For Pressley, good and rocky memories at Hickory

Robert Pressley says he has a bunch of good memories of Hickory Motor Speedway, including “25 or 30” victories.

Unfortunately, his first racing memory wasn’t among the good ones.

Pressley was 22 when he decided to go racing, and he didn’t start in a lower division. He tried Late Model right out of the box.

“I decided I was going to be a race-car driver; I was going to be like my dad,” Pressley said of the late Bob Pressley. “In fact, he was in the race with me.”

They qualified, then went to the drivers’ meeting, and someone started calling out the lineup, car number by car number. Pressley kept waiting for No. 59, and he had to wait until 21^st, the last spot in the field.

“I said to my dad, ‘They’re going to start me in the back of the field,’ ” Pressley said. “He said, ‘That’s where you qualified.’ ”

It was an eye-opening experience. Pressley was asked how he finished.

“Probably 21^st,” he said. “I spent more time getting out of the way than I did racing. You have to realize that when you have a name like Pressley, you need to race. And I’d never been in a race car before, even with my dad.”

From that rocky start, he realized how much he needed to learn and improve. And he did both.

Pressley says he doesn’t know if he was as good as his dad, but an impartial observer would say that Robert was pretty good, too. He ran 205 Winston Cup – now Sprint Cup – races, with five top-five finishes, but most of his success was in what was then called the Busch Series. He posted 10 wins, six poles, 38 top fives and 76 top 10s in 244 Busch races.

He also ran 69 truck races from 2002 to 2005, with two wins (both in ’02), 11 top fives and 27 top 10s.

“I quit racing in 2005. I never retired; I just walked away,” he said.

He says he enjoyed watching drivers like Bob Pressley, Morgan Shepherd, Jack Ingram, John Settlemyre and others race at Hickory. Of course, he had his favorites.

“Besides my dad, who was my hero, there was Butch Lindley, and there was always Harry Gant,” he said. “He was almost a Southern tradition.”

He says he may have enjoyed watching them more than winning races.

“I won 25 or 30 races there, and they were all memorable,” he said. “My proudest moment, though, was when (son) Coleman won the (Bobby) Isaac race at age 18. That was my fondest memory.”

That made the Pressleys one of the few families to have three generations of winners at Hickory.

Pressley visited Hickory for the Dwight Huffman Memorial event a couple of weeks ago. He joined several former greats who signed autographs, then joined fans in the stands.

He says his career as a racer helped him this year during his first season as promoter of Kingsport (Tenn.) Speedway. Racers realized that Pressley had been there, done that pretty well.

“I’m still young (52), and I’ve come full circle,” he said. “It’s a way to give back to the local racers.”

He still lives in Asheville, and he says he commuted “about an hour, four or five times a week” during the season and is commuting “two or three” times a week in the offseason. He was working in Kingsport on Tuesday.

Hickory has always been there for Pressley. In 1987, he was running for the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard title, and he needed two extra races for points. So he ran two races at Hickory in a car owned by the late Dwight Huffman, winning both of them … and the seaboard championship.

He also won the seaboard title the next season.

Pressley says he learned from his own start, and he used it when his son Coleman started at age 16. He rented Hickory Motor Speedway so his son could get seat time.

“For four or five days, I rented the track to get him ready for races,” Pressley said. “He must have run a couple of thousand laps by himself. We’d go home and look at what he’d done.

“Every time, he’d get a little better. He got the line down, and he got comfortable on the track. Finally, I said, ‘The only way he’d get better is to run in traffic.’ ”

He says his dad didn’t push him or his brothers to race, and he didn’t push Coleman. Racing was just something the family did.

“Dad said he preferred we’d do something else,” Pressley said. “This was nothing he wanted us to do. He wanted us to go to school; that was something he cared about.

“If you think times are bad now, think what it was in the ’60s, trying to raise five kids and going racing at local tracks to make a living. He’d go three or four days a week to the track, and he didn’t leave us behind.”

Sounds like a family tradition.