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Carroll Shelby Dies

Legendary car designer Carroll Shelby has died at the age of 89.Tags: Shelby

Carroll Shelby Dies

So here we are, running 140 mph into the first turn at Indy in a Dodge Viper and Carroll Shelby is driving, his head turned toward me, running that mouth in that gravelly Texas twang.

He's driving with his left hand and gesturing with his right, not even looking at the track, let alone that turn, which, though banked only 9 degrees, looks like a mountain rushing at you when you're heading for it at speed.

"A.J. Foyt couldn't design a s---house," is one topic he touches on near the end of the front straightaway, and then, "Jim Hall was the smartest kid I ever hired outta Caltech …"

This is the man who fathered the Cobra sports car and all the various Shelby Mustangs and Shelby Dodges, the commanding general of Henry Ford II's frontal assault on, and triumph over, Enzo Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966 and '67.

This is either the most rough-hewn genius or the most brilliant Texas redneck who has ever lived, and he keeps grinding stories out like a cement mixer at 140 mph.

And I'm thinking, "Lord, just let this old man with the transplanted heart look at the frigging corner before we get there," but he doesn't, and Bobby Rahal's words flash to mind: "There's no amount of money in the world that can make you go down into that first turn at Indy and turn left unless you WANT to."

This isn't about money or desire, it's just a lark, just a ride for the helluvit, and Carroll Shelby is laughing, looking at me, and suddenly it hits me, to my great relief:

Nothing to worry about. Carroll Shelby cannot die.

If he could, he would have been dead for 50 or 60 or 70 years by now. He's had heart problems since age 7. He had a transplant in 1990, maybe five years before our little excursion here.

Whomp! The Viper takes a set, and we pull some G's, but Shelby still hasn't looked away from me and he's still pouring profanity, telling his stories.

Back in the pits, I, in my 40s, feel certain that Carroll Hall Shelby, at that point in his 70s, will easily outlive me.

Well, I'll be damned.

Carroll Shelby died Thursday, May 10, 2012.

He was 89. He lived 82 of those years with heart trouble, the last 22 with a transplant. He had lived wide open, full of piss and vinegar all the way.

I'll be damned. Toughest SOB of a genius I've ever known.

JEFF HAYNES/Getty ImagesCarroll Shelby sitting on a 1968 GT500 KR during the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Ford Mustang in 2004.

Oh, honey, hail! Hail! The gang's all here
For an Alabama jubilee
George Cobb and Jack Yellen, 1915

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- Silly me, I thought there would be one car here Sunday that could draw a mightier roar from the grandstands than even the No. 88 of Talladega Superspeedway's unanimously adopted son, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

That would be the No. 15 of Clint Bowyer, liveried in the colors of the Alabama Crimson Tide, reigning national champions of college football. Last spring here, Michael Waltrip carried the orange and blue of the 2010 champion Auburn Tigers.

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Tom Pennington/Getty ImagesCrew members work on the No. 15 Aaron's/Alabama National Champions Toyota of Clint Bowyer in the garage area during practice.

I figured even the War Eagle legions would cheer the crimson and white Sunday out of sheer state pride -- no other has produced three consecutive national champions. For that reason, even my son, an Auburn graduate and adoptive Alabamian, pulled for the Tide against LSU in the BCS Championship Game.

Bowyer, who has won two of the last three races here, will even wear a helmet bearing the visage of Bear Bryant.

"If Earnhardt wins, it'll be 100 percent [cheers]," said Huntsville Times columnist Mark McCarter, a buddy of mine who always has his finger on the pulse of the Alabama public. "If Bowyer wins, it'll be 50-50."

Not even that, reckoned Talladega Superspeedway chairman Grant Lynch, who proceeded to give me an astounding lesson in the demographics of his crowds. Turns out Talladega is a wide gathering of Southeastern Conference tribes.

Both Alabama coach Nick Saban and Auburn coach Gene Chizik, who served as grand marshals for the spring race in 2009 and 2010 to celebrate national championships, were booed.

"Saban got booed a lot more when he was grand marshal than Chizik did," Lynch said. "And they both were amazed that they were being booed as much as they were. I told both of 'em, 'Listen, this isn't just Alabama. I got LSU, I got Tennessee, I got Georgia, I got South Carolina, I got all the people here.'

"I said, '75 percent of my fans come from outside the state of Alabama. Half of them come from more than 300 miles away.' LSU -- in the infield, they're probably No. 1. You go down Talladega Boulevard, you'll see more purple and gold than just about anything. And even out in the campgrounds, they're huge."

Among Alabamians who attend, Lynch figures the breakdown is about 55-45 Alabama over Auburn.

Both of Lynch's daughters are Auburn graduates, and the youngest will officially "walk" Sunday -- but across the stage here rather than at Auburn.

"Sara Katherine called me and said, 'Daddy, I graduate on your race weekend, either Saturday or Sunday,'" Lynch said. "And I said, 'If it's Saturday, I can probably get down there. If it's Sunday, I can't come.' She called me back and said, 'It's Sunday. I just won't walk.'

"I said, 'Yeah, you'll walk. I got a stage here at Talladega.'

"I thought, 'I sell tickets to everybody and I'm not going to make anybody mad, so let's get an Alabama graduate up there too.'"

They found an Alabama graduate school student who had already decided to "walk" here on a stage rigged by his buddies, and now he'll cross the Talladega stage with Lynch's daughter.

War Eagle! Roll Tide!

But at this Alabama jubilee, add Geaux Tigahs! Go Dawgs! Go Vols! And allow for some Hogs, Rebels, Gators and Gamecocks too.

I agree with many NASCAR pundits that Anne Bledsoe France shouldn't go into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in the fourth group. I think she should have gone in before her husband, NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., and her elder son, the second czar, Bill France Jr.

I think she should have gone into the Hall of Fame before there was a Hall of Fame. They should have laid a cornerstone with her name on it before they even started construction of that building in Charlotte, because she WAS the cornerstone of NASCAR.

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ISC Archives/Getty ImagesAnne B. France's influence on NASCAR was immense, because she was the one keeping track of the money.

From day one there should have been an "Annie B. Room" near the main entrance. In the room, there should be a simple desk, and on it should lie an adding machine, an old-fashioned bookkeeper's ledger, a few cigar boxes filled with cash (they could use Monopoly money lest the patrons help themselves) and a pair of glasses.

On the wall behind the desk there should be an elegant sign, carved in oak: "Without Her, There Would Be No NASCAR."

Lesa France Kennedy, who at age 14 was apprenticed to her grandmother, will tell you Annie B. kept two sets of books during and beyond the formative years of NASCAR and Daytona International Speedway.

"There was the real set," says Kennedy, now CEO of International Speedway Corp., "and then she had one that she would show my grandfather."

Whatever Big Bill knew he had, he would spend.

Betty Jane Zachary France, Bill Jr.'s widow and Brian and Lesa's mother, recalls arriving as a new bride in Daytona Beach and being put immediately to work with Annie B., bookkeeping.

At the end of one day, young Betty Jane was 10 cents off on her ledger. Oh, well, she would just figure it out the next morning.

"You're not going to leave," Annie B. told her new daughter-in-law.

"She made me stay," Betty Jane remembers. "I cried. I went home and told Bill [Jr.], 'I can't work for this family, I can tell you right now.' He said, 'Well, that's how she is. You'll get used to her.'"

All of NASCAR did. There was no choice. If Big Bill ruled with an iron hand, Annie B. ruled by the life's blood, money. She was not just his helpful wife. She was his boss.

First time I walked the halls of the old NASCAR building, as a rookie reporter in 1974, I was being shown around by a tough old publicist of the time. He gestured toward an open office door, and there she sat in those glasses, alone, silent, poring over financial statements.

"That sweet little lady," he said, "knows where every g------ dollar in this organization is, where it came from, and where it's going."

Every France and France associate I've ever told that story responded the same way: "Absolutely."

I'll have much more on Annie B. in a saga of the France family, a series I'm developing for publication here on ESPN.com later this year. Suffice it to say for now that no one I've interviewed thinks there would be a NASCAR today without her.

She was a nurse by profession and had met Big Bill France at a dance in Washington, D.C. She married him in 1931 and in '34 packed up all their belongings for his impulsive drift down the Eastern Seaboard in search of a better life. They liked Daytona Beach, knew about its racing history since 1903, and stopped, and stayed.

The rest is history in which Annie B.'s name rarely appears. She took a bookkeeping course at a local business college, and from there she literally knew where every dollar in NASCAR was, and hid a helluva lot of it from her husband so he wouldn't spend it.

She had Big Bill on an expense account. Whenever he went off on a trip, say to Alabama to look at land for a new speedway or to meet with Gov. George Wallace, Big Bill had to submit receipts for everything -- meals, hotel rooms, fuel for his private plane -- or he simply did not get reimbursed.

After one beach race, before the big Daytona track was built, the legend-to-be broadcaster Chris Economaki happened by the little France bungalow near the Halifax River late on Sunday evening.

"Bill answered the door, but didn't invite me in," Economaki once told several of us. "That was very unusual -- he was always very friendly and hospitable. On this evening he was very nice, but he stood in the doorway with the door opened only a couple of feet.

"I got a glimpse inside. There were stacks of money, cash, everywhere on the floor. And in the middle of all that money sat Annie B., on the floor, counting."

The Frances now are all millionaires many, many times over. So are a lot of NASCAR's owners, drivers, even crew chiefs. Every one of them has that little lady to thank profoundly.

Among the statues at Daytona now, tallest of all, rises the 6-foot-5 likeness of the founder of NASCAR, but he is not alone. He has his arm around the bronze likeness of a diminutive woman. There's a damn good reason for that.

The moment confirmation came out Wednesday that Bristol Motor Speedway will indeed bow to fans and -- how do you put this? -- re-reconfigure the track, I thought immediately of the best friend NASCAR fans ever had, the late Jeff Byrd.

No one on this planet cared more about you, who pay your hard-earned money for tickets, than he did.

"JayByrd" was the track president who had Bristol redone in 2007. He was the one who took the blame for it, and felt so bad about it, until the day he died in 2010, at age 60, of brain cancer.

I thought of the wee hours in the parking lot at Bristol after the 2008 night race, the first one that laid a blatant egg, on the new surface, widened from the old one.

Byrd drove a golf cart around, stopping at each straggling gaggle of fans and saying, simply, "Y'all, we're sorry."

As he drove toward a group of reporters, I shouted jokingly at him:

"JayByrd! Have you overnighted Carl Edwards his certified check for a million dollars for saving your event?"

Kyle Busch had dominated, leading 415 consecutive laps so smoothly, that David Poole of the Charlotte Observer, also gone now, dubbed the place anew: "Mini-Michigan."

But at the end of the race, Edwards had taken Rowdy out to win, and there had ensued a slamming match on the cool-down lap that -- finally, finally that evening -- satiated that traditionally enormous "Bristol Night Race" crowd.

So, I kidded, had Byrd compensated Edwards?

Byrd got out of his cart, walked over to me, put his head on my shoulder and cried out loud.

He was half-kidding, but half-serious.

"Do you think Carl saved my job?" he said as he mock-sobbed.

Byrd knew that night he'd made a mistake that would be hard to undo. Knowing the man as I had since 1974, I can assure you that he was sorrier for you the fan than for himself, as the BMS president who had to answer to track-owning mogul Bruton Smith.

Byrd's full intentions were to make the racing better for the fans. That you were displeased made him heartsick.

Smith didn't go into details Wednesday about what will be done to the track, whether an attempt will be made to return it exactly to the Bristol many of us thought was the best and most action-packed track on the tour.

The details will come later, but …

"The race fans have spoken," Smith said in a statement.

But Byrd had heard you that hot August night nearly four years ago, and he told you up front that he was sorry.

If he hadn't gotten sick, I suspect he would have moved sooner.

So please don't feel vindictive now that Bristol has yielded.

Just know that your late dear friend meant well by you.

Getty ImagesBenny Phillips, center, is flanked by other members of the media, from left, Jim Hunter, Gene Granger, Gerald Martin and Randy Laney at Atlanta International Raceway in 1973.

Benny Phillips was the grit and the guts of the NASCAR media corps for more than 40 years. It was he who dubbed Darlington Raceway "The Lady in Black."

He was the writer Richard Petty trusted most down through the decades. He co-authored Dale Earnhardt's autobiography. He so captivated Formula One legend Ayrton Senna upon their first meeting that the great Brazilian shooed away all his handlers and gave the North Carolina reporter all the time he needed.

Outside racing, Benny had enough narrow escapes from death in the outdoors to rival big-game hunters and soldiers of fortune. Countless cowboys, backwoodsmen, poachers, bootleggers and hunting guides called him a friend.

Benny died Tuesday, at 74, in the last kind of place he wanted to -- a hospital.

He had tumbled ATVs down mountainsides, been thrown off horses, fallen out of tree stands, saved panicked friends in small boats in winter tempests off the Outer Banks, had a skiff go upside down on him in a raging, freezing river …

Oh, one other thing: Benny was a paraplegic.

The Salk vaccine came one summer too late for him. Benny always reckoned he'd contracted the polio virus in a country swimming hole, the way so many kids did in the 1950s.

You get an almost certain path to Duke or Chapel Hill as a running back cut off suddenly, completely, you're pretty ticked off. And Benny was, but only for a little while.

He went off to Warm Springs, Ga., to the therapy center established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and encountered an old Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who'd been shot through the spine in the Pacific.

Just as Benny got his bearings with steel braces on his legs, the gunny would sneak up behind him and knock one of his crutches away.

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ISC Images & Archives via Getty ImagesBenny Phillips was selected the National Motorsports Press Association writer of the year seven times and spent 48 years with the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina, ultimately serving as sports editor for 32 years.

"You're gonna fall," the gunny would say. "You're gonna fall a lot for the rest of your life. Might as well get used to it."

All those years Benny traveled the Cup tour, he never would accept a room fitted for the handicapped. All that stainless steel stuff got in his way. He'd been taught by the gunny to "improvise; improvise; improvise."

For 40 of the 48 years he wrote for the High Point Enterprise, all 27 years he wrote for Stock Car Racing magazine, even his 12 years with Turner Broadcasting, Benny "walked."

That's what he called lumbering along on crutches through the garages and through airports and onto planes.

Seven times he was National Motorsports Press Association writer of the year. He deserved the Henry T. McLemore Award, given for courage in auto racing journalism, more than any other winner.

ATVs, which he discovered in the 1970s, set him free to hunt, from the quail fields and turkey thickets of the South, up to Montana and even on up to Hudson's Bay in Canada.

But for all those decades he never would abandon those crutches and heavy steel braces for a wheelchair. The braces almost took him under once, when a boat capsized on him while he was duck hunting on a river.

When he went to interview Senna for TBS, Phillips and his crew were told they had 15 minutes. Senna was a deeply caring and sensitive man, virtually a priest, and so immediately he told Benny he didn't mean to be nosy but wanted to know what had happened to him.

Benny told him. Senna said he had a sister who'd been disabled by disease. Before they knew it, the McLaren publicists came and told Benny the interview time was up. Senna told them no. To go away. That they would take as much time as they wanted.

Maybe 10 years ago, the cartilage in Benny's shoulders just wore out from what he called "40 years of walking on them." Finally he yielded to years of advice from his doctors to get into an electric wheelchair.

I called it his scooter. He was hell on it, just as as he'd been on the ATVs in the mountains and fields. More than once he turned the scooter over, one time suffering a compound fracture of a leg.

This winter, hunting, Benny was injured just trying to get onto the scooter, and needed surgery. The aftermath didn't go well, and besides, he was seriously diabetic by this point.

He fought the complications for more than a week in intensive care. But this time all the grit and all the guts weren't enough.

For 37 years he was one of my closest friends. He taught me much about motorsports journalism, even more about the ways of animals in forests, birds in fields and fish in streams.

And we played a helluva lot of poker.

I am heartsick.

Chris Graythen/Getty ImagesRichard Childress, left, said grandson Austin Dillon's championship was a family affair.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- The Trucks series needed this. Badly.

Just when you thought NASCAR's third-tier division was fading, here's Austin Dillon to revive it, and make it what it should be: a developmental springboard for young drivers on their way up.

Dillon, 21, didn't just become the youngest driver to win the Trucks title. He's the first champion under 40 since Travis Kvapil won it at 28 in 2003.

And, because Kvapil has never quite established himself at the Cup or Nationwide levels, Dillon is the first Trucks champion who appears to be headed seriously higher since Greg Biffle in 2000.

Dillon now moves up to the Nationwide Series for 2012, and right behind him into Trucks comes his younger brother, Ty, age 19 -- who won the ARCA championship this year, and if anything might be just a tick better than Austin.

And before you start in with the complaining that the Dillons' grandfather, Richard Childress, bought them championships, consider this: The boys were doing it for "Pop Pop" at least as much as Pop Pop was doing it for the boys.

"I'm so happy for my grandfather," Austin said after winning the Trucks title Friday night despite being stuck in 10th place when rain shortened the race. He edged race winner Johnny Sauter by four points for the season title.

For Childress, who won six Cup championships with Dale Earnhardt as his driver, this has "got to be right up there at the top," Pop Pop said, because, "It's so special when you're family. Our whole family is involved."

Whatever the amounts Childress has spent on those boys, he has done NASCAR a service, because the notion of the up-and-coming young driver moving through the ranks is back.

For the previous eight years, if Trucks are analogous to Double-A baseball -- and they are -- then it was sort of like watching a bunch of players on their way down from the majors.

Now there's Austin Dillon, with Ty on the way, Sauter isn't exactly a geezer himself at 33, and James Buescher, who wound up third in Trucks points, is also 21.

That's not exactly an Over-the-Hill Gang.

My top 10 reasons why Sunday's AAA Texas 500 (3 p.m. ET, ESPN) promises to be the most spectacular event of any kind ever beheld by mankind.

10. Because Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage says so.

9. Because TMS draws 8.5 million fans in 3.4 million luxury motor coaches to every single race, and every race gets bigger. (No, Gossage doesn't disclose attendance. You have to go by his insinuations.)

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Todd Warshaw/Getty ImagesSunday may be so exciting it will set your hair -- and cars -- on fire!

8. Because prerace ceremonies will include Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeating that speech he made in New Hampshire the other night. ("Live Free or Dah" should draw thunderous cheers at home.)

7. Because the event has a triple-A rating, higher than U.S. Government bonds. (And to think, Gossage got TMS paid for going AAA -- how's that for fiscal responsibility?)

6. Because the highlight of driver introductions will be the firing of chief Chase contenders Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart from twin circus cannons into the grandstands to meet and greet the fans.

5. Because the traffic jams at Cowboy Liquors, just up the interstate from the speedway, will be worse than Woodstock.

4. Because there's this little Mexican restaurant in Lake Worth that leaves our native Texans Terry Blount and K. Lee Davis so blissful, so cheap, that they think nothing but positive thoughts for the rest of the weekend.

3. Because TMS chief publicist Mike Zizzo's late-race nacho buffet costs the track $383,421.97 per person. The tortilla chips are blessed individually atop an ancient Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan. The beans are from Fort Worth's finest Piggly Wiggly.

2. Because Texans who haven't gotten over the World Series will be roaming the parking lots looking for people with Missouri license plates to whup.

1. Because Gossage will be roaming the media center looking for journalists who don't buy his stories to whup.

LOUDON, N.H. -- R-r-r-r-race fans! Are … you … ready?

Are … you … READY?

For some coasting? Some clutching? Some knocking the cars out of gear? Some backing off the throttle waaaay early? Some rolling free through the corners?

For some more fuel-mileage racing?

Slow may be the new fast in this Chase.

Sunday's Sylvania 300 (2 p.m. ET, ESPN) at New Hampshire Motor Speedway "very easily could come down to fuel mileage," Jeff Gordon said.

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Jerry Markland/Getty Images/NASCARKevin Harvick knows how to save fuel down the stretch, but he's not about to talk about how he does it.

So here we go again, right on top of last week's fuel-mileage cliff-hanger to open the playoffs at Chicagoland Speedway, where the late dropout rate was enough to churn the playoff standings significantly.

This, right off a regular season where fuel-mileage finishes "seem to be part of the norm more than they are the exception," said Dale Earnhardt Jr., who benefited from last week's late attrition to finish third in the race and jump to fifth in the standings.

Then there was last year's Chase opener here, where Tony Stewart dominated the race until he ran out of gas on the 299th of the 300 laps and wound up 24th.

Kevin Harvick, who conserved enough fuel to finish second last week and stay atop the playoff standings, was asked here to talk about some of his techniques for saving.

"Yeah … right," Harvick said with that little smirk of his, and then sat there for several seconds of silence, until his audience figured out he wasn't going to give away anything.

Brad Keselowski stopped me in midquestion -- "No" -- about discussing his methods.

Ryan Newman, who'll start on the pole Sunday, had perhaps the best one-liner when asked what makes a driver good at conservation.

"Genetics," Newman cracked, and laughed.

Saving fuel has become so routinely crucial that teams are developing their own sets of secrets about it, a whole separate category of technology and instincts, getting as complex as, say, chassis setups to suit an individual driver.

"Each team has their own way of making it happen," said Keselowski, "just like anything else, no different than cooling off your engines for Daytona and Talladega and different things like that.

"It's just an evolution of the sport. And the thing I'll say about fuel-mileage races is that as a whole and in general, they do take talent. The driver who is able to save very well, there's some talent involved in that."

"The game certainly has changed over the last year, year and a half," said Jimmie Johnson, who admitted fuel-mileage strategy may be a weakness in his quest for a sixth straight championship. "Fuel mileage never has been a strong suit with us, and it's something that we know we need to be better with."

Stewart said his win at Chicagoland on fuel mileage last week "doesn't make up for" the one he lost here last fall, the Chase opener he dominated until he ran out of gas on the 299th of the 300 laps.

Newman did speak in the general terminology of his engineering background about conservation.

"The car balance is one thing, knowing what you have to do to conserve that energy," Newman said. "Track position is a big factor, too. There were times at Chicago that I was getting drafts off of guys on the straightaways just to try to save some fuel."

Earnhardt was a little more driver-specific.

"We all sort of study about what to do," he said, "whether it be just lifting off the gas, simply lifting and just coasting into the corner, lifting earlier than you normally would, whether you need to turn it off, clutch the motor, whatever. There are all kinds of techniques that guys have."

What has made fuel-mileage races so common? Essentially, better tires and longer runs between cautions.

Fewer cautions, Kyle Busch believes, may be due largely to the current car design.

"These cars are not easier to drive, they're just harder to spin out," Busch said. "The old cars were a lot easier to spin out sometimes, or [one driver] could get underneath the back of somebody and jack them up. With these cars, the bumpers line up."

And, Johnson said, "Tires don't fall off like they used to."

Whether you like fuel-mileage races or not, "There is nothing you can do to get rid of them," Earnhardt said.

A colleague of mine, one of the few who has been around NASCAR longer than I have, asked Gordon a rhetorical question: "This isn't NASCAR racing -- is it?"

"It depends on how exciting a finish it is," Gordon said. "I think sometimes if somebody is able to make it and others aren't, that can be pretty exciting."

Actually, I kind of like fuel-mileage finishes. They are suspenseful. When front-runners are close on gas, there's always the chance that what would otherwise be a runaway could be snuffed.

And my recollections of yore in NASCAR, say the 1970s and '80s, are that virtually every finish was suspenseful. Even if one driver was way out front, you never knew he had the race locked up until he crossed the finish line.

That was because engine reliability was poorer, and fuel calculations were far less precise. So there was always a chance a dominant car would blow an engine or run out of gas.

Now, as then, the most boring element in any race is predictability.

"When it goes all the way to the finish [under green], and it's somewhat predictable, then it's not very exciting," Gordon said.

On Sunday, for the second straight Chase race, fuel mileage may leave the finish entirely unpredictable. And that's not such a bad thing.

ATLANTA -- I'm giving you an honest dateline. I won't try to imply that I went down to Hampton, Ga., where Atlanta Motor Speedway is, today. NASCAR, of course, isn't there, either.

Anyway, we might consider what the drivers and crews will have to deal with when they come back, on Tuesday. NASCAR has scheduled an 11 a.m. ET start on ESPN.

Yeah, right. The way tropical depression Lee is lingering, I'll be thrilled if they're finished by 11 p.m., and content if they even start by then. Forecasts don't promise clear skies over Hampton before about 9 p.m.

So chances are, the setups the teams left in the cars, back when they held a shred of hope of running Sunday night, will be about right -- or as near right as you can guess for this racetrack.

But let's say, optimistically, they start at noon Tuesday. Let's say some fluke of nature clears out the clouds and the sun blisters the track, so that cars that were set up for a cool track with lots of grip will slip and slide on the hot pavement.

That would be little different than just a couple of years ago, when cars had to qualify at night for a scheduled day race at AMS. That was by design, trying to draw a crowd for qualifying in a metropolitan area that is a tough sell for NASCAR.

Historically, regardless of weather or the time of day or night they practice and qualify, few if any teams get their setups right for AMS until at least the first pit stop. You simply have to have a shakedown run, just to begin figuring it out.

That goes back far past the reconfiguration of the track in 1997, all the way to its beginnings in 1960. Until '97, the track was known as the only one in NASCAR whose 1.5-mile circumference was taken up more with turns than with straightaways. It remains pretty close to that.

Obviously it's harder to set up for cornering that for straightaways, and so "It's more aggravatin' than anything else," Richard Petty used to say, back when he, David Pearson and Cale Yarborough were struggling until their first pit stops to get some sort of handle on the handling.

So whatever time they drop the green Tuesday, the real race is unlikely to start until after those first pit stops, as crews begin to sort out what kind of racing conditions they're left with. Tropical storm or not, that's pretty much standard procedure at AMS.

Getty ImagesA cowboy hat and cars that ran fast were Smokey Yunick trademarks in auto racing.

The "Best Damn Garage in Town" -- or maybe anywhere, ever -- burned down Monday night.

In it, in his time, Henry "Smokey" Yunick worked wizardry unprecedented in NASCAR, or Indy cars, or the entire realms of physics and mechanics, for that matter.

From it, he ran everything from mining exploration along the Amazon River to winning cars in the Daytona 500 (Marvin Panch in 1961, Fireball Roberts in '62) to stock-block engines in the Indianapolis 500.

Outside it, in the community of Holly Hill, Fla., part of metropolitan Daytona Beach, the sign stood for decades, bearing Smokey's proclamation: "Best Damn Garage in Town."

Profanity came as naturally as breathing to the self-educated genius: "Now one of us is f----- up," was the second thing he ever said to me, as he prepared to go to Indy in 1975 and was trying to explain the difference between turbocharged and normally aspirated engines. I had misinterpreted what he'd said first.

The building was sold in 2004, after Smokey's death of leukemia in 2001 at age 77.

"Hell, I might already be dead," he told our longtime mutual friend, Ken Willis of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, who visited him often in his final months. "I've never been dead before, so I don't know what it's like."

He'd worked on national-level energy projects, along the way meeting a young Navy nuclear officer named Jimmy Carter, and high-level design projects for Chevrolet -- frustrated, in the early 1960s, with "a little a------ by the name of Ralph Nader," he would grumble in recollection.

For the '75 Indy 500, his car, driven by Jerry Karl, had only one sponsor, the Jose Johnson Hotel, the two "Js' in the logo formed by snakes. It was Smokey's own hotel, a shack along the Amazon he and some fellow prospectors had found and turned into a base camp. He'd painted its roof orange, thrown in some hammocks, and at Indy he issued a plug during an interview: "If you're ever up along that part of the Amazon, be sure to stay at the Jose Johnson. We don't have air conditioning, but we do have mosquito nets."

Smokey claimed to be working on an engine that would run on water, and another that burned paper (hopefully to be developed into one that ran on garbage).

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Getty ImagesOne of the things about Smokey Yunick is he knew what was in the rulebook and what wasn't. It was what wasn't that counted in his book.

From used bookstores, he earned de facto Ph.Ds in physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering -- "Some of the best books in the world can be bought for a quarter," he once said, shaking a tattered volume on petrochemistry at me.

After the deaths of crewmen led NASCAR to mandate pit road speed limits circa 1990, Smokey lobbied for the replacement of humans in danger by mechanical means. Rather than jack men, for example, Indy cars were using pneumatic jacks.

Would it work for heavier stock cars?

"A fellow I know took a Pontiac to Darlington in 1960, with pneumatic jacks," he said. "NASCAR told him never to bring it back, and to forget it."

He puffed on his pipe.

"I've still got those pieces of aluminum tubing lying around here somewhere."

What made him bail out of NASCAR by the 1970s was his disgust with Bill France Sr.'s insistence on policing -- stifling, in Smokey's view -- technology.

Had Smokey run automobile racing, he would have had only one rule: "All right you sonsabitches, let's have a race."

Nobody hated concrete retaining walls more than Smokey, who developed one of the first "soft wall" systems, using stacks of used racing tires bolted together through the centers, and covered with canvas.

Once, when invited to inspect newly reinforced concrete walls at Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- a considerable improvement in fan safety -- Smokey was wary.

"What about the drivers?" he asked. "All you're gonna do now is kill the poor bastards deader, quicker."

Something he said to me circa 1990 got him in big trouble with his old friends in the Chevy hierarchy and would keep him there for the rest of his life.

At the time, the "Chevy Indy V8" engine was dominating Indy car racing.

At Charlotte, word leaked out that NASCAR was considering dropping engine displacement from 351 to 250 cubic inches. I found Smokey underneath his trademark cowboy hat.

"If they go to 250, what's to keep the Germans and Japanese from running with them?" Smokey mused about the smaller-block, higher-tech imports.

But what about the NASCAR rule mandating "any American car"?

"Is a Toyota built in Ohio an American car? I don't know," Smokey said.

Then came the bombshell.

"Now you take that Chevy Indy V8. The people at Chevrolet would have the American public believe that's an American engine. All I know is, the Queen of England just knighted the two engineers who developed it."

Indeed, the engine was built at Ilmor Engineering Ltd., run by engineers Mario Ilion and Paul Morgan.

"Now somebody's lying," Smokey said, "and it's either the Queen of England or the PR guys from Chevrolet."

The rebuttal from the PR guys from Chevrolet? Chevy had developed the electronics for the engine. That was about it.

The most famous story about Smokey wasn't true, according to the always-candid David Pearson.

The story was that NASCAR officials were questioning the size of the fuel cell in Smokey's car at Daytona. To show them there was nothing illegal about the fuel cell, Smokey supposedly cranked the car and drove all the way back to the Best Damn Garage in Town -- with the fuel cell out of the car, lying on the ground in the Daytona garage! The implication was that the fuel was hidden in the roll cage.

Not true, Pearson once told me, and, "Hell, I was standing right there." Smokey drove away, but the fuel cell was in the car.

Doesn't matter. There was more than enough that was true about Smokey.

Henry Yunick, World War II bomber pilot, had flown over Daytona Beach on training runs, and thought the seaside town below looked pleasant enough. After the war he settled there and opened the Best Damn Garage in Town.

He took to NASCAR right away, but found it too limiting. Same with Indy cars. At the national level, his radical ideas both amazed and frightened the U.S. government.

In his final years he settled into his garage, specializing in diesel mechanics, common-sense science and … philosophy.

Now even his classroom, where a lot of us learned a helluva lot, is gone. Burned to the ground.