Tom Stolarz, in a 1992 Purolator...
Tom Stolarz, in a 1992 Purolator Lumina, leads Dan Verstuyft's "Tide Ride" through a series of corners at Portland International Raceway during the annual Historic Car weekend.
Forty stock cars come pouring down the infamous corkscrew at Laguna Seca Raceway. Their exhaust notes resonate off the hills surrounding this demanding Northern California road course as they snake through the series of curves and onto the long straightaway below where their big V-8s bellow before the grandstands.
It is a field of race cars like none other, made up of battle-worn veterans that often date back to the days when NASCAR was a regional attraction rather than a national phenomenon.
Drivers in the Historic Stock Car Racing Group are invited to compete as a support race for NASCAR weekends at Watkins Glen and Laguna Seca and are often the centerpiece for vintage racing weekends. The companion races to the NASCAR main events expose thousands of today's fans to the cars that helped develop the sport. For some of the fans, they offer a trip down Memory Lane at 200 mph.
Former sports car and NASCAR driver Gene Felton is the man most agree is behind the interest in vintage stock cars. He restored his first one 10 years ago when he bought a Sunoco Oldsmobile.
"The series has grown little by little," Felton says from his crowded 3,000-square-foot shop in Roswell, Georgia. "We have 60 cars on the East Coast and another 55 on the West Coast."
Felton has restored about 100 cars in the past decade. While most of them hit the tracks as vintage racers, a few end up in private collections for display only.
When the Historic Stock Car...
When the Historic Stock Car Racing Group rolls into town...
There are a lot of old-time racing organizations in the nation. Many of them let owners fabricate new "old" cars using reproduction body parts and up-to-date construction techniques. Others will allow someone to put a rollcage into an old sedan rusting behind a barn and declare it a "vintage" car even though it has no racing history. To some, as long as it looks right, it is right.
What makes the Historic Stock Car Racing Association unique is Felton's insistence that each car in the field has a pedigree. "They have to be a '93 or older car," Felton says. "And each one of them has to be documented as having been raced back then. We don't allow anyone to build a car and call it something it never was."
Felton says the paperwork is often the hardest part of a restoration. He says most teams didn't keep records of which chassis raced at what track in which event, and that most of the cars never carried any identification to help track their history. "Even the teams can't tell you where a particular car raced, unless it was something like the only road course car they had that season," he says.
"I go through the chain of ownership to determine where the car began," Felton continues. "It's a pain in the butt. There are some cars out there that no one ever will be able to document. It's a shame because some of them you just know have a history, but I won't buy one without knowing I can trace it."
Many old Winston Cup cars end up in a series like ARCA or Winston West. The longer they are raced, the less the present owners may know about them. "They are still out there," Felton says. "I'm looking for them constantly, always beating the bushes. I've been racing for 40 years so I have a lot of contacts."
"A guy called me four or five years ago and had a Sportsman car. He described it over the phone and I bought it. When I traced the history it turned out to be a Nova that was a Dale Earnhardt car. He raced it with his dad's number on it."