About Me

Back when "adding wedge" was adjusting a weight-jacker and "track bars" were panhard bars, and even before Mario Andretti had won a world championship and anyone had heard of Dale Earnhardt (senior not junior), I was introduced to racing by a man who eventually became my step father. He had talked my mother into bringing me and my brother to a local short track where he was on the crew for a local driver. By the second lap of the first heat race, I knew that I was hooked.

My passion only grew as we frequented local tacks like Speedway 605 (the original Irwindale), Orange Show Fairgrounds, Saugus (I Bet Ron Hornaday remembers it), Ascot, Riverside and Ontario (yes, NASCAR did run on a track just like Indy before they ran at Indy). But still, I wanted more.

 I was eventually allowed to do menial tasks for a driver friend of my step father's at his shop (a garage in his backyard). And, in my mid-teens, I would lie about my age to gain access to the pits to help him at the track. One day, my step father announced that Roger Ward wanted to race again and that he was going to help build Roger Ward's car. Could it get any better?

It did. One day my step father arrived home towing a trailer with an old Chevelle on it that he had pulled out of somebody's yard and announced that we were going to build our own car, a street stock for the local short tracks.

At the time, I was taking metal shop in high school and was the only one in the family that knew how to use a cutting torch properly. So, armed with a cutting torch, a couple of tin snips and a pop rivet gun, I was designated the fabricator. I would rush home after school and stay up late stripping excess metal from the body. From a couple of old door hinges, some two by fours and a couple of straight pieces of angle iron, I made a sheet metal bender and fabricated the interior sheet metal. My step father would exchange favors with his racing buddies for the work that I did not have the experience or tools to do.

And then the crushing moment, the car nearly complete, my step father accepted a promotion at his work that required long hours, travel and occasional weekends. The car would be sold.

And so it was. A car that was carefully constructed to begin as a street stock for the local asphalt track and designed so that it could be easily and quickly adapted to be a competitive contender in the late model ranks, was drug off by a man wanting a dirt car, maybe even wanted to use it for chain races. I felt like Redd Foxx from Sanford and Son. My heart was ripped from my body and I never saw it coming.

I never got the chance to build a car myself and working on somebody else’s just never seemed the same. So now I am just a fan like all of the other Joes sitting on their couch on Sunday glued to the TV, wandering if things could have been different.

Written and published by Tony Vaughn July 3rd 2012