Editor's note: This story first appeared in Jan. 27's Inside Dirt Late Model racing on DirtonDirt.com.

So Georgia-Florida Speedweeks has begun, the now month-long odyssey already into its second weekend. Or first, if you’re more of a traditionalist and don’t count the new Sunshine Nationals weekend at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla.

I haven’t made the trip south yet from my Pennsylvania home — my coverage schedule spans the Feb. 5-10 Winternationals at East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., and the Feb. 12-17 DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia — but I still have Speedweeks coursing through my veins from afar. I always do this time of year.

This is my favorite stretch on the annual dirt racing calendar. I’ve come to realize I wouldn’t know how to handle not being down there in the Southeast to experience it in person. | Complete Speedweeks coverage

Well, at least part of it. This expansion of the Dirt Late Model portion of Speedweeks in recent years to a monster excursion encompassing five weekends is a little too long for me.

Nevertheless, when I sign in at East Bay in a little over a week, it will mark the start of the 27th consecutive year that I’ve attended Speedweeks — specifically, the two weeks leading up to the Daytona 500 that historically represents the heart of the winter racing extravaganza. 

The realization that so many years have now gone by is a bit surreal to me. I mean, I’ve now been covering Speedweeks as a journalist or public relations official for more than half my life (I just turned 51 on the very day this column was posted), and, if you add up all the Speedweeks days I’ve spent in Georgia and Florida, it must equal more than a year.

More than a quarter-century of doing anything tends to make a person turn reflective, and such is the case with my Speedweeks attendance. All the things that I’ve seen, done and experienced during Speedweeks seemingly occupy a separate section of my brain. It’s the memories that make something special, and man, I have a lot of them from Speedweeks. There are certainly indelible moments in my mind from the hundreds of races I’ve attended since I started going to them as a 9-year-old in 1982 and writing about the sport as a 16-year-old in ’89, but Speedweeks stuff just has a way of sticking out more than others.

I can still vividly recall my first trips to Speedweeks, in 1986 and ’87 with my parents. We made the long drive to Florida from my native New Jersey and spent a week staying in Ormond Beach, Fla., and attending the races at Volusia, which was then known as Volusia County Speedway.

I was overwhelmed by how it was almost impossible to go anywhere around the area without realizing you were at Speedweeks, not only because so much was happening at Daytona International Speedway all week (I made my first visits to the big track to be awed by its banks for the Twin 125s in ’86 and the 500 the following year) but also because you’d see dirt and asphalt short-track teams working on their cars in hotel parking lots all along the beach (that’s something I miss!).

We were at Volusia, of course, for the big-block modified action because that’s the division I grew up watching in the Northeast. I had no real interest in the class sharing the bill with the mods — Dirt Late Models — because at that point I had never been exposed to the full-bodied cars that I thought were basically street stocks. When the Late Models came out, I spent my time playing football and running around behind Volusia’s turn-four bleachers with other kids, including a future modified and Late Model driver named Tim McCreadie.

Looking back, and knowing what I know now about Late Models, I can’t help but be disappointed that I skipped the Late Model races at Volusia. Some of the Late Model feature winners those two years — Donnie Moran, Charlie Swartz, Jack Boggs, Mike Head, Ronnie Johnson, Larry Moore — rank as legends of the division, and no doubt there were many more big names in the fields that I missed watching in their primes. I remember the camper that burned up in the middle of Volusia’s parking lot during the racing program one of those years more than anything about the Late Model racing.

By the time I returned to Speedweeks just over a decade later, though, I was a much better informed dirt-tracker. 

Come Speedweeks 1998, when I was nearly two years into working full-time as a writer and editor at Trenton, N.J.’s Area Auto Racing News, I had covered several Dirt Late Model events in recent years, including the Dirt Track World Championship at Pennsboro (W.Va.) Speedway, the Pittsburgher 100, the Super DIRT Week STARS-sanctioned races at the Syracuse Mile and other various shows. 

Big-block modifieds were still my primary priority — the division made its return to Speedweeks in ’98 after a three-year hiatus as the Volusia half-mile oval returned to a dirt surface following seven years of asphalt action — but I was much more familiar with Late Models and I wrote about them throughout my first working Speedweeks, taking in my initial races at East Bay while also covering big-blocks and sprint cars at Volusia and even making a stop at New Smyrna (Fla.) Speedway for some pavement racing.

It was while I covered two or three East Bay nights each year and both Late Model and big-block mod races at Volusia during the late ‘90s and early 2000s Speedweeks that I became more friendly with people in the Late Model world. One person was my current colleague here at DirtonDirt.com, Todd Turner, who I began to cross paths with in the pit area as I interviewed Late Model drivers. Who could have known, in that time when trade papers still were prevalent in racing, that we’d eventually end up working together at this new-fangled website focused on Dirt Late Model news?

Speedweeks is like that. You run into so many people over so many days — usually talking about how the weather you’re experiencing in Florida is so much better than it would be back home but plenty of other topics as well — that you develop closer relationships. Everyone is far away from home, participating in the only real racing going on in the country, that there’s just a unique feel to the whole deal. Everyone is in an adventure together.

And not surprisingly, spending extended periods of time at Speedweeks naturally results in plenty of happenings. I wish now that I had kept a daily dairy of my Speedweeks experiences through all these years — my trips with Area Auto from 1998-2006, as the World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series P.R. director from 2007-14 and as a DirtonDirt writer since ’15 — but alas, I never did. I’d certainly remember more details if I had jotted down notes about everything, at the track and away from it, that occurred.

But I still recall plenty, especially about the racing when I jog my memory by perusing the stories I’ve written over the years or simply glancing over an all-time list of Speedweeks winners.

I’m reminded that I saw this Illinois driver named Tony Izzo Jr. — at that time largely unknown to me — win Volusia’s Late Model opener in 1998. I’m reminded that I witnessed Tim McCreadie capture his first-ever Dirt Late Model feature (2004’s DIRTcar race opener at Volusia) and his first career WoO A-main (2005’s Volusia finale that sticks out to me forever because after the previous night’s program I had gone out in downtown Daytona Beach with friends and emerged from a bar to find my rental car had been sideswiped on the street and was undrivable, keeping me up till the wee hours while I waited for the car to be towed and a replacement car to be brought to me). 

I’m reminded that my Pennsylvania boys Rick Eckert and Chub Frank — the two Late Model drivers I knew the best by the late ‘90s — won their career-first Speedweeks races at Volusia in ’99. And I’m reminded of the dominant Speedweeks runs I saw authored by such drivers as Don O’Neal (six wins in ’02), Billy Moyer (notably three wins at Volusia in ’08 and three at East Bay in ’15), Shane Clanton (four out of five at Volusia in ’15), Josh Richards (Speedweeks-record seven wins in ’16), Jonathan Davenport (four wins in seven-race span in ’18), Brandon Sheppard (four-race WoO sweep at Volusia in ’19) and Jimmy Owens (three straight WoO wins at Volusia in ’20).

I have some completely unforgettable Speedweeks moments as well. The coldest I’ve ever been at a racetrack? That would be during Speedweeks, the 2012 WoO show at Screven Motor Speedway in Sylvania, Ga., that saw temperatures dip into the 20s (there was frost on the track at the end of the night!) and steady winds of 20-30 mph freeze you to your bones.

One of the most crushing defeats I’ve seen? That would be in 2020 when Dennis Erb Jr.’s apparent WoO victory was stripped from him because he didn’t report to post-race inspection before returning to his trailer.

One of the angriest drivers I’ve ever seen? That would Mark Whitener, who might have had steam coming out his ears as his buddy, Kyle Bronson, tried to prevent him from running through Volusia’s pits to find Brandon Overton after a 2020 WoO tangle.

One of the wildest wrecks I’ve ever seen? Definitely Volusia 2005 when West Virginia’s Tim Senic vaulted over the wall in turns three and four like a Dukes of Hazard stunt man, corkscrewed in the air over an access road and rolled down an embankment through trees, bushes and catch fence before coming to rest precariously close to the first turn of Volusia’s third-mile asphalt track where big-block modified teams were pitted.

Speedweeks has certainly brought me some of my longest nights at racetracks, like back in the early 2000s when Volusia drew over 100 Late Models and the programs stretched forever. 

I remember there were years when Volusia had its smaller paved track running simultaneously with the dirt oval and I watched features on both tracks well after 2 a.m. And there was one year I didn’t think I’d be able to cover Volusia’s Monday night DIRTcar opener because I was scanning photos at our condo in Ormond Beach to transmit back to Area Auto Racing News on deadline day but, when I was done, I called over at nearly 11:30 p.m. and learned that the program was still in heat races without even a rain delay.

So I headed over and arrived by midnight with the consolations still not on the track — even after getting a speeding ticket as I came down the Ormond Beach bridge on Route 40. (Sidelight on that: I was irked when I read in the Daytona Beach newspaper a couple days later that Tony Stewart had been stopped for speeding at almost the same spot but was let off with a warning after the cop recognized him. I noted that when I sent in my ticket payment.)

There are bizarre racetrack moments I remember from Speedweeks past as well. How can anyone who was at Volusia in 2013 forget the mid-week rift between buddies Darrell Lanigan and Mark Richards? 

Angered by scrapes with Richards’s son Josh, Lanigan drew everybody’s attention by loading up and leaving the pit area, then returning the next day after some cajoling by WoO director Tim Christman but bypassing his customary pit spot next to Richards and instead parking in the lower Gator Pond area. Talk about a development that set off the Dirt Late Model world.

Scott Bloomquist has, not surprisingly, provided me plenty of unusual Speedweeks memories as well. In 2019, for instance, he received penalties and fines, including a suspension from a midweek show at East Bay, from Lucas Oil Series officials after it was discovered that had left the track following a heat accident but had a crewman, K.C. Burdette, use his provisional to start the feature. 

Then there was the year a photo posted to social media showed Bloomquist driving shirtless in a convertible somewhere around Daytona, causing a sensation in the pit area that had everybody breaking down the picture like it was the Zapruder film. I also recall the stories I’d hear from Bloomquist about his exploits with his late pal Randy Sweet, including Bloomquist saying how they had dumped goldfish in the pond outside Tampa’s Hard Rock Casino (and Sweet telling me he’d tie me up and put me in his car’s trunk if I wrote about that incident).

Speedweeks goes way beyond just what happens with the actual competition and the Groundhog Day feel of going to the track every day. For me — for everybody, really — it’s about the whole experience, and that means all the stuff that never shows up in stories and video recaps of the races.

Like the late-night talks — racing and otherwise — us DirtonDirt staffers have at the houses we stay at during the East Bay and Volusia weeks. Like watching video legend Steve Gigeous leave said houses wearing his music headphones for his wee-hours walks after every race.

Like religiously checking the weather forecasts in hopes of a rainout to give everyone a break. Like going out on the town — Daytona’s Ocean Deck, Oyster Pub and other establishments that might or might not feature ladies dancing — with so many people from the Dirt Late Model clan who want to let loose on a rare off night.

Speedweeks is about making memories. I have 28 years of them, and I’m sure I’ll add a few during my 29th overall trip.

And maybe this time I should start up that diary so I’ll be able to better recall everything for posterity.