ONMC ALL-STAR FAN EXPERIENCE: DAY 1

By Ron Lemasters Jr..

RANDLEMAN, N.C. – The first day of the eighth annual ONMC All-Star Fan Experience was, in a word, awesome.

When the first event of the day is a 40-minute conversation with Richard Petty, it’s going to be a good day. The King held forth in the theater for our attendees, talking about his career, Victory Junction, the 20th annual Kyle Petty Charity Ride and a whole lot more.

After The King had signed everything our Members had and taken photos with practically everyone in the room (that's Terry Bray with Richard), we moved over to the Petty Museum, which is still in the finishing stages but impressive to the say the least. We toured the actual museum, still under construction, moved to the Red Floor Garage where many of the cars important to the Pettys are housed and finally into the homestead where patriarch Lee and matriarch Elizabeth lived. 

That was spectacular. The house, still undergoing some renovation, was huge and is also the house The King was born in. Yes, really.

From there, it was back to Victory Junction for a four-star lunch prepared by Chef Matt Brown and his staff at The Fuel Stop, a silent auction that netted $810 for Victory Junction, and a concert by the Atlanta band The Howling Tongues.The five-man band, which will debut next week at Charlotte on the Bass Pro Shops Stage, is new to NASCAR, and will have the ONMC as its fan base while getting started. The concert is the first of two planned for the ASFE, with country star Chelsea Bain playing Friday at Charlotte Motor Speedway at our annual Tailgate Party.

A tour of the massive facility for chronically ill children followed that, and we ended the day stripping pillow cases as part of our annual service event for Victory Junction.

“This is the best day ever at the ASFE,” said Ron Bray, who with wife Terri have been to nearly all of the ASFE events over the years. “Today alone was worth the price of this week.”

Richard Petty is not only The King, he’s a man who understands how race fans are. “For the first eight or 10 years of my life, that’s what I was, a race fan,” he said. “I wasn’t driving, so I got to watch a lot of racing and I knew what made it work for me. I knew, once I started racing, that if the fans weren’t there, I didn’t get paid. So I looked at it like the more fans that were there, the bigger percentage of their ticket money could be mine if I won. The happier they were, the more I could win to feed my family.”

In contrast, he understands why today’s drivers are not able to give that much to fans.

“The guys today do a pretty good job, but they have sponsors telling them to go and keep these people happy, those people happy. It’s a whole different deal today.”

Victory Junction has been a part of the past several All-Star Fan Experiences, and for good reason. Making a difference to chronically ill children and their families is an extremely worthwhile thing to do, and they do it well. Anything we can do as a group and an organization to help them in that endeavor, we do.

Day 2 begins Thursday morning in Mooresville at the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame, with stops at Penske Racing and elsewhere set up as well. The four-day event presented by the ONMC runs through Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.