When Mike Hayes sets up Jimmy Owens’s souvenir trailer at Batesville Motor Speedway in Locust Grove, Ark., for this weekend’s 23rd annual Comp Cams Topless 100, memories of his first year handling Owens’s T-shirt sales in 2007 will come flooding back to him.

Stifling, sweaty memories.

“The way we were doing it back then was brutal,” said the 41-year-old Hayes, who joined with his wife, Amy, to take over Owens’s merchandising efforts the same season the Dirt Late Model superstar from MORE

A couple days before the start of last weekend’s Firecracker 100 presented by GottaRace.com weekend at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, Pa., World of Outlaws Late Model Series traveler Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa. — a quick-witted guy who’s always busting the chops of his buddies — stood in the pit area at Weedsport (N.Y.) Speedway and suggested that he wanted to do something special for his home-state track’s blockbuster event.

Briggs’s idea had nothing to do with his race car or his MORE

When Devin Friese rolled his Dirt Late Model out of his big yellow trailer in the Hagerstown (Md.) Speedway pit area last Saturday night, heads turned and, in some cases, hearts began to flutter. His MasterSbilt machine, after all, was no ordinary vehicle. | Column

On an evening in which the racing community banded together to salute cancer-stricken Dirt Late Model Hall of Famer Rodney Franklin of White Post, Va., Friese found a special way to show his feelings for a driver he considered a friend MORE