Well by all means, please fill us in.

I only know what I have read, and I know (now) that all that I have read is not to be taken as gospel. For instance, I am pretty sure that stock car racing didn't originate from a cow-pasture in north Georgia from just a bunch of bootleggers looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon.

I'll give you some of my history as a race fan. I went to the 1981 Indy 500 with my dad when I was not quite 12. I was bitten by the bug and became obsessed with racing (all). I was always crazy for statistics and there was a rundown of all the Indy 500's in the back of the program so I started charting all of the races. When 1982 rolled around, I started with the Daytona 500 that year cutting all of the newspaper articles (Memphis' Commercial Appeal) that had anything to do with racing and keeping them in a notebook as well as charting the races.

Back then it was hard, sometimes you only had the top 10 or 5 even listed and it might be two months before I could get a complete run-down. (in Stock Car racing magazine, it was only later I would discover National Speed Sport News).

Of course I wanted to at least get a list of winners of past races, but that also illustrated a problem. My mom got me the book Stock Car Heroes (or something like that by Bill Libby. It had a line in the preface talking about Neil "Soapy" Castles pulling into victory lane in Greeneville SC to end a 0 for 4 or 500 race losing streak. That bugged me for a long time because I could never find another reference to that race anywhere. I now know it was a Grand national East race which was where all of the 200 lappers were placed when Winston came on and the Cup schedule was shortened. At the time though it was maddening to me.

I kept this up until about 1986 or so. By then, Greg Fieldings Forty Years of Stock Car Racing came out and I of course bought it.

The point of all of this is to say that I realize that what you stated earlier in this thread, "Stock car racing and NASCAR history is largely, to be kind, a huge mess, there being no end of baloney and nonsense passed off as "history" and blindly accepted since almost no one bothers to do the grunt work to check the stories out. ",is true.

I am very interested in what you have to say about NASCAR history and in knowing your perspective, but at times I don't know what I can contribute, because much of my knowledge is tainted so to speak.