The race week is finally here.

It's the week we all go to the beach, Packed for as many nights as we can afford, loaded with as much beer as we can consume and as much suntan lotion as we can find. And means under the Deposit.

Excellent, has the ability to be, for example was this week.

Now that we're older and wiser, and we've got a lot of garage door TVs, we can watch a lot of this on TV. And in case it wasn't for Waltrips, that might be an option.

But for most fans of racing this week stands out from any other race or any other sports action.

It's the season itself for itself, the season that begins Sunday with qualifying for the Daytona 500 and conflict.

There was a time we would join a caravan of cars from North Carolina and go South, joining thousands of cars from all over the East coast, the parade of fans of the race led down the I-95 through small Rukhs, which for example are perfectly familiar to us at the moment, driving through the metropolis, we know by memory, crossing streams and rivers and passing by the counter with hot dogs and ice cream parlors.

It was not actually that other as a race, make no mistake. And it was also a game of remembering where patrol ambushes, where country roads, in fact that ran close to the construction zones started and ended and where the gas station with the highest octane number.

This is an honest situation. There was a time when some gas stations in the South sold fuel with an octane amount of 100 or more.

There was a time when the station Union 76 straight near the Speedway implemented racing fuel, in consequence of this for example a large number of people did not return home. so, coming back from Daytona is a completely different thing. For example, it was every time.

In the old days we literally knew what was waiting for us. This year it is not absolutely true.

NASCAR has worked hard on a few things again, and 1 of them involves a post-race inspection that will now take place on the track itself on the night of the race, not at the NASCAR tech facility in Charlotte, not Tuesday.

In other texts, Sunday will be a long day.

There was a time when the single rule of NASCAR in respect of favorites was that the admirer had the right of the aristocracy, who won the race, before he or she left the track. For example the fact that in a certain sense we go back to that time.

But in reality, NASCAR wants to get back into the game of law and order and arrest personal creativity and homogenize the sport. They get pleasure from lying.

Behold, this is where NASCAR has dimmed the personal road through the years. There was a time when we moved to Daytona by the same cars, actually as on the highway. We drove big muscle cars from Detroit, and we repaired them ourselves to make them faster, louder and sexier, and we did it in competition and out of respect for our buddies and opponents.

And once a year we took them to Dayton, to those sandy beaches, from which 500 people grew up, led them to the high-speed track, where we will go this week, filled them with racing fuel Union 76 and relied, in fact, that the spark plugs will not undermine our engines V8.

It was the same thing that the racers actually did, they all came from the same space where we came from.

North Carolina.

Behold, during this time it was our picture of the sport. While you witnessed the license plates from all over, when we flowed 500 miles from there, the bulk of them were from North Carolina. And in case your cruising speed was 70 and you were one moment ahead of the line of cars making 90, they were all from North Carolina.

And often won the young man from North Carolina.

In this way, he always stands out from every other race, and every time he had a situation in order to tell not only about the race, but also about the journey. The journey downwards was cheerful and cheerful, but the journey back was painful and unsafe, the highway was full of broken heroes and blown up engines, road patrol everywhere and traffic jams, from which hours went by.

But a little-known appearance happens on the roadway home. No time Nardowy Carolines not remained behind. If you sees once a stalled car on the side of the road with the first in flight license plate symbol, you sees, in fact that a number of other stop, in order to assist. If you see a car with a raised hood, you see six or eight of us looking inside, messing with components, belts and hoses.

Very nice scene I ever beheld, was randnum day later like we faded Dale Earnhardt, when the caravan of cars from North Carolina lined up in the transport truck No. 3 and married his entire roadway from Daytona beach to welcome.

It was a day when the races changed forever, a day when we tarnished our innocence. It was a reminder that not all of us were actually coming home from Dayton.

And yet no one survived from behind.