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Oh my goodness! This footage is just SO DOGGONE SWEET. Best coverage I’ve ever seen from race in 68’, i had NO IDEA WHO WAS GOING TO WIN and when I saw who DID…OH YES! Thank you thank you THANK YOU
Ah! Lots to tell about this race, but being the first here, I won't be a spoiler. This was a unique TV coverage, as Chris Economaki carried the announcing load for this race. While Chris was memorable with doing the race coverage, recalling that Fred Lorenzen also doing TV back then was a blank in my memory. It is nice seeing this in color, as back in 1968 as a kid, the family still had a black & white TV set.
Charging Charlie Glotzbach, what a talent!! He won 4 grand national events this one included, and was runner up to Lee Roy Yorbrough in the 1969 Daytona 500 after Lee Roy passed him on the last lap. He also owned a machine shop in his hometown but late in the 1969 season an employee who Glotzbach fired earlier in the year shot Charlie in the shoulder with a slug, despite this unfortunate setback... He would be able to race the Daytona 500 again in 1970, finished 4th, WITH the slug STILL in his shoulder!! A very talented driver indeed as well as a very kind individual... RIP charging Charlie, 1938 - 2021
@@MrChristopherHaas I agree 100 percent, especially with Hamiltons case. He went from winning the Daytona 500 in 1970 to out of the sport in just 3 - 4 years a absolute shame. And both still had pretty good equipment too.
@@CudaRebelsAutoModeling426 agreed. Chargin ‘ Charlie had a machine shop that would have made it possible for him to make his own parts i recon. Ive always wondered if he was doing just that for himself and others.
I feel fortunate: As a kid, I became a fan in 1977 and gravitated to Cale Yarborough because it seemed as if EVERYONE was a Petty fan at the time! Good timing as Cale won back-to-back championships in 77-78. That led me to becoming a Dale Jarrett fan as he was Cale's protege when he decided to own his own team and scale back around 1987. It was a long and winding road, but DJ eventually won a championship in 1999. 🙂
Unless you lived in the South, the TV coverage of NASCAR was infrequent and spotty; and none of it was 'live.' I lived in California as a youth back then, where ABC-TV Wide World of Sports [WWoS] carried the broadcast load of the superspeedway races, albeit televised highlights the following Saturday after the race. The World 600 [Charlotte] was never telecasted in the 1960s into the '70s. The race date was near that of the Indy 500, back when Indy was raced on May 31st Memorial Day; along with the F1 Monaco Grand Prix; so the WWoS production crews were kept busy with race coverage at the end of the month of May. The other superspeedway race not televised by WWoS in the 1960s into the '70s was the Fall race at Atlanta. I checked the YT homepage of this channel, which confirmed that only the Spring race at Atlanta was televised in that era. The thing was, at least in California at the time, was that even with the televised delay of the race by six days, the sports news media rarely reported the race results from the previous Sunday, so many times there was the suspense factor with the WWoS telecasts. Only those that subscribed to AutoWeek, albeit postal delivered by Friday/Saturday, would be the only spoiler for the Saturday telecast.
On a separate topic going back to the golden era of NASCAR: What made it special for me was the suspense factor if a particular car was going to finish the race, as mechanical failures back then were very high. There's a web site of racing reference that does well with reporting the results of the races back then, including the details of the cars that did not finish [DNF]. The types of breakdowns back then were staggering. Here is a list of maladies that plagued those stockers back in the 1960s: Battery Ignition Suspension Steering Wheel bearing Chassis Clutch Oil Pump Water Pump Radiator Fuel Pump Handling Differential Axle Tappets Driveshaft Crankshaft Camshaft Exhaust Manifold Broken Connecting Rod Broken Push Rod Broken Rocker Arm Overheating Transmission Oil Leak Sway Bar Gasket Electricals The modern NASCAR racers are marvels of reliability; which has removed a suspense factor on the outcome of the race. Over the past 20 ~ 30 years if a car had a sizable lead late in the race, then it was pretty much a lock on victory. Not so for those race cars going back 50 ~ 60 years ago, as the precariously fragile stockers of that era, with a lap lead in hand, could break down with two laps to go for the checkered flag.
