Everyone has tried to convince us that “Days of Thunder” was a farce, but every now and again a Sunday afternoon at the racetrack comes along to remind us that the story of Cole Trickle and crew chief Harry Hogge is more of a documentary than anyone seems willing to admit.
During this latest Sunday, throughout the 3-hour, 20-minute entirety of the Food City 500, as the collective voices of the drivers crackling over the radio were moving into higher octaves … and stacks of shredded rubber were beginning to pile up in the Bristol Motor Speedway pits … and Goodyear workers were scrambling to mount extra rings onto exhausted wheels … it was impossible not to hear Robert Duvall’s voice echoing off the walls of Thunder Valley.
“Tires is what wins a race,” Hogge explains to Trickle. “If we can’t figure out a way to run so you don’t melt the damn tires, we can’t finish a race.”
“There’s 40 other vultures out there who manage to finish the race on their tires,” Hogge later asks his driver. “You see Darrell Waltrip using up his tires?”
That movie dropped nearly 34 years ago. That makes it old school. Its technical references are outdated. They have also crossed over into nostalgia. NASCAR fans and competitors alike point to the boxier, decidedly non-Next Gen cars, the tales of wild modifications made to those cars’ bodies and frames that bent the pages of the rulebook, and yes, the Goodyear tires that wore down to the cords, and wonder aloud, “Why don’t we see that anymore? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
By the end of Sunday’s second round of pit stops, barely a quarter of the way into the event, the mechanics in the trenches and atop the pit boxes were looking at the Eagles that had just been pulled off their race cars and saw something that has become a bit of stock car racing unicorn. Their tires looked like a unicorn had been gnawing the tread off of them. Then they looked at their NASCAR-mandated limit of ten sets of tires and realized, that, Oh damn, we aren’t going to have enough to finish the race.
“You calibrate your entire world around a certain set of parameters for Bristol. It was pretty clear right after practice, again pretty clear…
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