Alice Cooper 'Muscle Of Love'

I’ve been to night races at Charlotte Motor Speedway starting back in 1994. I was with my father, mother, Grandfather Pence, and Uncle Malcolm Lively when we saw Jeff Gordon get his first career victory. I was there again the following year to see Bobby Labonte get HIS first career win. I got lucky. I had two moments in NASCAR history happen right before my eyes.

I’ve been to a handful of other night races at Charlotte for both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series. I’ve stood under the lights on pit road in Jeff Burton’s pit. I stood next to Robby Gordon’s #55 car. And Jeff Burton won that Nationwide Series race by the way.

I’ve done my share of tailgating both before and after a night race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. You could even say that I’ve had my share of “buzzes” at that racetrack.

But never… Never in my life have I seen the sheer volume of drunks that I saw at the “Last Race To Make The Chase” event at Richmond International Raceway back on September 7th.

There were people falling down the stairs. There were people falling up the stairs. There was even a guy a mouse hair’s away from passing out (he sure kept the cops busy on the backstretch).

We saw the first sign of what was to come later that evening when we were being directed where to park at 1:30 in the afternoon. A plump blonde was stumbling around the chain-link fence perimeter of the Richmond International Speedway. She would take a step and fall to her right so the fence could catch her.

The green flag was to fly that evening just before 8 that evening and she was already a drunk-tank candidate.

I talked to one of the guys parking the cars in the warehouse lot where we set up our tailgating camp and he told me that he was nearly hit twice by pre-race drunk drivers. According to him, it was not an unusual occurrence at a Richmond race.

At one point during the race, I left the stands and headed for bathroom. A drunk fell on the back of my left leg causing soreness that hit two days later and I saw something that I won’t soon be forgetting.

I saw a beautiful young lady standing in the middle of the walkway with her hair being held back and out of the way by her lovely girlfriend. The young hottie was standing over a drainage grate puking her guts out. THAT… was something I had never seen before. Everyone gave her a wide berth as we navigated around that spectacle.

Some people were trying to justify the amount of drunkards by saying things like… “They’ve been there all day drinking.”

But like I wrote before, I’ve been to plenty of night races. Perhaps the “last race to make the chase” brought the party out of everyone in attendance, but I have never seen such sights before.

It was indeed a wild night at Richmond International Raceway. We were there to witness “Spin-Gate” even though we had no idea what was really going on until Monday morning.

Would I go back to RIR in the future?

Without a doubt!