Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 2:42pm ·

#19: Dean Hall Band at AMS infield

Part of the fun of camping out during race weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway is the partying.  Now if you know me, you know I am not much of a partier… but party animal or not, the sights and sounds of the campgrounds at a NASCAR track are high quality entertainment.  For most, what happens in the infield stays in the infield.  OK, sometimes you’ll see stuff you don’t really want to see, but even in those cases, you can usually laugh about it later.

Back in the ‘90s when Winston (RJR Tobacco Company) was the title sponsor of the Cup Series, they set up a huge enclosed area with a stage in the infield, not far from what is now the driver motor home lot.  During the day, provided you were old enough to purchase cigarettes, if you gave them your name, address and signature, they actually handed out packs of cigarettes to fans (oh how the times have changed).  At night though, this was party central in the infield.  We actually still joke about how this was probably just a brilliant way to get all the drunk, rowdy race fans together in one spot so security and police could easily see and take care of anybody who got out of control.

Up on the stage was the Dean Hall Band.  Probably only the most diehard music fans would know the name (though after a google search I found out he was on the road with Gretchen Wilson as a guitarist for a year or two, and even found a youtube video of him singing in a jam session with her), but this guy was awesome, looked a lot like Mr. Clean, and put on a great show.  It was a mix of southern rock and blues… PERFECT for a race crowd, and everybody loved it.  Our racin’ buddy Stan even got his autograph one year, and he’s quite proud of it.  Since then, Winston has left the sport and with increased attendance I guess there is no longer room in the infield for such a huge set-up… so it’s up to the residents themselves to put on the party… and a guy named Billy Bad Ass (who all weekend wears only a pair of boxers, boots and a black cowboy hat) and his band have since taken over.  We always make a stop by their spot each year, and track president Ed Clark and his staff have put together some GREAT pre-race concerts on the front stretch recently (the one and only Lynard Skynard is performing before the race this year!), but we all still talk about the days when Dean Hall rocked the infield at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

www.DeanHall.com

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: #20

by Mike Fuori on Monday, August 15, 2011 at 2:56pm ·

#20: Hooters Girls Visit the Infield at Atlanta Motor Speedway!

I’m probably going to get in trouble for this… so I’ll keep it short and sweet, and leave the details to your imagination, guys.  From 1992 to 1994, Hooters was the title sponsor of the November race at Atlanta.  Needless to say, this was quite popular for the mostly male crowd at a NASCAR race.  Well one year, they did the unimaginable, even for Hooters, by sending a bunch of Hooters girls to the track to walk around the infield and hang out with the fans during the race.  Not just walk around, but actually climb up on the platforms and sit with the fans.  One of the racers could have stopped his car, turned around and started driving around the track backwards, and no one would have noticed.  It was like Justin Bieber had just walked into a room full of twelve year old girls.

Of course, I was only twelve or thirteen years old myself at the time, so I promise I didn’t notice anything.  In fact, I don’t even remember this… This is just a story I am passing along on behalf of the guys in our group, because they thought I should include it.

Photo Credit: Dirty old man Stan Howell

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: 21 Days left!

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: 21 Days left!

by Mike Fuori on Sunday, August 14, 2011 at 12:26pm ·

#21: “Welcome Race Fans”- Driving to the track with my dad

One of my earliest memories of going to the races was from driving to the track from our home in Roswell.  We’d spend so much time looking forward to and planning for the weekend, then we’d hop in a truck and head south.  One of the things we’d do on the way down to pass the time was count the “Welcome Race Fan” banners on highway 19/41 on the way to the track.  Back when we first started going, every gas station, fast food restaurant and car dealership had a banner near the road.  One year, we counted over 100 of these banners between I-75 and the speedway.  Funny how little things like that stand out in my mind, but as a five-six-seven year old, I loved trying to spot them with my dad. 

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: 22 Days left!

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway: 22 Days left!

by Mike Fuori on Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 2:43pm ·

#22: The Greatest Finish I Never Saw

Ask anyone in our group and they will tell you that I HATE missing any racing held at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and I will vilify people who leave the race early to “beat the traffic”.  I give our buddy Stan a hard time about it every year, because he is usually one of the first to leave.  If you can’t already tell, I’m a little obsessed with NASCAR and racing in Atlanta (please don’t ask my wife how obsessed I am).  When we go to the track, I never want to leave, and only once have I ever let something like bad weather convince me to stay home (only because I knew there would never be a car on the track that weekend).  But the thing I hate the most is spending all weekend camping out at the track, and having to leave to “beat the traffic”.

In November of 2001, I begrudgingly agreed to leave early when my dad suggested it.  Jerry Nadeau had a huge lead, and we were only two or three laps from the checkers.  It looked like a done deal and while I always like it when an underdog like Nadeau wins a race, I had to be back in Tallahassee at school the next day, and it seemed like the right thing to do.

We pulled out of our spot and turned on the radio for MRN’s race broadcast, and drove through the turn 3 tunnel and out of the infield.  Right about now, the white flag was flying and it was the last lap.  25 seconds later, Nadeau was out of gas in the final turn, limping toward the finish line and wiggling his car back and forth to try to pick up a little extra gas, but Bobby Labonte flew by and took the lead and the win at the last second, quite literally.  And the crowd went wild.  I know because I’ve seen the footage… not because I was there.  I missed it.  And I’ve been giving my dad crap about it ever since.

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

From last year...

by Mike Fuori on Friday, August 12, 2011 at 3:16pm ·

#23: At a Home Depot near you, Bill Elliott bathroom stall doors!

Back in the 80s when we first started going to races at what was then called Atlanta International Raceway, the amenities were not as nice as we enjoy today.  One of the biggest and most important improvements we have seen at the track in 25 years is the bathrooms.  Before Bruton Smith bought the track in 1990 and eventually built a large bathroom with attached showers just a short walk down from our spots in turn 3, the only bathroom we had on the east end of the track was a small building with 4 or 5 stalls and an interior wall that you peed on (how’s that for a visual on a Friday afternoon?). Fortunately, there was a concrete step in front of the wall, forming a trough for everything to drain, but you literally just peed on the wall.  It gets worse…

The stalls… well I don’t want to make this story any more disgusting than it already has been so I’ll jump to the funny part of the story.  Now this was a really long time ago… I was 6 or 7 years old probably, so I don’t really remember the details of when or why this happened, but for at least one of the race weekends we were there (I actually remember it being several times), there were no doors on the bathroom stalls.  None.  When you walked in the door, to your left was some guy sitting on a toilet.  Given the crowd at the track, trust me when I say this was even worse than it sounds.  My dad tells me the reason there were no doors was because people were taking them off the stalls to burn for firewood (wouldn’t be surprised back then).  In any case, needless to say I never wanted to go to the bathroom when we were at the races (especially #2!). 

Well at the next race, someone in the infield came prepared.  Somebody threw a piece of plywood in the back of their truck, brought a screwdriver and some hinges, and made their own stall door.  And, in the true spirit of NASCAR fans, who are the best fans in all of sports, he painted a big old number 9 on it to make sure everyone knew he was a Bill Elliott fan.

I wouldn’t be writing this if I couldn’t tell you that now (and for the last 20 years) you don’t have to worry about this problem anymore.  The facilities are more than adequate and usually kept pretty clean despite what tens of thousands of NASCAR fans put them through in a weekend, and all the stalls do have doors.  The bathrooms are nice enough now that I almost slept in the one in turn 3 on a very cold and rainy night because it had heat… but that’s another story you’ll see down the road.

Maybe it was this guy who we can thank for the stall doors!

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 2:15pm ·

#24: Jeff Gordon’s Busch Series Win and first Cup start in 1992

Non-NASCAR fans may not have heard of most of the drivers… but everybody knows who Jeff Gordon is.  His name will always be remembered along with Petty, Earnhardt, Allison and many others.  First, let the record show that I am not a Jeff Gordon fan... but I do have an appreciation for how good a driver he is and was.  The first time I saw him race was in November of 1992, in the Busch Series (think triple-A league of NASCAR) race when he drove the #1 Baby Ruth Ford.  Its too bad he didn't have a picture of Bill Murray from Caddyshack or Sloth and Chunk from Goonies on the car... that would've been cool.  I remember him dominating the race, and people talking before the race about how he could be the next star.  I was only twelve, but I was able to see that he was in a class by himself that day.  Our infield spot is right at the entrance to turn 3 (was actually turn 1 at the time under the old track configuration) and you can tell by looking at how they enter the corner, how they deal with the bumps on the track whether they are going to have a fast lap or not.  He was solid, and this was before he ever got in the best equipment in the sport at Hendrick Motorsports.  He won the race, the second and last of his Busch Series victories before he went to Cup full time.

The next day, Jeff Gordon made his Cup Series debut in what turned out to be one of the greatest and most historically significant races in NASCAR history, if not the greatest.  Being able to say I was at Jeff Gordon’s first race is kinda cool… but that little piece of history was nothing compared to what else we would see that day. 

Stay tuned.

I can't believe I found this pic on the web.. can't find a name to give credit but thank you to whoever posted this on the Forzamotorsports.net forum

Top 30 Memories from 26 Years of Race Weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway

by Mike Fuori on Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 12:02pm ·

#25- Jeremy Mayfield: “That Octane 93 you’re wearin'?”  Girl: “Yeah you like it?”  Jeremy: “Oh yeah.”

One of the best things about NASCAR is the access fans have to the drivers.  Autographs are actually not that hard to get, except maybe from a few drivers.  For a relatively small price, you can get access to the pit area, and if you know the right people you can even get into the garages where the teams work on the cars, and drivers are always walking right past you (thanks Aunt Dawn!).  And in what other sport can you literally walk by the place where the athletes are spending the night?  At Atlanta Motor Speedway, the drivers have motor homes in a fenced in area right in the middle of the infield.  Every once in a while you can walk by the motor home lot and see a driver playing with his kids on the playground, getting interviewed on TV, or even standing by the fence signing autographs. 

Pretty late one Saturday night while doing our traditional walk around the infield, we were passing by the driver’s motor home lot and saw a guy walking his dog on the grassy bank next to the fence.  As we passed I realized it was Jeremy Mayfield, who at the time was driving for the great Ray Evernham (crew chief for Jeff Gordon when Jeff Gordon became “Jeff Gordon”) in the #19 Dodge Dealers Dodge.  He was in a funny Dodge commercial at the time where a good looking girl is getting ready for a date, walks out the door and jumps in Jeremy’s racecar and says “heyyy Jeremy”, and he asks her “is that octane 93 you’re wearin’?”  He was a good, still somewhat up and coming driver with a lot of potential.

Anyway, I whispered to everybody, hey, that’s Jeremy Mayfield walking his dog!  So they talked me into asking for a picture with him.  I walked over and asked him, and he was really cool about it… was more than happy to take a picture, and even laughed when Stan awkwardly asked him if “that was octane 93 he was wearing”.  For the longest time we told people about that story and what a nice guy he was and how it was cool that he didn’t mind us bothering him late the night before a race while he was trying to get his dog to go to the bathroom.  You just aren’t going to get this kind of experience in any other sport.  The drivers, especially these days, are all like this, though you probably wouldn’t see dale Jr. out in the infield walking a dog for fear of being mobbed by crazy fans.  But in all our years at the track, I can only think of one driver who ever, ever rudely refused to give an autograph or even the time of day.  I won’t name names… but he drove the #2 Miller car in the 90s and is an analyst for ESPN now (cough cough Rusty Wallace cough).  The other 99% of them are usually more than willing and go out of their way to be with the fans.

Unfortunately, Jeremy’s career was cut short.  He struggled in future seasons and was let go by ray Evernham.  Then in 2009, NASCAR found him in violation of the sport’s substance abuse policy after a failed drug test.  Not good publicity for the sport, especially since its athletes are known for being some of the most clean-cut people in sports.  I don’t know where or when he went wrong, but we were all fans of Jeremy Mayfield after that night and its a shame he got off track... pun intended.