Setting NASCAR Back, One Daughter at a Time

It has been a while since my last post, but I'm on a little vacation right now, so it's time to dust off the keyboard.

One of my earliest posts details the demise of a Matchbox car that my then one-year-old daughter stuck into the opening of my subwoofer.  It appears that the report of this death was "greatly exaggerated."

It's Alive!

I could not stand the thought of this thing rattling around while I had the volume cranked during the dramatic finale of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, so I spent a good hour of contorting, prying, and swearing until the car came out.

Fast forward about a year and a half later to the present day.  My, now very verbal, daughter likes to know the names of everything.  When she held aloft this toy, which she once tried to cast out of our family, she smiled and inquired, "What's this called?"  I told her that this is a car that was driven by Bobby Labonte.

"Bobby the Bunny?"

"No, Bobby Labonte?"

"No, Bobby the Bunny."

"OK."

So I'm sorry, Mr. Labonte, some fights are not worth having.  I do feel bad about this, but it turns out that my daughter's mis-pronounciation was the least of my failings.  As I looked more closely at this car, it occurred to me that this was not a model of a modern car.  A little research in the Interwebs revealed that this Hotwheel was actually meant to represent the 1974 Dodge Charger driven by Richard Petty.  Yes, I confused Bobby Labonte and Richard Petty ... and then passed along that misconception to my daughter.

What makes me feel better, however, was this YouTube video that I found today.

Somebody (an adult) posted this high definition video of the exact Hotwheel car in question.  I love the Internet!

To make things up to the NASCAR gods, I did have another conversation with my daughter today.

"Sweetie, can you get my car keys for me?  They are the ones with the #2 on them."

"Why number two, Daddy?"

"The number two represents a great man, Rusty Wallace.  One day, when you have to do a school project about a person in history, we can make a diorama of Rusty Wallace together."

Perhaps we can recreate one Rusty's reverse victory laps in honor of Alan Kulwicki.  The 1993 April Bristol race was a particularly powerful tear jerker.