Around 1974. True story and it's funny, in fact when I shared it with "Thats Racin" I won free tickets to a Busch race at Charlotte. In my younger days my Uncle Chris and I would go to the Cup races at Charlotte year, and we always got to the track before sunrise so we could race to get good seats on the backstrech. This partiular race was the World 600 in May and it turned out to be a very warm day. We made our way to the best seats avaliable and settled in to bake in the sun and wait for the race to start. My Uncle Chris is a smoker, like many of that time, and he kept a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other at all times at the races. Due to crowds he was having a hard time putting out and discarding the butts but he did manage for the first few hours. By 11:00 the stands filled and everyone felt squeezed. This day we found ourselves sitting behind a very large fellow, decked out in the usual dress for the day, a red flannel shirt and baggy jeans. From the time he sat down he started drinking and didn't let up.

As I sat and enjoyed the race, it got hotter and hotter till finally "Big Un" stood and took off his red flannel then sat back down. He was still emptying beers at a rapid rate and got so drunk he could no longer stand during any action on the track, he just slumped there and was taking up much of the foot room Uncle Chris once enjoyed. The more drunk Big Un got the more he slumped. At some point of the race I noticed my Uncle laughing with the gentleman on the other side of him and I soon saw why. As Big Un slumped over just in front of Chris he had exposed a huge gap in the back of his droopy jeans, open well past the top of his hairy crack, and Chris had been using this area to flick his ashes in for some time. By now Big Un was so sun burnt and drunk I guess he hadn't noticed what was going on behind him. I'll try to give you a visual.

Picture if you can a big man, probably around 300 plus pounds, sun burnt rolls of blubber, long sweat soaked hair and drunk to the point of being comatose. Leanning over with a days worth of ashes trailing down his back and disappearing deep in his baggy jeans. Big Un sat there for hours with ashes accumulating in his crack. As it mixed with beads of sweat it darkened and trickled into his pants... and he just sat there. The only movement was when he reallized he was out of beer and reached for another. For 600 miles this continued.

When the race ended and we made our way back to the car, Chris and I talked about the days events, both the race as well as Big Un. Chris said that was the best ashtray he ever had except for the huge crack in it. We had a good laugh talking about it and wondering what he would find when he got home and removed his clothes. I can't imagine what was waitting on him. I bet he found a thick gummy paste in his drawers and wondered just what it was how it got there. The things you can see at a Cup race.