To sustain one’s membership in DORPS (Doddering Old Racing Persons Society), it is mandatory to periodically lament the passing of racing’s Good Old Days, when “racing was fun.” As tired as you may get of hearing racing geezers mourn those bygone days, there is considerable truth in such reminiscences.
On a sunny spring day in the mid 1950s, I drove up an alley in northeast Minneapolis to a double garage behind the modest bungalow of Jerry Kaufman. Jerry was a perennial winner and champion in area racing events and among the best at setting up his cars.  Superior handling was a big part of the edge he enjoyed. On that day, he had his “new” car — a 1941 Cadillac two-door fastback, with the “boat-anchor” flathead V-8 — in the yard alongside the garage. A heavy six-foot chain ran from the lower-right A-frame to a stout tree. As I watched, he ran the car about three feet closer to the tree, put it in reverse, gunned the engine and backed up rapidly.  The chain tightened and jerked heavily on the A-frame. He got out of the car, eyeballed the A-frame, then repeated the process.  After another look, he said, “That’s about right.” 
“May I ask what you’re doing?,” I inquired.  He replied, “Sure — adjusting the caster.”  In those early days of local stock-car racing, it’s unlikely many of the drivers building cars knew how important caster was, or what it did. Kaufman knew, but lacking an alignment rack, he found a neat and cheap, if imprecise, way to adjust it. Such do-it-yourself ingenuity was one of the things that made early racing challenging and fun.
During most of those years, when I announced races at Raceway Park south of Minneapolis, the drivers and their crews and some fans would gather after the races in nearby Savage at a little beer joint fondly known as “the divorce court” to drink beer, tell lies, dance the Twist and laugh a lot. We’d all buy drinks for the guy who got stuffed into the wall and totaled his car. There were few serious arguments.  It was a time when they all built their own cars in backyard garages and shared speed secrets, such as they were. 
A decade later, when the speed equipment industry took off, things began to change.   You would no longer buy some wide Buick rims in a salvage yard and weld Ford centers in them.  You now bought ready-made wide wheels, each of which cost more than a whole set of homemade wheels. You didn’t reinforce the chassis and weld a roll cage in a Ford coupe anymore — you bought a chassis from a speed shop for a few thousand dollars and had your engine built by a speed shop. And when those cars got walled, their crews were on the track ready to commit mayhem upon the stuffer. 
In the ’80s, the growth of the speed equipment industry exploded, ushering in the Buy-A-Race-Car era. A $30,000 Banjo Matthews short-track Camaro had this sign on it: “Banjo’s — Where speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?”
And look where we are today. Stand at the pit gate at a typical short track and see the line of 40-foot trailers behind crew-cab dually pickups. Crews unload store-bought race cars (including $25,000 “economy”modifieds) from the trailers, which also contain workshops, lighting, tires and speed-shop engines. It is the age of escalatio, of keeping up with the Bloomquists, Moyers and Eckerts, even if you don’t race against them. Everything drivers use to work on the car is bought from a speed equipment catalog. If you want to know who’s getting rich in auto racing today. It isn’t promoters, and it never has been the racers.
Even in those good old days of do-it-yourself racing, we would see drivers who had mortgaged their homes to support their racing and whose kids ran around in worn-out clothing. How does anybody keep up with the racing Joneses today? How many credit cards can you max out before they come to get you?
This is progress, we are told. Will today’s racing become The Good Old Days? God forbid.