Chuck Piazza: Short Track Legend, Q & A, Part II

Chuck Piazza: Short Track Legend, Q & A, Part II

By Rhonda Beck, WISNC Creations/BeckRacingMedia, 1-15-2023

This is Part II of the Q & A I did with race car driver Chuck Piazza of Inman, S.C. Like I mentioned in Part I, I first did an interview with him back in 2011 and then followed it up with a couple more in 2022. Part I can be found at my Linked in page. Part II is mainly about Piazza’s time racing in the South and the activities that have kept him engaged in the motorsports scene since his retirement.

RB: When you came down here to the Carolinas, what were some of your first memories?

CP: I used to buy parts from Rex White down in Spartanburg. We’d talk on the phone. And in 1967 we were going to come down to Daytona for the races. I called Rex on the phone and said, ‘Rex, I’m gonna stop by and see you. I’ve never seen you. We just talk on the phone, and I want to stop by the shop and see you.’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ Well, that was about the time that Rex left Spartanburg, between those couple of months, and went to Atlanta. It was many years until I finally met Rex.

RB: So you saw someone else instead of Rex?

CP: Elmo Henderson was the Firestone tire dealer.?Elmo was a hotshot driver and had a bad wreck. He run a good many Grand National races, but he got hurt. When I got here, I stopped by his shop. He was a driver, probably on the same level back then as David (Pearson). He probably would have went up and been a NASCAR star. He and Ken Miller were partners in race parts. Ken Miller was the engine builder for Bondi Long. Teams were called Grand Nationals back then and that was who Little Bud Moore drove for. So that’s how that happened. When I stopped to see Rex in February, a 70-degree day, I went to the shop and said, ‘Man, 70 degrees.’ And one thing led to another. They said they’d like to expand their business and sell racing parts. Well, I was a machinist, and I could do that down here. With that weather, I thought I could run three times as many races here. I thought maybe I’d get a chance at running a little bigger series. So we went back home to Jamestown and couldn’t get in the driveway--there was so much snow! But April 7th we rolled into Spartanburg and went to work for Elmo and Ken; worked with them for a while.

RB: You said Ken Miller was the engine builder for Bondi Long?

CP: Bondi Long. That was a Ford dealer somewhere around Sumter or Darlington. And they’re both passed now. Elmo passed several years ago, and Ken passed about a year ago. I finally went to work over at Greenville for the Robert Wilson Barbecue King race teams. Ronnie Hopkins was crew chief and Little Bud Moore was the driver.

RB: You said out of that came another story about them and a new track.

CP: Robert Wilson wanted to build a track here in Spartanburg, a new track like a Richmond, a small tri-oval. It wasn’t the original Talladega track. And I seen the plans and the option on the land at Hwy 29 and 85. I seen the drawings, just tons of ‘em. But Spartanburg City shot all that down back then. That was the Cleveland’s and the White’s back then and they ran everything. They had all the big mills. And you got the little mill homes. You got the general store. You played baseball or softball for them. They had the church for you. They gave you everything and then back then it was kinda like, ‘You got all this. What else do you want?’ So when I came to Spartanburg, there were 12 NASCAR race teams here, made of the Allison’s, the Moore’s, the Hylton’s, Cotton Owens, Mario Rossi, G. C. Spencer, Jack Smith, and a couple other ones.

RB: When you first came down here, were there things you adjusted to or is there anything you missed from up North? Do you get up there still?

CP: Oh yeah, a lot of our family has passed away now but we try to go up there. I will try to go up for a family reunion. But other than that, it’s not often. 1967. So we’ve been here 56 years.

RB: How did you get in with teams down here?

CP: While I worked with Ronnie, I was racing for teams up in this area—at Cherokee, Shelby, Rutherfordton. I got with some really good team owners. Larry Edwards out of Columbus, N.C. was the first one I drove for. They were good people, he and his son. But somehow, I got hooked up with the Davis Brothers out of Mayo, S.C. That was Billy and James.

RB: You drove for a family team in Chesnee, S.C.?

CP: They were the Martin family. There was Vincent and Larry and Jimmy and Wayne. Vincent Martin was the car builder and primary owner. The brothers were all in it. Vincent could have gone up in the NASCAR ranks. He would have been a good NASCAR crew chief. He was that sharp back then, I always thought.

RB: And you said that he liked it when you came from the back to win a race?

CP: We didn’t win a lot of races, but we won a few—four or five. And he said, ‘Well, this ain’t no fun. I want us to see what we can do.’ He’d deliberately go to the racetrack late, so we’d have to start at the back--just to watch us. He had the car and we’d do it. He got a big kick out of that. He’d come in late and we’d win the race. He loved it.

RB: So you raced at Old Concord but sometimes went to Cherokee or Shelby instead depending on the circumstances, like the weather?

CP: Lots of times we’d do that. We’d won a lot of races at Concord. One night, after getting rained out, we hightailed it back to S.C. ?In fact, I spent a few hours in the Shelby jail. We drove 80 or 70 mph, as fast as you could tow a racecar back then. Because James Davis was towing, and I was behind them. Well, there were troopers that stopped us. I never forget the trooper saying, ‘Where are you guys going?’ And we said, ‘Do you believe, we were trying to get to the races over in Shelby?’ And he said—'Well, you’re going to be a little late ‘cause we need to go to the courthouse.’ And they locked us up back there with the hardened criminals for a couple of hours.

RB: But did you get to the race?

CP: Yeah, we got there late.?Missed all the heat races and everything and got there for the feature, which is the last race of the night. Usually features back then didn’t start ‘til 10 or 11 at night. And as I recall, we did win the race that night.

RB: They let you run even if you missed the heat races?

CP: Well, you’d just start at the back.

RB: I don’t know if that’s true today. With those big series, if you’re not there in time, you can’t race.

CP: Yeah, now if you missed the qualifying then you would be out. But if you came in there late, you gotta start at the back. But I was used to that. And the Davis Brothers. Well actually, Edwards was first and then the Martin brothers, they were out of Chesnee, and then the Davis brothers was the third. And Preston Humphries was driving for them a lot back then too. But he was not driving for the Davis brothers the day he got killed. For whatever reason Phil Combs asked me, ‘Why I didn’t you run that race? Everybody was there.’ And what year was that? ‘76 or ’77? ?I don’t know what happened, if I was driving for somebody else another race. Seems like I might have been.

RB: Well, that’s the next question. You weren’t racing in that when Preston Humphries got killed at Metrolina Speedway? Tom Higgins talked about the crash and how it was difficult to cover.

CP: Where Preston got killed? No, I wasn’t. I was at another race somewhere. They raced at Metrolina that day and he got killed. But Preston drove for the Davis brothers for a long time and that’s how I was trying to tie that in. Somehow, I got tied in with them and, geez, they were good car builders, good engine builders and worked hard. We would come home, maybe run Cherokee on Thursday night. They got home and the first thing they did was unhooked and put that car on jack stands. They did a really good job. Tore the parts off, checked everything. I remember we run that one engine 37 times and they wanted to see how long it went (the engine). Kind of reminded us of that story with Kramer in the Seinfeld episode, when he was out driving a new car, test driving it, and didn’t have much gas in it, and they wanted to see how far it would go. That was sort of the same principle. That’s something I feel bad about, ‘cause I don’t have all the records. But we won a lot of races and once about 11 in a row. Then about that time there was a guy I got to know over in Gaffney, S.C. His name was Joe Elmore. Joe was a businessman, went to South Carolina, was a Gamecock fan and good athlete, and had made some money in business. He wanted to go racing. He hooked up with Pete Byers out of North Carolina over near Forest City. He was a good car builder. Built cars for Charlie Blanton.

RB: You still have a lot of interesting papers where you calculated things for the racecars. Can you talk about the significance of your formula page? Like computing the anti-roll rate formulas?

CP: You know, I’ve still got all my formulas in there for doing the rates on roll bars and bump steer and roll centers. Most of the cars and even the Grand National or the Winston Cup cars now, I don’t know what they’re running. But the anti-roll bar--they call it a sway bar--it ran across the frame and attached to the lower suspension arms of the independent suspension. You could use the roll bar along with the springs to come up with the total spring rate for the front of the car. And it gets a little deep. But by computing the weights of the car and the spring rates all around, you could come up with the roll couple. Let’s say you come up with a thousand pounds of spring rates and most of the time the front suspension is gonna carry most of the load of the car. You go down into the corner where it was on the right front. You could control that—the springs, roll bar, different setups on the car. And one of the things we learned back then is a good driver could tell a half a percent difference in roll couple. I learned more about that with Harry Hyde. So I always ran a front roll couple of about 76 to maybe 80 percent, depending. But you’ve seen cars go down in the corner. Dive over on the right front and the left front is all the way off the ground. That’s a 100 percent roll couple. And they don’t run sway bars anymore, but they’ve got some links that the body comes way up and wheels stay pretty much on the ground.

RB: As far as your current activities, do you plan on going to any pioneer events or races in the near future? Charles Craig has his Cruise In in Gastonia and Phil Combs has his pioneer gathering. Any other comments about him or Roby and the Combs Family Museum?

CP: Well, Charlie and the Combs brothers--they’re preserving an era of racing history that probably, unless you dug deep into the archives, you’d never find. I think they’ve really done a service to the histories back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And Roby, he’s even older and has more history. But Phil has done his research and he was deeply involved in a lot of the tracks. He’s a walking dictionary on racing. I think it’s just remarkable that the family has taken on the project of keeping yesterday’s racing history alive. Phil had come up when Buckshot raced for the Pearson’s. And my son worked part-time with the Pearson’s. He knew Buckshot and had some good stories to tell about him. I had a few memorabilia that my son had got and I donated it to Phil. I’m running out of room to keep everything.

RB: Do you remember any specific reporters, writers or photographers or announcers you interacted with? You gave me an Erie article by Dennis Bender.

CP: Dennis Bender and Frank Hyde were the two main ones up North. They were good. They wrote some good articles. And me being a Jamestown boy, that was the Jamestown Post Journal back at that time. We had a lot of Jamestown drivers that were good and run MARC and NASCAR. Well up North, and I probably should have mentioned this, Emory Mahan was a car dealer out of Warren Pa., one of the first guys that raced in the Stateline era. Real good driver, real gentleman. He was like a Freddy Smith, was a good driver. He won a lot of races. His brother was Gordon Mahan, and he was the photographer up there. And then of course, the Post General would take some shots, depending on who was there. But the racing series up there got good publicity from the local newspapers.

RB: And other writers down here? Like Perry Wood?

CP: Perry Wood and Bob Myers. And I think they mentioned Concord, Metrolina, Gastonia, Cherokee. They had a bunch of really good racetracks in a 50-mile radius or less.

RB: While watching NASCAR, were there any announcers you liked?

CP: Well, Bill Connell. He did Metrolina a lot. He did Charlotte Motor Speedway, too. He could make a race out of one car and make it the most exciting thing you’ve ever heard. He was that way. And Bill and I had a good relationship. I liked him and he liked me. He always kind of flattered me a little more than I deserved. But he was that kind of guy. He was the one when we had a fundraiser at Memory Lane and Phil Combs had asked him who he wanted to see, it had been myself. He might have mentioned Billy Scott too. I don’t remember how that went. But Phil said he definitely wanted to see me.

RB: In the past couple of years, you’ve been involved with “Lost Speedways” and specifically the Cleveland County Speedway episode. I think you expressed how fun that was. Anything more to say about that?

CP: I think if you watch it, you’ll see. I think I told some of the good stuff about Stick (Elliot) and some the guys in there and then I learned afterward by talking more with Carl (Smart). He drove the Chrysler kit car for the guy who had bought it from Harry Hyde. Who was businessman Marshall Perry. So Carl was driving for him the year after I drove it. And I think he won maybe a few races, but I don’t’ remember now. But I said, ‘What ever happened to that car?’ Well, he and Stick were running at Cleveland County one night and neither one give or take an inch—well, give an inch; they’d take an inch. They went into turn one and both of ‘em crashed. And I said, ‘Did you get hurt?’ And he really didn’t answer me. Carl said when they got out and started walking back toward the infield, he said, ’You alright, Stick?’ and Stick said,’ I don’t know, I think I hurt my back.’ And Carl said, ‘Well you either shoulda or I wish you’da broke it.’ And then called him a favorite cuss word. So that’s what happened.

RB: I looked at the racing stats from 1971 and your main racetracks. Any favorites?

CP: I liked Rutherfordton. I really liked them all. I liked the faster half mile tracks which included Concord Speedway. Metrolina, in its own right, was fast, but Cherokee was faster. And I ran a race at Columbia when Little Bud (Moore) couldn’t make it. I run a race there when he was at Darlington.

RB: J.J. Grice came out with his book “The Chronicle of Metrolina Speedway.” Anything to say about it and the time it took to do all that compilation?

CP: I’m really impressed with the way that he went back and was able to track down the dates. And I’d almost forgotten about one race. It was a big race too. It was a 100-lapper. I passed Stick (Elliott) on the last lap down in one and two and Stick was not only good but he was pretty savvy. He spun a slow car, so I come across in first and they went back to the last lap and he got the race win. Because he was leading the race and when I passed him he had the wherewithal to spin a slow car and they went back to the last lap. He got the victory. We ran second. The promoter actually gave me first place money. Took the sting out of not being officially awarded first place.

RB: Shouldn’t they have restarted that?

CP: At that time, that was the rule. You’d go back to the last lap. There was a caution on the last white flag lap. At that time, it was the rule there—the race was over. I kind of had forgotten about it, but in reflecting back, I got to thinking that he was pretty aware of what had to be done. And so I give him credit for that. I wouldn’t have thought of that; maybe I didn’t know the rules well enough at that time.

RB: What did you like or dislike about racing at Metrolina?

CP: Well, I liked everything. Looking back, I never ran that many races there. The best years for me were the late 60’s to early 70’s, winning 23 out of 72 races. But that’s when I was racing for the Martin brothers, the Davis brothers and we won a lot of races then.?I did like Cherokee, but Metrolina was a good track. I liked the tracks when they got dry and slick. And the main advantage I had then was I had a car that would handle on that type of a track.

RB: You got to know Ralph and Martha Earnhardt at that time as well. Did you enjoy racing with Ralph?

CP: Well, Ralph could beat and bang with the best of them. But we had the best racing.?I feel like the best racing I ever did in my life was with Ralph Earnhardt ‘cause we would run that close side by side and never touch. It was just nip and tuck all the time. It was in that one article. In 27 races Ralph won 14 and I won 13. But it was always good racing and he and my car owner Joe Elmore had a good relationship. And they’d kid each other. A lot of times for qualifying we’d draw a pill and more often than not Joe would beat Ralph. Ralph was always pretty good at drawing for whatever reason. And it got to where Joe was winning more. So when Ralph would lose, I remember when he gave him 100 pennies one night in a bag. Then another night he rolled up a dollar bill as big as your little fingertip and said, ‘There, Joe.’ Then there was the night at Cherokee when we lost a couple engines and he wanted to know if I was going to run at Metrolina the next night.?I told him that we didn’t have another engine. We went through two in two weeks. And then he said, ‘I’ll tell you what.?I’ve got a fresh engine on the floor. If you and your car owner want to come up and get it tonight and put it in your car, we’ll race tomorrow night.’ So, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’?That was a ‘74 car when we were running neck and neck every night. And he said, ‘That should be the best engine ever.’ First of all, the gesture--that’s how Ralph fed his family. The way he put food on the table was in a racecar. So we did all that. We got to Metrolina the next night. We run the race. Ralph won it and I run second. And it was not close. It’s half a straight away--10 or 15 car lengths; he was out there. When I come in Joe asked what I think. First thing I said was, ‘I don’t see how he runs in the same straightaway.’ Because I didn’t think he had any power.

RB: Talk about the difference in the cars. You said you ran a different engine?

CP: I always pulled a lot higher gear ratio, which was lower numerically but higher ratio. In other words, I usually pulled a 5.64 and everybody else was on a 6.14 or something. But it was a whole chain of events how you set the car up, how you’d get the bite. And we’ve always run smaller engines than everybody. I was running 310 up there for a long time and everybody run 350s. We turned a little bit more, but we had a momentum car. And once you could keep it going it was hard to beat. So in hindsight now, and I hadn’t really thought about this until some years back when we got talking about it, Ralph’s engines were geared for a different rpm and torque at a different level. What I should have done, but I didn’t have the time to do it, but we coulda, I guess, is switch gears and go to a lower one to accommodate his engines. Cause his engines were good, but it was a different way of a setup. Ralph was real good when the track had a cushion on it. He could run that outside. He was really good. The outside is better. And he always seemed to have the best part of the racetrack. I mean a lot of times I’d forget about everyone else; I raced the racetrack. And, of course, there are times you gotta race someone. When I was racing with him, he kinda always had the best part. But my car would work better on the dryer tracks. So it ended up a combination. We was pretty even.?I always recall Ralph could get through wrecks that no one could get through. There’d be big pileups. There was one car comin’ out and it was always Ralph. I think the only way you could wreck him or get him was strictly by accident. You wasn’t doin’ it on purpose.

RB: You also ran some where Ralph was racing and Dale was too?

CP: Yes. Well, actually, Dale was running the semi-mods and when we would get to the racetrack—we always got there fairly early—Ralph was the first one there. He’d be leading Dale around the racetrack. He’d let Dale follow him, push him. He’d get behind Dale and he taught him a lot. But Dale was running those at the time and then the year before he went up to Cup me and him drove for Henry Gordon. He had the Camaro and I had the 98 car that I ran for him and both were very successful.

RB: When I talked to your wife Pat, she talked about knowing Martha Earnhardt.

CP: Martha was a dear lady. I found it fitting that she passed on the day of the Lord’s birthday. I don’t know if you seen that. But she did. It was Christmas. I found it fitting that he called her home that day.

RB: One good podcast I listen to is the “Scene Vault” by Rick Houston and Steve Waid. I listened to one episode with Mario Andretti and the tricks that Smokey Yunick did, like springs on blocks. Or the lever to lower the car. Do you remember doing any of that?

CP: It was one of the things they did back then. And Darrell Waltrip did that. But a lot of the cars—you had to weigh so much at the start of the race and so they would put lead shot, steel shot in the frame rails and they would start the race and they had different ways of letting all that stuff out on the racetrack. It would roll down. And some of the track owners would say, ‘Where the heck did all this stuff come from?’ And I think Darrell said it the best once when NASCAR said, ‘Darrell, we know that you’re cheating.’ And Darrell said, ’We’re right.’ So they jacked the car up and wanted to find where he was letting the shot out at, and it was on the jack peg so it was jacked up and they couldn’t see it. And when I was racing, Eddie Pearson helped me a lot, especially on the stock cars and the Trans Am car. He had all sorts of ideas. We had weight limits. And I was always wanting to be right to the nth degree. We’d start to race and it was legal, but it was hot and I’d lose eight pounds in a car, especially on the hot tracks when it was hot. So we’d come in and we were going to be five, six, seven pounds light. Well, Eddie had a thermos jug with a straw in it, and he’d run over to the car after the race and he’d give me that jug. It was full of lead and I’d suck on air and make it look like I was having a drink. Just sit it on my lap. And every once and a while I’d take a sip of it and nothin’ in it. But we’d always be just two or three pounds over with that.

RB: Did they find out you were ever doing that?

CP: No, they never did.

CP: And we’d soak the tires. You could soak them, and they could catch you if you wasn’t clever about how you did it. We had a rotisserie in the shop, and we’d roll them tires. We had a pan underneath with a solution in it and we’d roll them tires through it. We’d take a hard tire and make it like a softer race tread. He’d tape the front of the cars up and The Trans Am car was meant to let the nose lift right off. And he’d tape that thing up and normally it would come off 15 seconds, but it would take us 15 minutes to get all that tape off it. We were fast. I got a neat photo card that I’ve got that I’ll send back with you that has me and Eddie on it.

RB: Do you have any memories of Wendell Scott?

CP: I do. Of course, I wasn’t here when he was racing, but I remember a lot of the things. A lot of it probably came from Elmo and those guys. But back then he won the one race at Jacksonville. And he was a pretty good driver from what I can gather. Everybody liked him and everybody tried to help him. He got hand-me down stuff, but it was way better than he could afford. One time he come in for a pit stop. And he had some of his family and friends help and one of the guys said, ’What do you want Wendell?’ And he said, ’Gas, give me some gas.’ And he said, ’We got no gas, Wendell.’ And he said, ’Well go get some.’ And he said, ’Wendell we got no can.’ So things like that went on and of course, he'd lose a lot of times in the pits.

RB: But it’s good that his family finally got the trophy.

CP: He was a good driver and a pretty ingenious mechanic.

RB: Are there any specific late model or other drivers in the past several years you’ve watched and liked?

CP: I always liked Scott Bloomquist’s driving. I knew Scott.

RB: When he was first coming up?

CP: Well, he was driving for Barry Wright. And I knew Barry real well. I used to help Barry on his chassis set-ups and geometry. Until I couldn’t help him anymore. Well, he got into all that 6-link suspension. I told him, ’Barry, you’re on your own until I have time to figure this thing out.’ So Barry called me one day and he said, ’Scott needs some work done on his motorhome. Put a little chemical toilet in it. Do some upholstery.’ And I said, ’Yeah, we’ll do that.’ So since I had my shop up here, right at the top of the hill, we worked a few days on it and I talked to him a little bit. And I liked him. Barry was so full of compliments on him. He told me that Bloomquist was, ‘the best driver I’ve ever seen.’ Picking that throttle up off the corner and getting maximum traction and not spinning the wheels. And he was real smart. He could look at the track and figure out the tires. And tires are always the name of the game. I always liked Scott. And Freddy Smith. As he continued his career, I loved to watch him. And I know some of the later guys; I just don’t know them well enough. Right now I started being a real Kyle Larson fan. But mostly from runnin’ the little wing cars and sprints.

RB: At the dirt tracks?

CP: That kid is unbelievable. But there’s several out there that are. They’re all good. They’re 20 years old and they’ve been racing for 12 years.

RB: You said you have an article and a story you’d like to tell me about?

CP: Yeah, it skips back. Eddie Kisko and Hyle Russell were from a little town called, Kane, Pa. and they drove for a car builder up North who was way, way ahead of his time. The car builder was Frank Rohlman. But Hyle died kind of young from a brain tumor, I think. It was sad. Eddie won the first one and I won the second one and there’s his son. So until you won two in a row, the trophy circulated, whoever won it. But the second year I gave the trophy to his son for him to keep. And I’ve got a nice note that his wife wrote. She lived in Pennsylvania, and I lived in Jamestown. She didn’t know my address, so she just writes ‘Chuck Piazza, racecar driver, Jamestown, NY’ and I got it. And today, it can be one digit off, and you don’t get it.

RB: That’s a neat.

CP: But this night. We had the largest field of new cars. All told, we had 40 cars try to qualify for the 30 starting positions. They asked me at an interview up in New York when I was up there a few years ago, ‘Who did you worst fear comin’ off the fourth corner to the checkered flag, that was behind you?’ Well, the obvious answer was Tom Dill, because Tom didn’t take any prisoners. I didn’t give that answer. I gave Squirt Johnson and Bobby Snars, because they were tough, you know. And Tom--Tom was either so far ahead you couldn’t catch him or he’d crash and burn. So he was never behind me. I told Randy Anderson afterward that I thought about it. ‘I’m sorry there, but Tom was either gone or he crashed and burned; he wasn’t a factor.’

RB: He wasn’t someone you feared because of that?

CP: On occasion when I did outrun him, I felt blessed. Because man, if he’d catch you, he was like Stick (Elliott). I always figured Stick was Tom Hill on steroids. (Chuck laughs.) But there were so many neat stories, I could go on forever up there.

RB: Have you raced at or been to Tony Stewart’s Eldora Speedway?

CP: I don’t think Tony even owned that track back then.

RB: No, the ones that started it, Earl and Berneice Baltes, have since passed away.

CP: The tracks I’ve run--there’s Paragon, Ind., Toledo, Ohio, Canfield, Ohio. There’s another one in Ohio, I can’t remember it off-hand. In New York, it’s Stateline, Eriez, Lancaster Speedway up in Buffalo, and Rochester. And Pennsylvania was Warren, Bradford, Oil City, Titusville. But I kind of stayed in that 50-60-mile radius up there for the most part up there unless I went off somewhere else.

RB: I asked you about the Cleveland County Fairgrounds episode. The next one I kind of asked you about was the other pioneer events. Like they had the one that they held in Mount Airy that Bill Blair and others have organized, the beach course legends event in Daytona and podcasts like Ghost Tracks by Tim Leeming, and the Racers Reunion and Memory Lane. Alex Beam passed away but you told me about being up there with Bill Connell. Any other comments on these different pioneer events?

CP: Of course, I’ve been to the Beach course and visited it. I loved it. You know they’ve got all the old stories, like on Smokey Yunick. Got Smokey Yanick’s book. Oh, that’s a good read. And then Smokey wouldn’t go far today because he wasn’t--‘What do you call it?--a politically-correct person.

RB: And the SRX series. Did you watch those?

CP: Yeah, I watched them all. And the one, I think it was the second or third race where the hotshot they brought in, the short asphalt driver, he wore them out. I forget his name now. I was watching him and watching his lines. I could see where he was making the time because his line going into the turns, entry, was so subtle. And everybody else was making it too shallow. He’d stay out a little bit and he hit the same apex, but he hit it from a different angle. He was coming like this (shows with arms) and they was coming like this. If he didn’t have anyone underneath him. But he was good. And I’ll watch it this year too.

RB: Many people can’t go to events far away. Any statement on the local and regional series, be they dirt or asphalt and what they mean to the fans and the racing community?

CP: I think, geez, now when I look at these racetracks, I mean, there’s more people that go to a short dirt race than would go to some of the NASCAR tracks. It’s where the action is.

RB: You have a lot of programs and history collected from your races. A great archive.

CP: Here’s one of the programs. That was the Emory Mahan. That I was telling you about. He won the first race, which was ’56. And Hyle Russell. And Bud Fearsdorf. He was the driver from Allegany who scored for a lot of the years. He was the man. Jug Pierce won in ‘60 and I won in ‘61 and Tom Dill won Erie. That’s when Erie opened, was in ‘61. And I gotta make you a copy of this one. This is ’72 statistics.

RB: Okay,’ cause I have the ’71. A lot of those same places.

CP: And there was three races on here that are not documented. One was the big race at Lancaster Speedway in 1967 with the Martin Brothers. I won one back with the Davis Brothers. I’m thinkin’ we won it, but I don’t remember which year. And then when one of the nights and my car wasn’t available, I drove another car up at Shelby and won the race. Also won at Asheboro Speedway where the Thomas Brothers were. They tried to hire me ‘cause I had built that car when I first come down here and Sam Smith run Columbia the night I started from the back and come to second. So it was the same car and I went up there to drive it one night—they run it on a Wednesday night—and won the race. And the first race I’d won with the car, so they were tickled.?Howard then recruited me the whole summer to go to work for him. But I just finally said I couldn’t go right now, between my family in S.C., I had a good car, I had a good job. Back then I said, ‘The only people making more money than me were David Pearson and Richard Petty and I’m not sure they were.’ You know, what they paid back then. We was knockin’ down $10,000 a month, which I’d get 30%. Plus, I had a good job and could be home in my own bed every night.

RB: Any thoughts on North Wilkesboro? Them renovating and getting that reopened?

CP: They were certainly part of the history of NASCAR. North Wilkesboro had, of course, the famous incident up there with Dale and Darrell.

RB: I think when we did the first interview, you talked about racing at some of the same events where the late actor Paul Newman raced? Can you talk a little about that?

CP: When I had my Trans Am car, I ran the Trans Am circuits. It was legal for Trans Ams or you could run SCA or GT1. I had a license. I had a Trans Am license as well as an SCCA license. And so Paul Newman ran a lot of those series.

RB: What years did you do that?

CP: Probably 2000 or 2003 or ’04. And even before it, I’d run with him some at Daytona when they run the historic stock cars and historic road race cars. Paul used to drive Nissans. They were factory cars and they were really fast. And, of course, I told you about the carburetor story. We had an SCCA Nationals race at Road Atlanta. Well, Newman brought two racecars. One he’d been racing and one they just built. And he was having trouble with the carburetion on the car they was wanting to test. Wasn’t going to race but wanted to test. At the time his crew chief was Bill Fingerlow, who used to be with Tommy Bahama. But anyhow, he was a well-known crew chief on those types of cars. He came down to ask if he could borrow an accelerator pump for a Holly, so Newman could test his car. And I told him,’ I don’t have one, but I got a brand-new Holly set-up for the racecars and you’re welcome to try it. But I also had a Paul Newman hat and I said, ‘For the use of this carburetor, I’d sure like to get this signed to my wife Pat.’ He said, ‘Well you know how he is.’ And I said, ‘I know. But it’s a $1500 carburetor too.’ So anyhow, after the races were over for the weekend we started to go home and I said, ’Hey, I haven’t gotten my carburetor back yet.’ Newman was stationed up in the garage area. We went up there and I asked Bill and Bill was loading the cars. And he forgot all about it, giving me the carburetor. I said, ‘I need to get my carburetor.’ And he went and took it off and brought it back and had the hat and said, ’I couldn’t get it signed.?I had him almost ready to sign it in the garage.’ And they would lock the garages. So somehow this guy got in and he said the guy came busting through the door and he had had Newman in a good mood about where he could ask him, ‘The that the guy who gave you the carburetor would like you to sign this hat,’ and the guy came busting in the door and said, ’Newman, sign my--autograph this.’ And Newman just turned around and walked out. So there went my opportunity. And I told you about how isolated he would be in the cars. That happened regularly. But at the same time when you would be at Daytona or wherever where there was all that fun stuff to do, he would play them machines. He’d hold his hand out. They were racing. You’d put a quarter in to keep them going. What are they called now? When they test. What do they call that?

RB: Simulator?

CP: Simulator. Thank you. And he loved them things. He would play them and of course during the time of playing, he’d run out of time and would have to feed them. But he didn’t want to give anybody else the machine. That’s why he went like that (Chuck puts his hand out) and his buddies would fill him up so he could stay there. He had a lot of fun with his buddies, but he didn’t want to be bothered by people coming up. That was his downtime. His free time.

RB: I was recently at the Mike Duvall Memorial at Cherokee Speedway, where you are also a member of the Hall of Fame. Any comments on knowing the Mike Duvall family over the years and just what he meant to this area?

CP: Well, when we arrived on the scene, Mike was running more of limited sportsman, I think that’s what they called it back then. He was moving up and winning races. When he finally moved to sportsman, I was still doing pretty good, and seemed to be faster than most of the boys. And like, he was aggressive. And as much as I hate to admit, he got the better of me several times and several of them were under caution. But Mike, as he grew and went out racing and was nationally successful, he was very formidable.

RB: He was known as the Flintstone Flyer and the kids especially liked that nickname and paint scheme.

CP: That might have been after he started traveling. He didn’t stay long. Once he started having success and he went after the big time.

RB: Like Freddy Smith.

CP: Yeah, hundreds of races. Same as Freddy. And was highly successful.

RB: The one person who won at Cherokee, and it was a 100-lapper, was Chris Madden. And it was very cold and they had to manage the tires.

CP: If you air a tire and the ambient temperature and it’s 90 degrees out and you go back to that same set and it’s 40 or 50, you’ll have problems. I’m sure those guys recognize it and they keep on the jetting, especially on the carburation. You’re out in the cold and cold weather is more dense, so you gotta have more fuel with bigger tracks. And you play with the timing and all those guys are pretty tuned in to what it takes to win. As for the tire problems they had with the Blue Gray race, that’s just a matter of how hard the track gets, how it dries out, and some of the settings. The real successful drivers are right on top of that all the time.

RB: Do you have any plans to travel or go to any races in 2023?

CP: My wife Pat and I are getting along in years. We are hopeful we can travel in our motorcoach this next year. I’m looking forward to attending Charlie Craig’s and Phil Combs’ events and seeing old friends and competitors. On a final note, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have raced competitively with the best drivers of that era. And I appreciate the time and effort different people have taken to get to know me and document some of the highlights of my career.