Just wanted to let you know. I’ve lived in Ohio all of my nearly 60 years, was always a fan of Jimmy and still get excited just seeing his car in a race. I have been a fan of Nascar since the early days when you were just lucky to find a broadcast on an am radio station, well before MRN or TV broadcast. It’s not just yankees who don’t know or appreciate the people who helped make Nascar what it is today or preferably what it was 5 or 10 years ago.

Dave

In the mid-1980s, I had some discretionary income and attempted to get sponsorship for Jimmy. Unfortunately I wasn’t a good enough salesman and wasn’t able to get him any support. However, gentleman that he is, he thought he owed me something so I ended up attending races at Daytona, Talladega, Atlanta, Darlington and the now defunct Riverside Raceway as a part of his crew. I went from staying out of the way at Daytona to sweeping the pits at Atlanta, to borrowing tires from other teams as they retired (we had something like 12 different colored sets of wheels in Jimmy’s pits at the end of the race, to keeping fuel mileage and time charts at the rest of the tracks. It was always interesting in that Dale Earnhardt, Sr. would without exception stop by Jimmy’s garage area on race mornings to talk. Of course while they were talking Jimmy was adjusting valves, under the car making adjustments, or doing something else. I can remember Jimmy once saying that he wished the drivers wrecking on Sunday had to fix their own cars on Monday like he did.

Jimmy could definitely stretch a buck. I can remember that his crew always ensured that leftover gas was put into a drum in his hauler for use with his dyno back at the shop. Also while other teams were spending $100,000 plus for transport trailers, Jimmy and his crew converted a used moving van trailer to a car transporter over one winter. It wasn’t state of the art; however, it worked just fine to get his car to and from the tracks.