Let’s Swap Paint!
Man oh man, NASCAR was awesome back in the day. Those are real cars. They’re as souped up as they could make them, but the SC in NASCAR still meant something. Those were stock cars.
I know today’s NASCAR pulls big crowds, but just look at the crowd at Riverside in 1966. Southern California was hardly Podunk back in the ’60s, but Riverside only had about 50,000 people living in it in 1950. There’s six or seven times as many people living there now. It must have been a bit of an excursion for the crowd to go to the races, and they had to rough it, but by gad they wanted to see Parnelli Jones swap some paint with Dan Gurney, and watch Gurney get a trophy and a smooch from Miss Bardahl.
Miss Bardahl is collecting Social Security now, the Ford Fairlanes are collecting rust, and NASCAR is racing moon rockets with hard plastic tarps over them that look vaguely like cars. It just ain’t the same.
2 thoughts on “Let’s Swap Paint!”
There were a couple of years, ’70 and ’71, or maybe ’71 and ’72, when my dad and my uncle Ward took me and my brother and my cousins down to Riverside to watch the race the week they were running. We camped in the infield around turn Nine. I was lucky to have the family I did.
Hi Monty- Thanks for reading and commenting at the BSBFB.