This is an extremely brief soapbox I’m gonna hop on top of for a moment.
Throwbacks for this year’s retro weekend at Darlington Raceway have begun to trickle in, with the latest being Connor Zilisch and JR Motorsports’ excellent tribute to Buddy Baker — complete with the canted hood logo, the (presumably) chrome door numbers and a yellow banner at the northeastern corner of the hood.
I always wonder why we don’t get more throwbacks to NASCAR movies.
Sure, there’s only so many you can do. We had Corey LaJoie and Justin Haley double up on Stroker Ace throwbacks a while back (as horribly as that movie has aged), we’ve had pretty much every car from Days of Thunder done at least once or twice save for Aldo Benedetti’s and there’s been a few Talladega Nights homages scattered about too.
Some of them haven’t even cropped up on throwback weekend itself, and that goes for several schemes that have yet to show up for that specific race. As much as I love Cole Trickle’s City Chevrolet scheme, and even though I’ll never get tired of seeing that one hit the track, there’s a bunch of others that haven’t seen the light of a (retro) day.
Specific to Days of Thunder, Russ Wheeler’s Hardee’s scheme has been done at least twice, if not more. Cole Trickle’s Mello Yello has had its run, if you count Kyle Larson‘s Kyle Petty tribute in that (it’s similar enough), with two schemes of its own. Plus, Days of Thunder is what got Mello Yello into NASCAR to begin with, so you might as well lump that throwback with the one Cody Ware ran.
Jeremy Clements tipped his cap to Rowdy Burns’ Exxon scheme with an all-black, red-accented throwback as well. We did have James Davison run a white-and-pink homage to the SuperFlo car that Cole wins the Daytona 500 in, but he ran that at Road America in 2018.
Better yet, let’s have an entire team do them. Hendrick, Gibbs or another four-car stable should take on the four main schemes (excepting the Exxon car) and do a team-wide theme.
Moving on. Talladega Nights has five iconic schemes of its own. Why, then, do we just keep getting the same Wonder Bread scheme and nothing else?
There’s Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. There’s Perrier. There’s the ME Cougar, for god’s sake (I know Kurt Busch ran a tribute to that at Talladega Superspeedway in 2012, but that wasn’t for a throwback weekend).
Those three schemes are all arguably better than the Wonder Bread car and it’s a crime we haven’t gotten those as throwbacks yet.
Hell, throw in some Cars throwbacks while you’re at it. I want to see a scheme lean into the Chick Hicks side of things and put labels all over the cars. It would’ve been sick to see JTG Daugherty Racing commit to the bit and do that with all the associate backers they had through Kroger.
Alright, off my soapbox. As you were (but use some NASCAR movie schemes as throwback ideas, please).
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.