“Racing people,” more than what you think

Almost every body in the news business has a story of the working life they lived before starting their career in this crazy business of local TV news. Mine was a life of going in circles at local tracks all across the southeast. Ever since I was old enough to drive, I've spent every weekend at a racetrack during racing season. I remember sitting in elementary school looking through the Monday sports section of the Florence Morning News looking for the results of the NASCAR race from the weekend. The bad thing is back in the late 80s, finding any news about racing was nearly impossible. Throughout high school, through college and for another year after, I worked in the two race car shops in Florence.

Way back in 1995, I started helping a man from Hartsville, named Todd Kelley, on his race car. At first, I was amazed at how meticulous and detail-oriented you have to be to maintain a race car. Every part on those cars has to be checked, re-checked and every angle and every bit of geometry in setting up a car to go fast was way more involved than I ever though. We spent hours building parts, fabricating chassis', cutting metal and welding. I learned the value of hard work, then the satisfaction of watching something you build by hand go out and win a race. I would hate to total the hours we spent in the shop together, the hours traveling from track to track, and never making one dime from all that hard work. But what I did gain, the knowledge of how a race car works, and how people work is something money could never buy. Most of all, from Todd I developed a close friendship, and a friendship that continues till today.

I bought my first race car in 1999. It was a street stock that I raced at the Florence Motor Speedway in Timmonsville. To tell you the truth, I had no idea what I was doing! I had several great friends at the track that would come by and offer advice and offer suggestions to help make my car faster and I was very, very thankful for that. That's when I first learned there was something a little different about these "racing people." I looked around and noticed that families would come to the track and spent their Saturday night watching and participating in the races. Dads were racing and their kids would cheer them on. If you ever had trouble with your car, you'd have a group of people you didn't know by name pitching in to help you get going again. I had friends there that I didn't even know outside of racing. They never asked for anything in return, not even a thank you.

It was that same year that I went to work at a race car shop in Florence. I went to work there knowing very little about chassis fabrication, very little about welding, and even less about racing people were with money. They'd spend every dime they had to race. That's probably not the smartest thing, but it made them happy, so who's to judge that. I built my first race car chassis that year, with the help of Ronnie Howell, a well-known local race car builder around the area. I finished the car the week of Christmas that year. I remember closing the shop down the night before we took a couple days off for the holiday, and before I turned the shop lights off to walk out, I turned around to take another look at the car. It hit me then that at 20 years old; I'd just built something like that. I remember the day the customer came to take his car home. It sounds funny, but I hated to see it go.

For the past several years I spent mostly every weekend at the Myrtle Beach Speedway. I built a late model car for myself and raced it only once there. I spent most of that time helping out friends who race and again, I developed a good feel for people during that time. In racing, there's this fierce competitiveness on the track between men and machines, sometimes that poured over into the pits following the event, but all that aggressiveness usually stayed on the track. Even the people who lost would cheer for the guy who won, even though they were on separate teams, after all it was a friend who beat them. They had to cheer. There are people who have spent their entire lives racing. There are second and third-generation families who race. These people develop a very tight clique, but getting into the clique is easy. "Racing people" are quick to make friends. They enjoy talking about their sport and once you start up a conversation about racing, it's hard to shut them up.

The lessons I learned from them are valuable: hard work, the value of a dollar, the value of friendship, the loyalty, and how you can't judge people based on stigmas. Of course there's a stigma surrounding "racing people." Just because most of them don't wear a tie to work, don't live in million dollar homes people draw conclusions about them. I've worked in the state house in Columbia through college, around some pretty affluent people and with my job now, I'm around affluent people most of my time. The two groups of people are different. "Racing people" don't put on a show according to the crowd around them; they're real, what you see is what you get. Their friendship is real; they're not looking to get something from you, just some quality time and good conversation. Their doors are always open. They're not perfect people, none of us are, but they're there when you need them. If I had a flat at three in the morning, I have a cell phone full of people who know a little something about changing a tire. They'd be the first ones there to help; service with a smile.

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