Never been to Charlotte. How long should I reserve for the NASCAR museum as a diehard fan of 25 years? Can you schedule tours of race shops? Anything else to know in advance would be great. Thanks!

Courtesy of @_DanielCespedes on Twitter

The whole team will get changed before the driver does.

Sorry not exactly not NASCAR related but looking to make the 7 hour treck to Cordele to see the CARS Tour since that’s the closest they will get to me. Never been to Cordele, but looks to be fairly small.

If I get there at 4:00 will that be early enough to get a grandstand spot? May seem like a crazy Q but Dale is running so not sure what to expect. Been to many nascar races, but this will be my first CARS Tour race.

I did a little dive on tracks that had the most wrecks all time. I limited this to tracks that were current and had a minimum of 10 races (this excluded Langhorne and Rockingham).

The historical pull popped out a crazy outlier of 1957’s Santa Clara Fairgrounds dirt race, which eliminated pretty much the entire field (17 out of 22 cars). Trying to find footage of that somewhere if anyone has it!

Only 30+ views

Top 5 and Team Graphs. Can see them all here

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I wanted some thoughts on this take. I know FOX has been terrible but I feel some of the blame is being pointed towards Mike Joy unfortunately. I believe the main issue is that the booth has NO chemistry. I love Kevin Harvicks insight from time to time but he is extremely boring in the booth, and Clint is unfortunately only in the booth because he was the closest driver that acted like DW. Also why the hell is Larry not in the booth ?! Mike Joy is great but he was great because of his supporting cast too. He just doesn’t have that with Clint and Kevin IMO

CW production is mid at best but I do throughly enjoy listening to Alex, Parker & Jamie together. Hell I’d rather listen to Jeff Burton than Clint and Kevin.

Again I love them as people/drivers but they just don’t fit in the booth.

Surprised those suckers are $100.00 with fees. I paid less than that for my fanzone access at the Daytona 500.

Anyone who has used these did you find it worth it. Will be my first time at Texas. Going Saturday & Sunday.

I know the negative views towards this race but I'll be in the area and going to see any race is better than not going. I'll be sitting in PL121 about 1/2 way up.

With a plethora of good throwback schemes and whatever the hell UniFirst drew up hitting the South Carolina asphalt this weekend at Darlington Raceway, it seems only right to explore how this new tradition came about. Let’s talk about it.

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Where Did The Idea For Modern Throwback Schemes Come From?

For the most part, tribute schemes in NASCAR were reserved for special occasions. Think the 1998 50th Anniversary paint jobs, the Iron Man record schemes we highlighted last week, or Mark Martin’s original retirement schemes in 2005 before quickly unretiring for ‘06. In the case of Martin in ‘05, the schemes he ran were inspired by some previous paintjobs he’d ran throughout his career, a template that served as the guide for how throwbacks would be handled a decade onward.

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But for the most part, they remained a rarity given the longevity of paint schemes at this particular point in NASCAR’s history. The days of rotating sponsors and alternating liveries every week had not yet set in; cars were still recognizable by their paint schemes at this time, something not particularly poignant nowadays. Still, the number of special schemes run never really wavered in the 21st century.

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Even in ‘05 did another retiring driver run a throwback scheme: Rusty Wallace, who ran a tribute scheme to his Miller Genuine Draft car that dominated in the mid-90s before Miller Lite came aboard. Brad Keselowski took this idea and continued the cycle in 2012 in his defense of the Bristol Night Race trophy, doing a scheme in tribute to Wallace. And even within the Penske stables, throwbacks had been a thing before Wallace’s retirement tour was announced, with Ryan Newman running a tribute scheme to Donnie Allison’s AMC at Rockingham in fall 2003 and putting it on pole position.

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Perhaps the first high-profile individual throwback of NASCAR’s post-Gen 4 era was Dale Earnhardt Jr’s special scheme inspired by Buddy Baker’s famous Grey Ghost car, running it at Darlington in May 2008 not a week after being infamous spun by Kyle Busch at Richmond, who went on to win the Darlington race in a special Indiana Jones scheme of his own. Following up on 2 fantastic tributes to his father and grandfather in 2006, this tribute Grey Ghost, in collaboration with the band 3 Doors Down, stood out via the fact that the original scheme Baker ran to win the 1980 Daytona 500 was Junior’s favorite car of all time, another thing that helped with inspiration for future throwbacks.

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Hendrick continued the trend in 2009, when Jeff Gordon ran a throwback scheme to Darrell Waltrip’s famous Pepsi Challenger from 1983 at Talladega in the spring. That foray didn’t last long, as he and Matt Kenseth made contact on lap 7 of 188 to set off the first of 2 major accidents, taking out Gordon and a plethora of others without even having gone to commercial break for the first time that afternoon.

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For the most part in this time, you’d see a tribute scheme of some kind every now and then, like Jamie McMurray’s Bass Pro Shops tribute to Dale Earnhardt in 2010 at Talladega, David Ragan’s UPS tribute to Ned Jarrett in the 2011 Brickyard 400, or Aric Almirola’s Richard Petty-inspired STP throwback in 2012 in a race sponsored by STP themselves at Kansas early in the season, just to name a few off of memory.

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Notice a pattern here? They were all one-offs intended to just happen at some point. Granted, they were planned out carefully with respects to the original schemes, but for the most part they were random and few in-between. Then the schedule somehow benevolently changed in 2015…

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Return of the Lady in Black

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With the return of the Southern 500 to its rightful place on Labor Day weekend for the 2015 season, it also brought with it a new challenge for teams and their graphic design departments. In the works for nearly 18 months alongside the Herculean effort to undo one of modern NASCAR’s biggest mistakes of the modern era, the throwback weekend theme was a way to celebrate both the return of the race to early September and a way to drum up interest in it with tribute schemes to some of NASCAR’s past drivers and teams; the first weekend certainly did not disappoint.

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Ironically enough, the winner of that race did NOT run a throwback scheme that weekend; Carl Edwards’ Arris Toyota still had the normal scheme it had run throughout the season. And in another odd contradiction, the retiring Jeff Gordon didn’t run a throwback paint scheme either that weekend, instead having run a Rainbow Warriors tribute scheme the weekend prior at the Bristol Night Race. Still, the enthusiasm and buzz throughout the garage and even in the throwback broadcast booth with the return of Ken Squier and Ned Jarrett was more than enough for the concept to return the following year and every year after that. When Darlington officially got a second date in 2021, the throwback weekend moved there where it remains to this day. 

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But perhaps the greatest use of a throwback scheme came not in the top level of stock car racing, but in the one just below it. Cast your minds back to 2010, where the new Car of Tomorrow platform was set to debut on a superspeedway in what is now the Xfinity Series, but Dale Earnhardt Jr made sure the Nationwide Series crowd saw him in victory lane at Daytona that year after his horrifying flip in February. Running a blue and yellow Wrangler scheme in the #3 car for Richard Childress much like his dad used to in the 1980s, Earnhardt held off the field for a memorable victory in the 100 lap preliminary event and gave Allen Bestwick a convincing piece of highlight tape to help reinstate him as the play-by-play announcer for NASCAR races the following season with an equally memorable call of the finish.

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Next week...

So many schemes to admire on a week-to-week basis, but how do we see them if most of the millions of fans aren't able to go to every track?...

Hello everybody,

I am currently doing a project based on Communities. I am not a NASCAR fan, but I always found the Community very interesting, even more than the Sports. To be more specific, on how you use NASCAR stickers to express your identity, loyalness to the driver, events, or political statements. Also the huge commitment camping days before the event, just based off just getting to know other people, even if they are (driver) rivals. I've done research on other sport fan-communities, but NASCAR fans seems very unique.

My question to the Community is, What makes you so special/different compared to other sport communities?