Truth be told, it's my best friend Carmine who steered me in this direction. I've been blogging for years, on and off, as inspiration (and a lack of censorship) allowed. I'd just never tailored a blog to one particular subject. Then Carmine asked why, with my love of auto racing, I hadn't started a NASCAR-related blog by now. He mentioned it more as the kind of thing that would start as a labor of love, and maybe progress to something with a following, an audience, maybe even actual media relevance. Now there's a dream I could buy into.
The name is something I'm sure readers will eventually try to read into, much as people guess that the "3" on my license plate is a Dale Earnhardt homage (which it isn't). It's actually an old name. Back in the late 1990s, I was part of a relatively active and closely-knit community of people playing "NASCAR Racing" for Macintosh. While the Windows gaming world got all the iterations of NASCAR games from Sierra and later EA Sports, the Mac community got a port of the original circa-1994 "NASCAR Racing," and that was it. The result was an active fan community that released converted tracks, designed current car sets to replicate the modern-era NASCAR teams, and even managed Mac-only league racing. I was part of that scene, designing cars and helping to share tracks people had converted. One of my antecedents had started a site called The Tri-Oval, and others shared similar names related to the track metaphor, so I called mine Turn Three. When it came to naming this blog, a quick search on Google turned up nothing for a motorsports blog named Turn Three, and so I borrowed from my own past. Back then, I actually did kind of pen some timely commentaries on NASCAR from my own rather naïve perspective, so you could say I was blogging on the subject of NASCAR way back then.
Yes, I've used the acronym NASCAR a lot. It's a trend that will continue through this blog. As far as motorsports are concerned, NASCAR is my primary interest. Ever since my dad talked me into buying that NASCAR plastic model in 1995, ever since we turned on the TV as I glued it together and watched a team trying to correct a pit-road blunder (I would later learn it was the 1995 Daytona 500), NASCAR has been the one sport that I actually care about. I follow the NASCAR news and the rumor mills and the insider chatter, and so most of my entries will be relative to the world of NASCAR. But, as a car lover, I can't exclude other forms of motorsports from my blog. If something amazing happens in the world of WRC or Formula 1 that deserves commentary, I'll write about it. Besides, we can learn so much from what happens outside of our own sphere of relevance. For instance, the Ferrari F1 debacle of a few weeks' ago (a team-orders gaffe that cast a temporary black eye on Ferrari) should make us talk about the notion of team orders in team-driven motorsports. And with my friends participating in grassroots motorsports of all sorts, I'd be remiss if their adventures didn't make their way to my blog, too.
So, who am I? In short, I'm a fan and nothing more. But, as those of you who don't already know me will surely find out, "in short" is not my style. I grew up in New Hampshire, and outside of four years spent in upstate New York getting an education, I've lived here all my life. I started following NASCAR in 1995, when building a plastic model of Geoff Bodine's #15 Ford led me to watch a few races on TV. I'd never been a fan of any sport, so for the first time, my father and I had a sport we could enjoy together. That summer marked my first trip to the race track, a rain-shortened afternoon at New Hampshire International Speedway, but despite the rain and the lightning, I was hooked. And as with most subjects that intrigue me, I sought an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport. It wasn't enough to know who won the Daytona 500 in 1995. I wanted to know who won it for ten years prior. And I wanted to know everything about the minor leagues of auto racing, the divisions where tomorrow's stars cut their teeth and where today's hopefuls made their careers while hoping for that big break. Over the years, NASCAR has remained my true love in motorsports, but as my best friends have introduced me to new forms of motorsports, I've come to appreciate each form for the special challenges they offer.
At times, I'll call myself an "outsider." I read a fair number of message forums, some of which are frequented by men and women who are clearly "in the know." They're track announcers, crew members, media liaisons, and so forth, people who know what's happening because they make it happen. I'm just a fan. So when the conversation calls for it, I'll present myself as an outsider, to make it clearer that all I can offer is opinion or observation. I'm content with that, though. There are plenty of people to report the news; I'd rather analyze it.
But enough said on the who and the why. It's time for commentary. As a real motoring journalist, Jeremy Clarkson, has said ad nauseam, "How hard can it be?"
