You Wont Believe Who Just Topped the Racing Results

“I just hope I don’t get lost in the sauce, ” Rajah Caruth said. “I think if you had told 12-year-old me what this would be like, he wouldn’t believe it, but he would have been really happy.

HENRICO COUNTY, Va. -- You can count on one hand the number of NASCAR drivers that have come from our nation’s capital. You can use the same hand to count the number of African-American drivers in the sport and have fingers left over.

Washington, D.C., is not exactly a hotbed of racing talent, but it’s where Rajah Caruth fell in love with the sport, thanks in part, to one of his favorite movies.

Mini Gt 1:64 Nissan Skyline Gt R (r34) Top Secret

He followed Jimmie Johnson, Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards and Jeff Burton among others. At the age of 12, he got to see them in person for the first time at Richmond Raceway.

“I remember a lot (about that day), ” the 20-year-old said. “I remember being surprised to go to the race in the first place. I remember seeing the grandstands. It hasn’t changed in my mind what that feeling was like. I had waited for it for so long.”

Caruth would also have to wait for his first opportunity to drive on an actual track. He honed his skills on racing simulators which have become a very popular training tool for both the novices and pros in the sport.

Vintage Tyco Magnum 440 Slot Car Original Manual, Instructions +more

“I raced on iRacing pretty frequently and did pretty well, ” Caruth recalled. In 637 career iRacing starts, he has 69 wins and 258 top 5 finishes. “Sim racing was really my only route.”

That led to a tryout in NASCAR’s Drive For Diversity program, not without a fair amount of convincing his parents to allow him to follow this incredibly narrow path to success.

“I think I just didn’t shut up about it, ” Caruth admitted. “I think my dad realized, this is what I’m going to do, and he’s been behind me every step of the way. Mom is a little more on the protective side and not crazy about her son driving race cars. But she’s still very supportive.”

I Don't Think It's…the Right Thing To Do…but Hey, We've All Done It'

Caruth has run late models at Greenville-Pickens Speedway where he earned his first on-track win and he finished third in the ARCA Menards Series East standings last year. Alpha Prime Racing thought enough of his potential to give him a six-race tryout in the Xfinity series which begins Saturday at Richmond. A journey that has come full circle since his first visit here eight years ago.

“I just hope I don’t get lost in the sauce, ” Caruth said. “In a lot of my experiences as a driver, I’ve been too caught up and haven’t enjoyed the moment. I don’t even remember much from my first Late Model win. I think if you had told 12-year-old me what this would be like, he wouldn’t believe it, but he would have been really happy.

Although he majors in motorsports management at Winston-Salem State University, his car will be sponsored by Virginia State University, a fellow HBCU but a CIAA rival.

John Deere 440 Liquifire Snowmobile Poster Vintage Sled Jd L/c440

“Having an HBCU on my car is important, even if it’s a rival school. At least it’s not [North Carolina] A&T, ” he said.

Caruth presents himself as a poised, seasoned veteran, which of course, he is not. He admits to the duck-on-a-pond theory of being calm on the outside but a whirling dervish on the inside. This isn’t just a huge opportunity for him, but could also pave the way for other African-American kids to follow whatever racing dreams they might have.

“It’s huge, ” Caruth admitted. “This can make or break my career. If I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, it’s on a much bigger scale. I welcome the responsibility and the duty that I have. I was that kid watching races on TV and wishing that was me. Watching [fellow African-American drivers] Bubba [Wallace] and Lewis Hamilton race, people that look like me, meant a lot. I’m just going to do the best I can.The Dragster Insider column celebrates 10 years of telling the stories behind the stories in history with a deep dive into the archives to look at some of the interesting columns of the past decade.

Tadej Pogačar Tour De France Speeds Raise Unfair Questions And Doubt

I can’t believe I let it slip past me – heck, I can’t believe you guys let it slip past me – but a few weeks ago (July 23 to be exact), we reached the 10-year anniversary of this humble internet bench-racing bar & grill. I knew it was approaching, but it completely slipped my mind in the middle of the Western Swing.

It’s been an amazing 10 years of sharing “the stories behind the stories” that make up the lore of this sport we love so much, and we’ve covered a lot of ground in this last decade. Honestly, when I started it, I wasn’t sure it would survive 10 weeks let alone 10 years and 800 columns.

As many of you know, I’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes to bring the entire Dragster Insider archive under one roof. When we launched the new earlier this year, we were only able to migrate one year (2016); the rest remained on the old web server, which was still active (and some of you figured that out pretty quickly), but many of the images were missing due to the old site’s new address.

Disneyland Halloween Experiences You Can't Miss!

Additionally, I wanted to create some type of searchable archive that allowed my readers (and, heck, me) to find what they were looking for in older columns. So, I’ve been working on that all year, stealing whatever time I could to migrate the content manually.

It’s not done yet – most 2010 and 2011 are still to be added – but the basic structure and more than 80 percent of the articles (more than 500!) are there and I have to say it’s a pretty impressive list already.

Hamilton

Going back and converting each article manually (why manually? See the explanation at the end of the column) allowed me to fondly revisit and remember them and, honestly, there were some I’d forgotten we’d done.

Runners Notebook: You Won't Believe How Fast Rochester 11 Year Old Meg Hughes Is

There are some that I’m extremely proud of – great “gets” like Barry Setzer (his first drag racing interview in decades) Richard Tharp, rocket go-kart driver Capt. Jack McClure, Herm Petersen, and Wild Bill Shrewsberry -- and stories on people who you may have forgotten about needed to know about, like Leonard Harris, Clive Skilton, Jay Howell, Larry Reyes, Dale Emery, Leroy “Doc” Hales, Bob Pickett, Raymond Godman, Jake Johnston, Buddy Garner, Nitro Nellie Goins, and many more. In October 2008 I devoted almost a whole month to the story of the rise and fall of Orange County Int’l Raceway; 2008 also was host to a summer-long Favorite Race Car Ever balloting and a series of articles on Ghost Tracks. Man, there's so much fun stuff here.

I also had some cool stories like the time The Munsters TV show came to Lions (heads up; that episode is airing next Monday on the COZI throwback TV network (check listings for your local time), and the stories behind the stories of wild machines like Bob Correll’s amazing KiteCycle, the fabulous Freight Train, the Durachrome Bug, the Terrifying Toronado, Tommy Ivo’s four-engine “Showboat, ” as well as columns about great rivalries, fire burnouts, blowovers (four columns in May 2012), and the saga of the Wonder Wagon Funny Cars.

I'll try to remember to include a link to the archive at the end of every column, along with my usual email contact info,

Top 10 Best Hypercars 2023

The archive is searchable by keyword; follow the instructions at the top of the page. If you're a racer of any renown from the sport's history, there's a good chance you'll find yourself listed, Anyway, enough chatter; I’ll leave you to your own devices.

1. Not all of the columns made the cut. To be honest, there were some real turkeys in there, where I rambled about what was going on in my week or some other such nonsense. I think that only two of the right columns in Dec. 2009 were worthy of making the move. Sorry ‘bout that guys.

How

3. Because the width of the actual pages changed between three generations of , some of the photos don’t go full width. Also, the previous versions of the Content Management System allowed for some intricate layouts that do not work in the new site, which has to be mobile-friendly. I did my best to match them up, but in some cases photos had to be removed.

Leadville Trail 100 Mtb

4. If you were around the previous version of the website, you remember the cool pocket photo galleries like the one at right that I could embed in any story that could hold dozens of associated images. The new website does not have a similar feature so, again, I had to pick and choose which images best reflected the column.

5. Because I’m a big fan of linking back to older columns, I should have started in 2007 and worked my way forward, but I’m not that smart. I could write a whle book on how