So I guess growing up with a late model in my dad's shop, it wasn't too hard to get into racing. I remember when we were little kids, we'd race year round with our hot wheels and matchbox cars. We had drivers names for every single car that we had, and we had plenty. Our race track was in the dining room. Nice swade carpet that looked like grooves. We race on our knees while the commentary was done like it was on Friday nights and Farmer City and Saturday nights in Fairbury. As we got older, we took our racing to the outdoors and into the dirt...where it was meant. We created our own Eldora, Pensboro, Clarksville and just to make sure it was like the real thing, we hung a flashlight out at night to get the actual feel.
Funny how things come full circle. My nephew and son are not the sons of actual drivers. However what rubbed off on us back in those days seems to have done the same on them. My son has a every growing population of matchbox and hotwheels cars now. Sometimes on occasions, while at grandmas, he'll run across a car and ask if we played with it. Some I still recognize, others not so much. Yet that one car he asked about, was Ray Godsey...and I didn't have to thing back real hard.
The love of the track starts at that point. Getting to see your first race and then getting those little cars that make your imagination run wild. From that point on, you never forget where it was you started and what you did to pass the time before the real thing woud begin. My father always said we actually put rubber into the carpet from all those cars we ran. Now it is just putting rubber on the road to get there.
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