A rough welcome to Bristol Motor Speedway left 18-year-old Marc Davis short of his goal of a top-20 finish Saturday in his debut as the first African-American owner-driver in a major NASCAR race since Wendell Scott retired in 1973.

But, considering the circumstances, "I'm happy with it," Davis said of his 27th-place finish in the Scotts Lawn Builder 300. He had run as high as 19th before being spun out by Burney Lamar just past the halfway point of the Nationwide race.

The spin took Davis into the wall backward, damaging the rear bodywork and the spoiler on his Toyota and dropping him back as far as 33rd.

"We had a really good run going," Davis said. "I believe it was the 32 car that spun me out, and that took us back a step. We had to repass the cars we'd already passed several times."

If not for the wreck, "I thought we could have been in the 20th- to 15th-place area," Davis said. "Even with the damage, the car was still fast."

Davis and his father, Harry Davis, decided to form their own Nationwide team after Joe Gibbs Racing, for which Marc had been a developmental driver, failed to find sponsorship for a Nationwide ride for him this season.

The Davises are running on about $75,000 per race in sponsorship, from Howard University radio station WHUR and The Word Network, an urban religious TV channel. Top Nationwide cars run on about $200,000 per race.

Marc Davis, a go-or-go-home driver, qualified 28th among 52 cars that tried to make the field for Saturday's race. His next try at a Nationwide race is scheduled for May 1 at Richmond, Va.

"We accomplished our first two goals," Harry Davis said. "One was to make the race, and second was to finish the race. We were hoping for a better finish, but the reality is that short-track racing at Bristol is hard on equipment, and it just took its toll.

"But we got in the show and we finished the race, so it was a good day, and we'll live to go on to Richmond."

I'm unabashedly pumped for Marc Davis in Friday afternoon's Nationwide Series practice sessions at Bristol. The two sessions are critical to his taking his next career step and making a little history in the process.

"We definitely need to get good practice on short runs to get ready to qualify," he said by cell phone Thursday afternoon as he and his father/business manager, Harry Davis, drove toward Tennessee.

If Marc, 18, makes the race, he'll become the first African-American driving for his family's team to compete in a major NASCAR race since Wendell Scott retired in 1973.

The Davises decided to field their own team over the winter after Joe Gibbs Racing, where Marc had been a developmental driver, couldn't find sponsorship to move him up to Nationwide. Marc ran three Nationwide races in 2008, one for JGR and two for Fitz Racing.

At first, the Davises considered starting at California and Las Vegas, but they decided the West Coast trip was just too expensive for a team that operates on about $75,000 a race.

So Bristol is the geographic/economic launching point.

"It's been a long wait the last several months, talking about it, and now we're finally going to the racetrack," Marc said from the road.

"I think it's been a long time coming, and Marc is prepared for it, and we've done the best we can do with the resources that we have," Harry said. "It's just a matter of setting realistic goals."

The first goal is to sort out their Toyota, powered by a JGR engine, in this afternoon's practice, focusing totally on preparing for time trials.

Fifty-two Nationwide cars are entered for Saturday's Scotts Turf Builder 300, and Marc is "a go-or-go-home driver, so he's got to make the race on time," Harry said.

The next goal would be "to finish the race," Harry said.

The son is a little more ambitious than the father, looking for a top-20 finish.

"It's Bristol, so we've just got to stay out of trouble and keep a clean race car and try to come out of there with a top-20," Marc said. "If we make the race -- well, when we make the race -- that should be a given, off the bat."

The Davises' funding, primarily from Howard University radio station WHUR with support from The Word Network (an urban religious TV channel), doesn't match the $200,000 per race some of the top Nationwide teams spend.

But, "We think we've got some pretty good equipment for this weekend, with Venturini Motorsports helping us out," Marc said.

Venturini, mainly an ARCA operation, prepared the car, and Billy Venturini will be crew chief. Some crewmen will be volunteers who are friends of the Davises, with others from the Venturini operation.

The Davises plan to run six Nationwide races this season, along with a handful of Cup races. Marc's projected Cup debut is the road course at Sonoma, Calif., in June.

Is the historical significance a major thought to Marc?

"It is now that you brought it up," he said. "But at the end of the day, you know me: It's all about racing."

My proposal for revising NASCAR's points system has been radically simple for decades now: One win, one point. Period. End of discussion.

In making that suggestion I have been smirked at, ignored, argued with, admonished to be reasonable, laughed at …

But today I stand vindicated at last by the great news from Paris. Formula One has done it.

Effective immediately, this season, the world driving championship will be determined by number of wins.

That'll set F1 on its ear, all right, since by the new rules, the enormously popular Briton Lewis Hamilton would not have won the 2008 championship. He'd have lost to Felipe Massa, six wins to five.

F1 will determine only its champion by wins, and keep its current points system to break ties and determine runner-up season positions.

But it's fascinating to examine how different NASCAR would have looked thus far in this millennium under a win-only system.

Carl Edwards, who in all fairness was the most consistently strong Cup driver over the entire course of last season, would have won the championship with nine wins, to Kyle Busch's eight and Jimmie Johnson's seven.

Johnson, the 2007 champion, would have won the title anyway, with 10 wins to Jeff Gordon's six.

From there back, things really would have been topsy-turvy in the Cup series:

Kasey Kahne, who finished eighth in points in 2006, would have won the championship with six wins, to the three-way tie at five of Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick and Johnson.

In '05, Tony Stewart and Greg Biffle finished 1-2 for the title. That would have been reversed in a win-only system, with Biffle's six to Stewart's five.

In '04, Kurt Busch, who won by points, would have finished fourth on wins with three. Johnson would have been champion with eight wins, followed by Dale Earnhardt Jr. with six -- and this would be remembered as Junior's biggest "almost" year -- and Jeff Gordon with five.

Best of all in the minds of a lot of fans, NASCAR might never have had reason to initiate the Chase.

In 2003, the last year of the season-long points system, Matt Kenseth won the championship with only one win, apparently spurring NASCAR to action. By one-win, one-point, Ryan Newman would have been champion with eight victories rather than finishing sixth in points.

But don't feel bad for Kenseth, who'd have won the championship a year earlier, in '02, with his league-leading five wins, rather than finishing a sharply contrasted eighth in points. Actual champ Tony Stewart would have finished in a three-way tie for third with three wins, behind Kurt Busch with four.

In '01, Jeff Gordon would have won either way with his six victories.

But in 2000, Stewart, who finished sixth in points, would have been champion with six wins. Actual champion Bobby Labonte would have tied for second with Jeff Burton and Rusty Wallace at four.

Maybe today, in world motor racing, will be remembered as The St. Patrick's Day Revolution.

And here I thought Bernie Ecclestone had lost his iron grip on F1. The diminutive czar pushed his idea right through the Federation Internationale de l'Automibile (FIA), after the London newspapers had reported all winter that he had virtually no chance of getting his way this time.

I'm by no means holding my breath for NASCAR to change. But at least now, when I am smirked at, ignored, argued with, admonished to be reasonable, laughed at … I'll have the most popular form of motorsport in the world, Formula One, to cite as proof of my sanity.

Very rarely, you see a driver-fan phenomenon occur in NASCAR, a spur-of-the-moment event that turns around the attitudes of the masses toward the guy.

The stars and planets may be aligning for Kurt Busch.

Suddenly the long-suffering, reluctant villain is awash in good will in the wake of his unprecedented victory lap at Atlanta Motor Speedway last Sunday.

He threw his Dodge in reverse and backed around the entire 1.54-mile circumference of the track, after a spectacular, dominating run to win the Kobalt Tools 500.

"We've done hundreds of media interviews since Sunday," Busch says, "and every time it's inevitable they'll get around to wanting to discuss our unusual victory lap."

Busch has been so "blown away" -- and so intent on repeating that kind of lap this season -- that he is asking fans to name the lap on his Web site, www.kurtbusch.com.

Dare we say Busch has reversed a long-running trend?

It happened to Darrell Waltrip 20 years ago this May. DW had been roundly booed at most tracks for fully a decade -- largely due to his unbridled mouth -- when in 1989 he was spun out by Rusty Wallace on the last lap of The Winston, now called NASCAR's All-Star race.

Appreciated as a victim rather than a villain, DW has been a fan favorite ever since, and it has carried over into his broadcasting career.

A little background on Busch's lap:

"That's something me and my buddies drew up after a few too many Miller Lites one night," Busch said during the winner's interview at Atlanta.

Suddenly he thought better of the way he'd gotten in a plug for his primary sponsor, looked at team owner Roger Penske and asked, "Is it OK to say that?"

Penske gave him the nod.

Now, notice Busch said, "drew up," not "drove," so don't get on him for drinking and driving. He wasn't.

"We had a name for it, but it didn't feel right," Busch said. You could tell he was searching for a name for the lap.

"I just kept focus, like Don Johnson would coming to the start/finish line, flipped a 180, did a little Miami Vice action. … Happy to do something like that today and create a statement. That could be the name for it, the Don Johnson."

Nah, that wasn't it.

So Busch sincerely wants your help. He wants to name the lap, because he's bent on repeating it several more times this season.

Now a little perspective on how and why this could do Busch a lot of good, imagewise.

Waltrip, as a Fox commentator, remarked during the lap that "He doesn't understand what the Polish Victory Lap's all about."

Waltrip was referring to the late Alan Kulwicki's self-named style of celebration, in which he drove around the track the wrong way, albeit driving in forward gears.

The public-relations effect Kulwicki got by driving clockwise was that the driver's side was turned to the grandstands so that the fans could see him waving the checkered flag.

Kulwicki first ran the lap at Phoenix after his first Cup victory in 1988. Thereafter, the reticent engineer -- who wasn't exactly the warmest and fuzziest of personalities -- became a fan favorite.

By driving in reverse, counterclockwise around the track, Busch got the same effect -- the fans could see him waving the flag.

If you ask me, it was the race performance that won the fans' approval. Nobody could deny the brilliance of the drive, on a day when the tires were so weird that everybody was slipping and sliding and sideways. Indeed, Busch himself scraped the wall twice.

After that, all he had to do was not screw up. And the brilliance was in omission.

Busch did his lap in reverse in lieu of a burnout or doughnuts.

I happen to think fans are sick to the gills of burnouts/doughnuts. I know I am. Busch not only drove dazzlingly, he didn't fog the grandstands with acrid tire smoke.

After veteran Terry Labonte won the Southern 500 at Darlington in 2003, he refused to do a burnout -- just drove around the track with the checkered flag -- and was thunderously cheered for it and got rave reviews in the media.

Burnouts/dougnuts, initiated in North America by Italian IndyCar ace Alex Zanardi in 1997, should be waaaay out of fashion by now.

So my suggestion for naming Kurt Busch's lap in reverse is this:

The Drive Against Doughnuts.

Should it catch on, Busch could be the dark-horse candidate for most popular driver in 2009.

All against doughnuts, say aye.

Aye!

HAMPTON, Ga. -- I have seen the Holy Grail of stock-car racing. It was given to the new NASCAR Hall of Fame here this morning.

It is a tarnished, simple, silver loving cup, less than a foot tall, with the race winner's name misspelled: "Loyd [sic] Seay."

But it is the trophy that assured there would be a NASCAR.

The date is inscribed as "11/11/38" -- Nov. 11, 1938.

It was awarded to Lloyd Seay, who NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. told me and others was the greatest stock-car driver he ever saw, for winning a 150-mile race on old Lakewood Speedway, a 1-mile dirt track on the south side of Atlanta.

This was nearly a decade before there was a NASCAR.

After that victory for Seay and his team, the car owner, Raymond Parks, told me 15 years ago, "We sho' 'nuf got the fever" to race full time.

And they did -- owner Parks, chief mechanic Red Vogt, Seay and second driver Roy Hall -- until Seay, at age 21, was killed in a bootleggers' quarrel in 1941 after he'd won three straight national-level stock car races in an eight-day span.

Not until 1947 would organizational meetings produce such a thing as NASCAR -- and it was Vogt who came up with the name and acronym. Not until 1948 would there be a NASCAR race, and a Parks car won it, with Red Byron driving. Not until '49 would there be a "Strictly Stock" division that would evolve into the Sprint Cup Series -- and that first season, Byron won the championship, driving for Parks.

Parks, now 94 and too hard of hearing to be interviewed, is the sole survivor of his team, which sometimes included a pickup driver -- Big Bill France himself.

Parks was "the No. 1 guy to get it started," Richard Petty said of stock-car racing at this morning's trophy-presentation ceremony. "I guess Mr. France did the organizational stuff, but Mr. Parks was racin' before he ever knowed Bill France."

Parks will donate his entire trophy collection to the Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C. But he wanted the initial presentation of five trophies, including the one for the first NASCAR championship, to be here, because Atlanta is his hometown and was the home of his racing team.

Of the five trophies, the one Seay won at Lakewood in 1938 is by far the smallest and least impressive.

Unless you understand that it is the most important trophy in the history of stock-car racing -- the one that "sho' 'nuf" got Raymond Parks excited enough to become a living cornerstone of the sport.

"I think I was 11 years old at the first Cup race [in '49]," Petty said. "Mr. Parks had already been there for years before that. … He set the standard. Racing started pretty rough -- rough characters, rough cars, rough situations.

"Mr. Parks brought class. I think a lot of people said, 'OK, if he can do it, we can do it. We can clean the sport up; we can clean ourselves up.'"

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Deity strolled gracefully, for age 94, through the paddock here Sunday morning, hardly noticed by the crowd.

If the throngs had had any idea who he was and what he did, they would have mobbed him. Television crews would have waited in line to interview him. Virtually everyone in the infield would have gravitated toward him, and people would have poured out of the grandstands to catch a glimpse of him.

Raymond Parks is the man who made stock car racing.

It is that simple.

And that complex.

Parks was dapper in a fine suit and fedora, just as he was at races a decade before there was even a NASCAR, when he was giving an outlaw sport enough dignity to make it worth organizing.

At 94 he looks maybe 64, but when you try to talk to him, you realize he is extremely hard of hearing. A friend from Virginia, Grady Rogers, helps him answer questions.

I didn't need to ask much. I have spent decades researching and writing about this living cornerstone, this man who kept an upstart dreamer named Big Bill France going.

The 51st Daytona 500 is the 51st running that Parks has attended -- although last year he retired to his hotel room after the start.

But he was here long before Big Bill France even dreamed of building a superspeedway and running a 500-mile race.

A Parks car, driven by Red Byron, won the first NASCAR race ever run, on the beach here on Feb. 18, 1948. Parks and Byron went on to win the first championship, in 1949, of what would eventually become the Sprint Cup Series.

But Parks runs back far deeper into stock car racing lore than that.

In 1938, at Red Vogt's garage in downtown Atlanta, Parks formed The Racing Team -- hardly a unique term now, but it was then. His drivers were two dashing, young moonshine runners, Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay.

Vogt would build the cars on an unlimited budget, all with cash. Vogt's only orders from Parks: All cars would be freshly painted, with no dents, entering each race.

How did he get that cash?

"Any way I could get it," Parks told me some 15 years ago, when he could still hear well enough to be interviewed one-on-one.

He'd landed on the streets of Atlanta as a teenage runaway from the northern Georgia mountains in 1929, ran moonshine liquor until he'd save a stake, then went into the bonded whiskey business and branched out from there.

By the late '30s, he was a kingpin of legal liquor and amusement machines -- jukeboxes, pinball and slot machines. He also was the founder of Atlanta's own original "lottery" -- i.e., the numbers game -- long before the lottery was cool in Georgia.

The cash was pouring in, and he took to hanging out at Vogt's garage, where both bootleggers and federal agents got their cars souped up without prejudice from Vogt. (Vogt did say, however, that the bootleggers got the better equipment because they had more money to spend than the revenuers.)

Hall and Seay persuaded Parks to back them, and from there, Parks became "the Rick Hendrick of his time," Junior Johnson has said.

The way I see it, Rick Hendrick is the Raymond Parks of his time.

The Racing Team roared across the Southeast, with Vogt towing the cars and the drivers hurtling over the highways with Parks in the new Cadillacs he always kept. They'd run 110 mph on the roads from race town to race town, with Hall or Seay at the wheel and Parks sleeping peacefully in the back seat, trusting totally in his drivers' skill.

Late in his life, Big Bill France told several people -- including me, when I was a very young journalist -- that the greatest driver he'd ever seen, anywhere, was "a fella from up in Georgia by the name of Lloyd Seay."

Seay would take the North Turn at the old beach course here with his Ford coupes turned up on two wheels, the left-side tires spinning wildly in midair. He also drove with one hand only, out of habit, and kept his left arm propped up in the driver's side window.

Such was Seay's skill driving cars that "I heard Lloyd say he could take a '39 Ford coupe and climb a pine tree," an old Georgia bootlegger once told me."I wouldn't doubt it."

The wild ride ended the day after Labor Day 1941.

Seay had won three straight national-level stock car events in eight days -- here on the beach, then at High Point, N.C., and finally at Lakewood Speedway, the legendary 1-mile dirt track in Atlanta, that Labor Day.

Seay sped home to Dawsonville, Ga., that night, and the next morning was shot and killed by a cousin in a bootleggers' quarrel over a load of sugar for making moonshine.

Seay was 21 when he died, and yet-to-be-born NASCAR was robbed of its first great charismatic hero.

Parks never got over that. A few weeks later, a magnificent tombstone appeared on Seay's grave in the Dawsonville town cemetery. To this day, a glass-enclosed picture of Seay smiles eternally out toward old Highway 9, known in Parks' youth as The Whiskey Trail.

Parks to this day has never admitted he placed that tombstone, but everybody knows he did.

In his grief, he got out of racing and went off to war and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, living in the same foxhole in the snow for three straight weeks.

As for Hall, he just went wild with grief. He rode out the war running 'shine. After the war, he was involved in a shootout with police in Greensboro, N.C., then was arrested and extradited back to Georgia on a bank robbery charge.

Parks restarted his racing team with Byron as driver after NASCAR was formed. (It was the brilliant mechanic Vogt, by the way, who came up with both the name, National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, and the acronym, in the formative meetings here in December 1947.)

Hall got out of prison too late to stick with Parks' reformed team, went back to racing in 1949 and suffered a head injury at High Point, N.C., that ended his career. He died in a nursing home in 1994.

Through the '30s and '40s, whenever Parks had an extra car for beach races here, he always gave a break to the promoter who also fancied himself a driver, Big Bill France.

After the war, France couldn't even afford a pace car for his races. So he'd phone Parks in Atlanta, and Parks would always show up with a brand-new Cadillac that would serve as pace car.

After the 1950s, several decades went by when NASCAR hardly recognized Parks at all. I stopped voting in the International Motorsports Hall of Fame balloting about 10 years ago because Parks' name never appeared on the ballot.

As we sat and talked Sunday morning, Grady Rogers told me that Parks, at long last, will be inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame this year.

That recognition is long, long overdue. In my book, Parks should be included among the first group of inductees for the new NASCAR Hall of Fame.

I did manage to get him to hear one question clearly: "Is it as much fun as when y'all raced on the beach?"

His entourage tried to prompt him by nodding -- say yes, Raymond, to keep good will with the current generation and the giant speedway.

But he remains an honest man. He smiled, he beamed and he shook his head.

"No-ho-ho!" he laughed out his answer."It was more fun back then."

And then, finally, after all these decades, NASCAR president Mike Helton introduced Parks at the drivers' meeting for the 51st Daytona 500.

It had been a long time coming.

But you know what?

Every driver and every crew chief in that meeting gave Parks a long standing ovation. They knew. They all knew.

After that, Helton and NASCAR chairman Brian France accompanied Parks out to a replica of the '40 Ford coupe Byron drove to the '49 championship. There was a photo session.

A small crowd gathered, mainly out of curiosity. They recognized Helton and France, and were fascinated by the old coupe.

"Who's the guy in the hat?" somebody in the jostling crowd asked me.

"Somebody who was more important to the beginning of this sport than Big Bill France himself," I said. "His name is Raymond Parks."

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- My top 12 drivers to watch in the Daytona 500, with odds and reasoning:

1. Jeff Gordon: 3-1 -- He's stronger, smoother, more confident here than he's been in years. Only the risk of pileups and the crazy draft keep him from going off at 9-5.
2. Kyle Busch: 9-2 -- Wild Thing may lead if he can at the white flag, as he did in winning Thursday's qualifier, then show his spectacular reflexes at blocking.
3. Jimmie Johnson: 5-1 -- Hasn't been drafting quite as smart as teammate Gordon all week, but has a plenty strong enough car to benefit from the right push at the right moment.
4. Dale Earnhardt Jr.: 7-1 -- He's still the best at getting to the front in plate racing, but has a bad run of luck at getting caught in other people's pileups.
5. Mark Martin: 9-1 -- He's more hopeful going into this 500 than any time in memory: so excited about his new Hendrick ride that he just might play rough, for a change, to win.
6. Jamie McMurray: 10-1 -- Dark Horse Special: McMurray has been far and away the best of the Roush Fenway Racing Ford drivers all week, lurking at or near the front in practices and preliminary events. Now, if he can just concentrate for 500 miles under this kind of pressure.
7. Tony Stewart: 12-1 -- His chances worsened Saturday when he had to go to a backup car after teammate Ryan Newman wrecked in front of him and took them both out. Stewart's backup isn't bad -- he finished third in the Shootout in it -- but it doesn't drive as well as the one he wrecked.
8. Martin Truex Jr.: 15-1 -- He's entirely capable of running up near the front all race. It's just a matter of whether he can keep his concentration and keep from getting clipped by wilder drivers.
9. Denny Hamlin: 18-1 -- If his crew doesn't fail him in the pits, he can hang in near the front 'til the final 10 laps and from there he's got as good a chance in the final crapshoot as anybody.
10. Joey Logano: 20-1 -- Stranger things have happened here. The rookie learned fast about drafting in his qualifier. Won't actively draft his way to a win, but could get into position to get the winning push from someone else.
11. Bill Elliott: 22-1 -- Doesn't think his old experience at staying out of trouble necessarily translates now, because back then he could drive off by himself and now he's at the mercy of the pack. But he remains a master of sticking around 'til the end.
12. Scott Riggs: 50-1 -- Hey, you gotta pick one storybook scenario. With a pickup team mainly of volunteers, he and new team owner Tommy Baldwin are doing it the old-fashioned, bootstraps way.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Fifteen years ago today, the nicest man who ever drove in NASCAR -- and I use that superlative advisedly -- was killed here.

Neil Bonnett went lightly, joyfully through life, left laughter everywhere he went and never knowingly was even so much as impolite to anyone.

He shouldn't have been back in a race car that first morning of practice for the Daytona 500 in 1994, at age 47. He'd had serious head injuries, including one that had given him severe amnesia in 1990.

But he risked coming back because he loved it and couldn't stay away. His best friend, Dale Earnhardt, had helped him work his way back into NASCAR, advising him that if racing was what he wanted to do, he ought to do it.

The circumstances of Bonnett's death remain somewhat mysterious. His car spun suddenly in the fourth turn of Daytona International Speedway and hit the concrete retaining wall nearly head-on.

NASCAR at first called it driver error, but after vehement protests from Earnhardt, NASCAR removed that description from the record.

Darrell Waltrip, who was racing that year on the same Hoosier tires that were on Bonnett's car when he died, told me later that his particular model of Hoosier was narrower, for less friction on the track, and could have been quite tricky either for a rookie or a driver who was rusty.

Earnhardt, until his own death in the 2001 Daytona 500, never got over the death of his closest hunting and fishing buddy.

This is the kind of guy Neil Bonnett was:

One summer day in 1978, he and I were sitting in his den in Hueytown, Ala., talking, when the phone rang in his kitchen. He got up and answered. His wife, Susan, was out at the supermarket.

"No," he said after answering. "No, not interested."

He listened.

"Look, I've told you not to call here anymore," he said, and hung up.

As he came back and sat down, I guess I gave him something of a mischievous grin.

"No, it's not what you think," he said. "That was the pipe fitters' union. I've told them never to call here again. They're paying $50 an hour now, and if Susan knew that, she'd make me quit racin' and go back to work."

He made a good living racing for the next dozen years, winning 18 Cup races and 19 poles. Then, at Darlington in 1990, he suffered such a bad concussion that it gave him amnesia for weeks and a foggy memory for months.

Back in the early 1970s, when racing's Alabama Gang couldn't beat him at Birmingham International Raceway, he was taken on as a friend, and Bonnett would forever be identified with the Allisons -- Bobby, Donnie and Bobby's sons Davey and Clifford -- and Charles "Red" Farmer.

Later, in 1990 after his amnesia had mostly cleared, Bonnett re-emerged at Talladega -- not to race, but to begin doing television (which he was very good at) for CBS and TBS.

At the time, Bobby Allison was still suffering effects of a life-threatening head injury he'd suffered at Pocono in 1988. As usual, when Bonnett came back out in public, he managed to make light of both his own condition, and Allison's.

"I went over to Bobby's house the other day," he said. "Judy [Bobby's wife] was trying to help us communicate.

"But I'll tell you what: Between Bobby trying to remember what he wanted to say, and me trying to remember what he said, Judy was having a helluva time trying to help us."

Bonnett came here in '94 as an unsung hero from the previous summer. When Davey Allison's helicopter crashed into the Talladega infield in July of '93, it was Bonnett who scrambled into the wreckage -- with spilling gasoline all around that could have exploded at any second -- and pulled Farmer to safety. Bonnett then wriggled back in to get Davey, who was unconscious.

Davey Allison died the next morning in a Birmingham hospital, but Farmer survived with only a broken arm.

I can remember the "meanest" thing Neil Bonnett ever said to the media. He was driving for Junior Johnson, who had put a strong gag order on him about some major deal that was imminent.

We pressed and pressed. Good ol' Neil would tell us, we figured. Finally, at a point when any other driver would have told us to get lost -- or worse -- Bonnett was apologetic.

"Guys, I don't mean to be rude," he said, "but I'm just not able to talk about that."

That was as mean as he ever got.

A few years before he died, with tire wars raging between Goodyear and Hoosier, I stood in the garage at North Wilkesboro watching drivers limp past, injured in crashes caused by blown tires as the manufacturers tried to one-up each other with faster -- and more fragile -- tires.

That day, I quoted an anonymous source among drivers.

"If this doesn't stop, one of us is going to get killed before it's over," the source said. He paused to look around. "You just wonder which one of us it will be."

I think it's OK now to reveal the name of that driver: It was Neil Bonnett.

PORT ORANGE, Fla. -- A day off at Daytona is a hard thing to bear.

It's not the silence from the speedway -- the peace and quiet is nice enough, here in the middle of Speedweeks.

The trouble is, today -- with the Shootout crowd gone and the larger crowds for the qualifying races and the Daytona 500 still to come -- is too strong a reminder of day-to-day Daytona Beach, when the races aren't in town.

This isn't exactly Margaritaville down here, and driving up and down the beach highway, A-1-A, is hardly a pleasure cruise. Daytona Beach and its suburbs aren't exactly boomtowns. They are weary, faded, salt-corroded.

So I've drifted back down to the south, to my hotel in Port Orange, to blog with my sliding-glass door open, to see and hear the endless sea, which eases the sadness of workaday Daytona.

The locals are largely a sad lot, the waitresses at the pancake houses and the housekeepers at the beachside hotels, mostly from the Midwest and up East, are struggling to get by, you can tell.

And yet they are amazingly cheerful, upbeat. I don't know how they do it.

Among the elderly walking endlessly up and down the beach, you can distinguish the locals from the snowbirds. The locals are the ones with leathery skins.

There aren't too many, if any, rich and famous along what used to be called the World's Most Famous Beach. Even the Cadillacs and Lincolns are old.

The restaurateurs and bartenders up and down the beach will tell you the NASCAR legions aren't their favorite crowds. The spring-breakers are the worst, damaging property and spending little money. The NASCAR crowds generally behave, but don't spend much.

Oddly enough, the locals love the Bike Week crowds of March the best -- at least, ever since the Outlaws, Hell's Angels and the other serious gangs had it made clear to them they aren't welcome here.

Thousands upon thousands of motorcyclists descend on the area, showing off their custom bikes to one another, paying relatively little attention to the world-class motorcycle races at the speedway.

"I never go to the races, myself," I once heard a guy say on TV, in his star-spangled-banner bandanna. "I just come to look at everybody's scooter."

Not many NASCAR fans realize how troubled day-to-day Daytona really is.

About a dozen years ago, during January NASCAR testing, I was pistol-whipped and robbed in the parking lot of a cigar store that fronts U.S. 92, which runs from the speedway to the beach.

It started out as a carjacking attempt. I got into my rental car with a package of cigars, and when I tried to close the door, it met resistance. I looked up to see a .357 Magnum pointed at my face through the driver's-side window.

At first the two teenagers wanted the car, but when I reached to drop the keys onto the ground, they spotted my watch, and wanted that.

I got one crack on the head with the gun for emphasis. Then when I was deemed too slow producing my wallet, I got whacked on the head again.

Oddly enough, they forgot about the car, grabbed the watch and wallet and ran off. And there I sat, blood pouring down my face, covering a white golf shirt.

A policeman took me to Halifax Medical Center, the hospital where injured drivers are taken. The emergency room there was bedlam. Bloody as I was, and accompanied by a uniformed cop, I was ignored.

The policeman tried to get a nurse's attention, and gestured toward me as if the sight of me should be enough.

"He's just gonna have to wait," she said.

After a while, I asked the cop if we could just go. Enough was enough. The gashes in my scalp were superficial anyway.

As we left, somebody thrust a handful of sample packs of antiseptic ointment into my hands.

And that was all the treatment I got that night.

Next day, I met a police detective who would become a friend over the years. It took him a few weeks to find my watch, but he did it. He knew of a pawnbroker he suspected of sending Rolexes to the Middle East, watched the man's place, and one day there was my watch. The detective carried a jeweler's loop with him, and found the serial number that matched.

I had to pay $500 to the pawn shop -- pawnbrokers have a powerful lobby in Tallahassee, the state capital, so that they get paid even for items that prove to be stolen.

I still wear that old Rolex every time I come down here. I have it on right now. It's sort of a badge of survival to me -- and, said the detective, it may have saved my life.

"Those were 90-percent shooters," he said of the teenagers. He figured it was a gang initiation, and said kids that young shoot the victim 90 percent of the time, but that the prize of a Rolex must have been enough for these two.

Once, he took me on a tour of the area just half a block off U.S. 92, the main artery to the beach. He stopped in an empty parking lot just behind an auto-body repair shop.

"Right here, a few weeks ago, there was a gang killing," he said. "They blew the kid's legs off with shotguns before they killed him."

We drove on, past a joint called the Tropicana, locally known as "the Trop." They used to post a uniformed cop on that corner, to keep some semblance of order, until one got stabbed with a sharpened screwdriver.

Outside the Trop, eight or 10 men walked into the street, glassy-eyed, applauding the detectives in the unmarked car, whose faces all these crack addicts recognized.

"Every one of them is holding [crack]," the detective said. "Every one of them. You can count on that."

Beginning with Thursday's qualifying races, fans will zoom happily up and down U.S. 92 in their SUVs and pickups, to and from the speedway, without a care in the world, oblivious to what goes on, on either side of the street.

They don't advertise that sort of thing over at the World Center of Racing.

No use driving up to Ormond Beach, "the birthplace of speed." Long before there was an Indianapolis Motor Speedway (built in 1909), there was racing here, at the Winter Speed Carnival -- the direct ancestor of Speedweeks -- in 1903.

The Ormond Hotel, once the largest wooden structure in the world, with its 5 miles of corridors, winter home to the greatest racers and innovators of the turn of the 20th century -- Henry Ford, the Stanley brothers, Ransom E. Olds, Alexander Winton, William K. Vanderbilt) -- is no more.

The Ormond was demolished in the 1990s to make room for more high-rise condos.

So there are almost no reminders now, of the era that was the springtime of American ingenuity and industry, long before a Washington, D.C., mechanic named William Henry Getty France drifted here and decided to settle in the 1930s, and a decade later organized a fragmented, outlaw brand of motor racing called "stock car racing."

So I sit here gazing at, and listening to, the sounding sea, the same one that rolled in for Olds and Ford and Alexander Winton and the pioneers of the early 1900s.

The sea, and only the sea, remains the same now.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Ever wonder what happens between a sports figure and a sports journalist after the latter criticizes the former publicly? When they next meet face to face?

Here's an example of the way it should be handled, but usually isn't. And here's how the sports figure can take the journalist's remarks under advisement, actually weigh them -- which almost never happens.

In the season-opening "NASCAR Now" show on ESPN2, during the Monday Roundtable this week, I said Mark Martin is too nice a guy for his own good, that he's too polite to other drivers on the racetrack ... that there's not enough dog-eat-dog in him to win races -- and a championship -- in this era.

I said it knowing I was sure to see him face to face, and soon. But I get paid for telling the truth as best I see it.

"When you criticize a guy, always write it as if you're going to have lunch with him the next day," I was advised years ago, by one of the wisest editors I've ever worked for. And I've tried to live by that. It cuts down on the cheap shots and exaggerations.

And so, upon arrival here for Speedweek, I sought out Martin right away, early in the morning of Daytona 500 media day Thursday, to face him and talk to him.

As I walked to get a place up front in his media stall, somebody clapped me on the shoulder from behind, and I turned to see Martin, grinning -- beaming. We walked over to his stall together.

I prefaced my first question by reminding him that everyone he's raced against has said Mark Martin races cleaner than anyone else, and --

"I saw you," he said. "I know."

"I was going to tell you what I said up front."

"I know what you said" -- and now he was laughing.

"Is there not enough dog-eat-dog in Mark Martin?" I asked.

"Are you saying would I turn a guy to win the championship? Is that what you're asking?"

"Well, would you rub on him?" I continued. "A lot of times you're so clean with a guy that you don't even rub him."

"I like what Marty [Smith, of ESPN] said to you," Martin said. "I haven't seen Jimmie [Johnson] knock anybody out of the way to win any of his races."

Well, not slam or turn, but Johnson can be aggressive with his fenders and bumper if he needs to be. Martin rarely touches a fender to the other guy.

"So you feel like you can be aggressive enough to win races?"

"I don't feel like changing who I am is necessary to get the job done."

But then he pondered.

"I will do what I do in the future based on split-second decisions. So I really can't tell you."

Seriously now, the man, at age 50, with 35 Cup wins but none since 2005, was thinking.

"Do I understand that I only have so many more opportunities? Yes, I do. But every decision I make, no matter how I answer your question, will be made split-second. And all those things might weigh into my psyche, but at the end of the day, I really can't tell you."

This is not the only fender-rub Martin has gotten from ESPN.com lately. My colleague Terry Blount, in his new book, "The Blount Report: NASCAR's Most Overrated and Underrated Drivers, Cars, Teams and Tracks," lists Martin as the No. 1 most overrated driver.

But Blount sees it the same as I do, saying Martin is too nice a guy on the racetrack.

Martin in no way apologizes for following his conscience.

"I can tell you that I've had a couple of wins where accidents were part of it. Like the Busch race at Bristol with Davey Allison years ago, where Davey was passing me for the win and moved up before he got clear of me. And he wrecked, and I won the race ..."

To this day, "That win doesn't mean anything to me, because that's not how I wanted to win the race," Martin said. "Really, it's how I feel when I lay down at the end of the day that matters most."

After three winless years, and now with a ride with powerful Hendrick Motorsports ...

"I can tell you that I want to win really, really bad."

He was pondering. Really pondering.

"I can't tell you what I'm going to do. I won't be able to answer that question until it's over with."

Don't ever expect to see Martin turn another driver to win. It isn't in him. But he still would be sainted in this sport if he laid a fender on someone to get a win or two in this, the twilight of his career.