weeks off and take in the Michael Head Jr. Memorial Southern All Stars race, I can’t help but think of the death of young Michael Head and how it’s related to Inman Farm Heritage Days.  Back on a Sunday in April of 1997, on Joanne’s birthday, she and I were picking up rocks, by hand, on what would become our showgrounds in a few months. (Some birthday celebration, right?)  My pager went off. It was Carolyn Head calling. I immediately called her back. In a calm, measured voice she informed me that her son had been killed.  Joanne and I can take you to within a few feet of exactly where we were standing when we got that call...

   For a lot of us, race tracks big and small are much more than just pieces of real estate. They’re special places in our hearts, and just thinking about them evokes fond memories.  Some of my favorite tracks are gone or have uncertain futures.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the old West Atlanta Raceway in Douglasville, especially after one of its best promoters, the late Ed Massey, was inducted into the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame last week.  West Atlanta was one of my favorites. It was on the ropes for a time after Massey’s tenure there before former Senoia Raceway owner Charlie Edwards bought it and gave it new life as Seven Flags Speedway. But that didn’t last. With residential growth closing in, complaints from neighbors and rising real estate values, it was eventually sold for development and bulldozed beyond recognition.  On the NASCAR circuit, North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham was one of my favorites. For a time it hosted the second Cup...

   Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are one of my favorite parts of sports, especially racing. Those ceremonies are a way to cement the legacy of those who have once heard the cheers of adoring fans from Saturday night short tracks to superspeedways across America.  On Saturday, the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame in Dawsonville will induct its 2022 class. After holding inductions since 2002, one might think the Hall might be running out of deserving candidates.  Instead the opposite seems true. Every year, more qualified candidates are added to the ballot.  Some of the inductees have been on the ballot for a long time but have been overlooked by voters while others were a long time getting nominated, for one reason or another.  I was particularly happy to see Dale Singleton finally voted in. For those who don’t know, he was one of the most successful independent motorcycle racers ever.  The Dalton native twice won the prestigious Daytona 200, o...

   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...

   Martha Swims and Turk Norton, two people that were a big part of the local racing scene for years, passed away recently within days of each other.  Both meant a lot to me.  Martha Swims, the wife of Mickey Swims and mom of Mia Greene and the late Mike Swims, has been described as the matriarch of Georgia short track racing. I couldn’t agree more.  I’ve repeated often how the late Hence Pollard, co-founder and long-time promoter of Senoia Raceway, got me into the writing business by giving me season passes to races at his track.  But Martha was the first one to pay me for compiling racing results and sending them to newspapers and radio stations.  One night at Dixie Speedway in the late 1970s she called me aside, thanked me for what I was doing and handed me $75.  That amount of money may not seem like much to some today (It does to me), but it was much appreciated back in the day.  I wrote stories for Dixie and Rome speedways...

  One of the most interesting aspects of last week’s NASCAR race at Atlanta Motor Speedway was the noise made by Chase Elliott’s fans at the track.  The AMS crowd was kind of slim, something I attribute to running the race in the hot afternoon as opposed to under the lights when it was much cooler.  Still, every time Chase made a pass for the lead or won a Stage, there was a noticeable roar from the grandstands.  In his winner’s interview on TV, Elliott gave a shout out to his noisy fans.  Chase, like his dad, has a way of making fans feel like he’s one of them. It helps that he’s good behind the wheel too, but there are a lot of drivers that are good behind the wheel yet draw more boos than cheers.  I believe race fans at all levels of the sport are drawn more by the personalities of the drivers than the equipment they drive or the tactics and strategies of the races themselves. (Sports car racing might be an exception to that kind of thinking.) ...

  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 th...