I remember as a kid watching ASA stock car races on TNN and thinking that they were really cool. The drivers were young for the most part, the cars were not quite up to the snuff you’d see at a full pull NASCAR race, and there was always chatter about drivers being called up to the big leagues of racing in what was then the Winston Cup series.
This video looks back at the relatively short lifespan of the ASA stock car racing series and talks about the importance of how t worked, how it evolved, and who came out of it. Drivers like Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace, Dick Trickle, and more all had success in ASA before coming to the top tiers of the sport and running hard. In fact, many of the “call ups” from the ASA would jump straight into full blown NASCAR stock cars and haul ass right out of the gate. That’s how well the series prepared them.
The end of the series sucks and the decline was not helped by an event in racing history we can all remember, which is when the parent network of TNN placed it under the purview of MTV management and thus the repaid decline of that channel took place, breaking racing hearts around America.
This video has parts the pieces of all this in there and every second is fantastic. Give it a watch.
