One of Frontstretch’s most popular and influential NASCAR writers has died.
Matt McLaughlin passed away last week (June 30) at age 66 after a long illness. A columnist at Frontstretch since 2007, McLaughlin had stepped away these past few years to deal with ongoing health issues. His last column was filed October 2021; since then, there were hopes he’d return but his body was never able to fully recover.
A Villanova University graduate, McLaughlin’s career drifted into NASCAR journalism in a most unexpected way. He was one of the first whose career blossomed exclusively on the internet, writing for websites like RaceComm, SpeedFX and later RacingOne, where he first got noticed in the late 1990s.
Matt’s work inspired a generation of writers, and he became known for his longform columns on NASCAR history like his 50 Years of NASCAR Racing, archived here. But McLaughlin’s bread and butter was his bold, unapologetic commentary, often aimed at powerful NASCAR officials and teams for their mistakes. Unshackled by insider relationships that, these days, restrict and control what people say about the sport, McLaughlin wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.
With every column, his goal was to put himself in the shoes of a race fan, and that was easy for McLaughlin; he was a lifetime fan of anything with a motor. Whether it was restoring a classic car or riding his beloved motorcycle, the man believed in going fast and his passion for anything racing never faded. McLaughlin could speak for the fans because he was the ultimate racing fan.
The growing popularity of his internet work led to a full-time journalism career through the early 2000s. He also became a published author of a stock car novel, Eights And Aces, and became close with many crew members and insider sources within the NASCAR garage.
However, an outspoken column entitled “Blood On Their Hands,” filed the day after Dale Earnhardt’s death, changed things forever. McLaughlin, already a strident critic of restrictor plate racing, was vocal about NASCAR’s safety shortcomings in the wake of Earnhardt’s tragic turn 4 crash in the Daytona 500.
McLaughlin would always claim to others his hard card credentials were revoked by NASCAR executives as a result of that piece. A few years later, RacingOne was purchased by a mysterious buyer (again, McLaughlin was forever suspicious it was the Frances themselves), and suddenly he was out of a job.
But McLaughlin was never bitter about his circumstances, always eager to return to writing in some way and make his voice heard. Connecting with Frontstretch in 2007 when it was still building its roster of writers, he remained a weekly, part-time contributor with us the remainder of his career.
McLaughlin’s avid fan base, along with his expert commentary, helped build Frontstretch’s reputation as one of the leading independent racing journalism sites in the country. For that, we are forever grateful. His work inspired many here who have gone on to have successful journalism careers.
We encourage you to read McLaughlin’s archive and familiarize yourself with some of his work. In honor of him, Frontstretch will be rerunning some of his best columns in the coming weeks.
McLaughlin leaves behind his four adoring sisters, whom he always spoke fondly of, a host of nieces and nephews along with so many he touched through his writing. In honor of his memory, the family asks you to consider making a memorial donation to the Camilla Hall Nursing Home.
The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 50+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.
You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.
Sad to hear. Always enjoyed reading his work.
oh my gosh……………i’m guttted. i knew he wasn’t well, but wow. i knew him over 25 years.
we always had a running joke, i’m a few months older than him and i always told him i’d try out the new trip around the sun and let him know how things looked.
rest peacefully my friend.
Always enjoyed his columns. Agreed with his opinions probably 99% of the time. My favorite story was about his trip to the Daytona 500 with his father. Where they ended up renting a dune buggy to get to the race.
Condolences to his sisters, family and friends.
i enjoyed that story as well. you knew daytona was around the corner when this column was posted. his dad in his skinny tie and the kid in the dune buggy. he had lots of stories. and his love of heather locklear and jerry garcia.
I will miss his wit and truth telling.
I read his work from 1996 until he stopped, even after I no longer followed modern NASCAR. Corresponded a few times through the years. Always hoped he’d come roaring back. Godspeed, Kid Lightning.
Another shocker on my return from being out of town. While I don’t recall specific articles, I do remember reading his work back in the day. Another instrumental player in the racing scene gone too soon. Condolences to all of his friends and family.
Matt was my favorite hands down. I use to look forward to his “Thinking Out Loud” columns when he did them and then his “Beside the Rising Tide” afterwards. I literally would look try to read it as soon as it was posted.
I had wondered what happened to him as his writing disappeared quietly.
To be frank I thought he had become so frustrated with what was going on that he just stopped.
I would have loved to hear what he thought of the changes and lawsuit.
He has been and will continued to be missed.
Oh wow, that’s such sad news. And he looks nothing like I thought he did.
He had such fiery opinions and never liked any changes. He will be greatly missed. I’m glad I was able to read his stories and comments here.
I’m sorry to hear this news. I loved reading his columns. I’m sure he and Kyle Busch are having some interesting conversations. My condolences to his family.
Matt was a friend of mine. When I lived in NJ (until 2004), we’d meet for drinks and dinner in Strathmere or Sea Isle City, NJ every summer when he visited family there. We lost touch along the way when I loved to North Carolina and really missed hearing from him. He was a good guy, sorry to hear of his passing
I too wondered where he disappeared too and also agree that that is not how I would have pictured him. He was my favorite writer as he just told it like it was – especially regarding Brian France and his running Nascar into the ditch . This saddens me as much if not more Steve Waid’s passing. Rest in peace Matt.
I’m very sorry to hear this. He was one of my favorite writers back when NASCAR was at its zenith.
I remember there were some health issues beginning towards the end of his Frontstretch tenure. I always liked his injection of classic rock allusions in his articles.
RIP Matt, you have been missed.
If you are running some of his stories please make sure to run his Pocono article about he and his friends yearly trip. I think it was called “1313 Turkey(something)” which was the address of the place they stayed every year. It’s a wonderful story about being a young adult when your friends were still single and before adult responsibilities separate everyone.
I remember 1313 turkey point. I remember so much of his work. I am proud to call him a friend. I missed him a lot over these past few years. Those of us that knew him and his way of writing can only imagine what he’d feel about the sport.
As cynical as he could be, thanks to his Irish roots, and strong catholic beliefs, I know he was greeted at the pearly gates by an interesting group of characters.
He ran that article every year when he went on vacation during the summer stretch/slump.
I don’t have to imagine too hard to know what he’d think about the current state of NASCAR. Not much. LOL
I just thought of him on July 4th when I wished there was a Daytona Cup race on at 11AM. One his constant gripes about changes made along the way.
i have thought of him often over the past few years when he stopped writing. just prayed he was doing well and healthy.
So sad to hear of Matt’s passing Tom. I am a longtime reader of his commentary from when he wrote for SpeedFX, and his eventual move to Frontstretch is the reason I discovered your website. He actually sent me a personal response to my comments on one of his columns, and it was hilarious! I still have a hard copy of it somewhere. And I always looked forward to his weekly rants.
No doubt Matt has already looked in on Tim Richmond up in Heaven. May he rest in peace.
Have missed his writing and wondered where he’d gone. Such a wonderfully approachable and enjoyable style. Read his work weekly and followed him through several websites over the years. A true fan who loved the sport.
A truly unique voice in the sport. I looked forward to and respected his thoughts on the issues of the week. A North Star. Godspeed, Matt.
He was one of a kind, not like all the rest of Na$car’s “ water boys”.
Wow, somehow I missed this. That sucks.
I’m writing a book ranking the 1,000 greatest drivers in motorsports history right now, and when I was a teenager in the ’90s, I read Matt more than any other racing writer. I had followed him from nearly the very beginning of his career at speedworld.net before it became SpeedFX before it became RacingOne. I also enjoyed his Racecomm work. He certainly taught me a great deal about NASCAR history. I always found it surprising that Racecomm’s editor Mike Calinoff managed to parlay that into becoming Matt Kenseth’s sponsor. Haven’t heard what happened to Speedworld/SpeedFX’s webmaster Derek in the last couple decades, but I’d like to.
I was a heavy poster on the speedworld.net message board and continued there when it became SpeedFX and RacingOne. As a message board poster, Matt was perhaps best known for creating the Out on a Limb (OOAL) game on the 1998 Coca-Cola 600 weekend (as I recall, but that was before I was posting there), where each player selected the polesitter and top three finishers and received a negative score based on how many combined positions you were off. I regularly played it, but I thought it was really boring to answer the same questions every week. Back then, I posted as Tony20, but I changed my name to Sean, as I started to grow tired of Stewart’s antics over the 2000 season. Derek nearly banned me back then for making fun of Darrell Waltrip when he bought out Carl Long’s entry to start his last Coca-Cola 600, but on that same weekend, exactly two years after Matt started OOAL, I started my own fantasy game where I asked six questions a week. The next week, I called it Pace Car Challenge. I had different questions every week with random point totals that did not exactly correlate to the difficulty of the questions. I wanted to ask questions about all kinds of different racing series, not only just NASCAR, and I introduced a season-long points standing. PCC was originally intended as a bit of a parody of OOAL and its negative points scores, only in MY game I awarded the highest weekly scores to the players who had a cumulative score the FURTHEST from zero. I only ran PCC for about four months in the summer of 2000 until I quit to focus on school. Nonetheless, it was noticed, and I was SO excited when Matt (who went by MATT) shouted me out in his OOAL recap post at Dover the next week. I guess I had picked Dale Earnhardt to win maybe, but after my name he said something like “Looks like the pace car led more laps than Dale Earnhardt today”, and I got such a rush. In PCC and I asked some wacky stuff. I asked what the theme song for the Bristol night race would be. I asked which driver would have the largest difference between their car number and the sum of their starting and finishing positions. I awarded bonus points to anyone who could “spell the #25’s driver correctly” because I was getting annoyed seeing Nadeau repeatedly butchered, and some people got it wrong! I awarded -1,000,000 points and basically an automatic win to anyone who could correctly pick BOTH the highest No Bull 5 finisher AND their finishing position, and Monster Mile Man got it. Those were some fun times.
Matt and I didn’t talk a lot, but I still consistently read him (except for about a year and a half from 2003 to mid-2004 when I stopped watching racing entirely before I came back late that season). When RacingOne fired him in 2004, I recall he had a “countdown thread” where he would just post the number of days remaining in the year without comment, and nobody was sure why, but people eventually figured out that RacingOne fired him. It’s obvious that at some point, NASCAR or some sister company did buy out the site, because the RacingOne message board briefly got ported to the MRN site (long after I left) and then eventually shut down. I don’t think he was fired specifically for “Blood On Their Hands” (which I noticed when I was going through the Internet Archive apparently got renamed “At What Price Entertainment?”). I think it might have been more about his criticism of the Chase.
In the wake of Matt’s firing, a splinter group of RacingOne forum members launched a rival site called RacingStalkers, and Matt wrote there briefly post-RacingOne, pre-Frontstretch. I posted there too from about 2005-2011 before I largely pivoted to posting in the racing-reference comments sections. Eventually, RacingStalkers came closer to matching the spirit of the old RacingOne boards than the people still posting on RacingOne. Oddly, both the OOAL and PCC games got ported to RacingStalkers, even though Matt and I had long ago stopped running them, and the games continued long after both of us were gone. The MRN board shut down in maybe the early to mid-2010s and I was definitely gone by the time it switched from RacingOne to MRN. The RacingStalkers board was still active until it shut down maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Amazingly, both OOAL and PCC managed to outlast the board from whence it came.
I really admired Matt’s writing, but I kind of miss those communities even more as message boards were better than the impersonal, transactional algorithmic feeds that replaced them. I increasingly diverged with Matt on a lot of things in later years (I don’t think road course racing is bad like he did, I don’t think 1992 was NASCAR’s peak, and I thought he belittled other series too much), but I can’t deny his influence as an online writer, especially as one of the few online writers who was entirely unafraid to say what he thought, even if it sometimes cost him insider connections. It’s sad how this pre-social media blog-era Internet is seemingly being erased from history. If you weren’t there, it’s like it never happened. Even Jayski seems to be largely forgotten now. As I’m now as old as Matt was in his prime, I’m getting similarly stuck in my ways with nostalgia for the old Internet. I guess the difference is I’m actually enjoying NASCAR in this decade way more than any decade since the ’90s. I’m not sure whether Matt would be.
Kenseth’s spotter*. Sorry, I didn’t reread that before I posted.