Has D.B. Cooper been found? At the beginning of the week, when a new NASCAR Hall of Fame class will be announced, a member of the sport's Hall of Fame has broken a four-decade silence.
I said that the straightaway is almost a mile long. I asked Lord, "How much can that car gain before you go into that turn?" and I didn't tell anyone else that.
A man named L.W. Wright competed in a stock car race at the highest level of racing, starting 36th and finishing 39th in theWinston 500 at the Talladega Superspeedway, on this date 40 years ago. Prior to the race, no one in the Cup Series garage had heard of Wright, but the sanctioning body had for some reason accepted his racing, on little more than the word of a Tennessee trucking businessman and a public relations group.
He abandoned the Chevy Monte Carlo he had purchased for the event and vanished after the race ended. Over the past four decades, he has evaded everyone from NASCAR officials to private investigators hired by the people he still owed for that race car, and a growing number of would-be amateur auto-racing sleuths, eager to meet the man who tricked his way onto a racetrack.
L.W. Wright would be a NASCAR champion if he could have driven as fast as he talked.
The story of Wright has become a NASCAR legend, especially in the conspiracy-obsessed corners of the internet. Woody wrote a story about the mystery in The Anniston Star. After years of efforts from journalists, Wright was finally located by Rick Houston, a long-time motor sports writer and host of the NASCAR history-based The Scene Vault. Houston spent a year searching for and persuading Wright to tell his story. Houston was taken to an undisclosed location where Wright was waiting. Houston was skeptical about meeting a man who has worked very hard for nearly half a century to get away from anyone in the NASCAR community. The writer was very careful about positively identifying Wright. Many have believed that the one-off racer was not L.W. Wright. Houston has a stack of back issues of Grand National Scene and photos from that day in 1982, and he believes the man he interviewed is the one in those images. The uniform Wright brought with him for the meeting was a perfect match.
Wright told Houston that he would face them if they could find someone who said he owed them $30,000. If it makes them stutter, you know what I mean.
Wright wants to set the record straight in failing health. Skeptics will wonder if stock car racing's most notorious con man is to be trusted. There is a lot of confusion about the post-Talladega disappearance. He is listed as a Did Not Qualify at the Nashville race, but no one remembers seeing him and neighbors said he grabbed some of their belongings.
All will be shocked that Wright has reappeared.
He says that he had a lot of friends in country music.
That same story began the story of Wright's race. In the spring of 1982, a publicist contacted newspapers in Tennessee to pitch a story about Wright. He was described as a 33 year old short track racer with 43 starts in the NASCAR Busch Grand National Series who was going to make his Cup Series debut at Talladega with the support of country music superstars. The team was called Music City Racing. Wright paid the $100 fee to file an entry for the Talladega event after applying for a NASCAR license.
News reports at the time. Wright convinced Space Age Marketing to lend him $30,000 to buy a race car, and to cover the additional expenses of a big rig truck and haul the car south to Talladega. The car was purchased from a local racing hero and his son, who would go on to win two Daytona 500s. Wright spent $168 to have racing jackets made for his crew, and wrote a lot of checks to other teams for parts and tires.
Wright says he asked the Marlins to paint the car black and give it the number 34 because it was from the first full-time black racer in NASCAR. I picked up 34. I was 34 years old when I started racing.
Wright told Houston that he asked his new team's coach to come down to watch his pit stops and race strategy. The man who has always said it was his idea to follow Wright and the car was skeptical.
"Hell, I had never heard of this guy, he claimed to have won a lot of short track races in Virginia, but didn't seem to know the names of any Virginia racers, including Tommy Houston." It all got even fishier as soon as we got there.
Wright asked questions over the weekend that any real racer would already know the answer to, and that Wright knew the answers to none of them. T.G. Sheppard's camp immediately released a statement that they had never heard of L.W. Wright. Wright apologized, explaining that he had made a mistake. He said that there had been some confusion about his experience, that he hadn't actually run 43 Busch Series races, but rather lower-division events that were run at Busch Series racetracks. He was allowed to make a qualification run at the largest, fastest track.
Wright remembers pulling into the infield and looking down at the track he had never seen. You think about holding that car, the pedal flat on the floor, all the way around this track!
In a conversation prior to his death in 2010, Jim Hunter, the former NASCAR executive and Talladega Superspeedway president, cited Alabama's Right to Work laws as handcuffs to the sanctioning body's efforts to keep Wright off the racetrack.
At the same time that he did, the first Cup Series driver to top 200 mph in pole qualification was done. Wright crashed in practice. He says he was approached with advice from two future NASCAR Hall of Famers. Bobby Allison told him not to feel bad if he didn't make the field, but Dale Earnhardt told him to be confident.
L.W. Wright got out of the way when the flag fell. Unable to maintain the minimum speed of 180 mph, NASCAR ordered him to retire to the garage after 13 laps. He made $1,545 for finishing 39th of 40 cars.
According to reports at the time, he vanished. The checks he wrote did not disappear. According to the newspaper reporters of the time, Wright's checks were returned due to insufficient funds.
Marlin said to not ask if he was surprised.
The weekly publication that was the must-read of the stock car racing industry and fans alike, was known as simply "Scene," and was worked for by Houston for a decade. Houston has devoted his career to interviewing heroes and now antiheroes of NASCAR's past since the paper was shuttered. He has never experienced something like this before.
Houston said that L.W. wanted to finally get a burden off of his shoulders and get his story out there. The story that he tells us is not the same story that we have heard before. Is there an end to it? I don't know. To sit there and listen to him finally talk about it, to a lot of NASCAR fans, that is a day we never thought would come.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
