Big Brown Truck

9/4/03

Well, here’s your chance. You can own a piece of racing history and, at the same time, have some fun. The Big Brown Truck is for sale. For those of you who don’t know what the Big Brown Truck is, it is the 1973 motorhome that I’ve had for over 10 years now. It has always been my ‘racechaser’. Even when my wife and I were camping a few weeks a summer with the kids in it, the camper still made 3 or 4 race appearances a season. When we bought it our children were 7 and 5, now they are 17 and 15. They’ve grown up in it, they still sleep in it at times when they have friends over in the summer. It’s like an institution, it’s been around our house so long that it’s part of the family. For the first 7 years we owned it, it was just known as ‘the motorhome’. We took it camping with the family, we took it to races, and we took it to Biker parties, we took it about everywhere, then came that fateful 4^th of July weekend when everything changed.

Dale Jarrett debuted a new sponsor on his car for the season and it was ugly! Brown and ugly! A couple of my racin’ buddies had been joking since the beginning of the season that we ought to paint the motorhome to look like the UPS truck that they showed in their TV ads. It was brown and had great big orange and yellow flames on the front of it. We laughed about that so many times that I eventually began to wonder if they might be serious.

As always, I invited a bunch of guys out to camp for the 4^th of July weekend to barbecue and watch the Daytona race on TV. A couple days before the weekend I got the call. A slurry voice on the other end of the line said "Fish, we’re coming out Saturday and we’re bringing paint!" At that point I figured, what the heck, it’ll be different. On Saturday morning they showed up with paint, brushes, rollers and beer. The combination was perfect. We painted the whole thing brown, put yellow flames all over the front, painted logos and sayings all over it and put on as many or more decals than Jarrett has on his Cup car. We also drank all the beer.

Since that day it has been the Big Brown Truck. It still gets taken everywhere we go to camp out but it gets some real strange looks now when we’re driving down the highway anywhere that isn’t within a mile or so from a speedway. When we are at or near a speedway, though, the Big Brown Truck is always the life of the party. There have been literally thousands of photos taken of it and dozens of people inside it to take a look. It will be like losing a friend to sell it but I have got my eye on a great little camper trailer that I can pull with my pickup truck. Right now it just looks like a 24-foot camper but, if I can sell the Big Brown Truck, I will buy it and then decide what it should look like. I’ve still got the same friends and they still come to camp with beer so, who knows? I’ve got a million pictures and as many memories. It’s been to a bunch of different racetracks as well as campgrounds, fairgrounds and Wal-Mart parking lots. It’s been a pace car for a School Bus race and it’s run hot laps with BNS cars at Canaan NH It has been up and down "Animal Hill" and "Frontierland" at NHIS and has even been the anchor vehicle at a high school football tailgate party. It is rich in history and memories.

So, there it is. Think about it. You could be the proud owner the next time someone passes it on the highway and gives a thumbs up or leans out the window with a video camera, or even when someone makes a crude sign and holds it up that says "Jarrett sucks!" (You have to take the good with the bad) All you need to do is contact me and you can be the one saying "We want to race the truck" because "People love the truck"

As always, send Questions, Comments, Hate Mail, and Indecent Proposals to, Fish c/o Busch North Scene or e-mail them to fishy@gwi.net