[WestCoastGal]

ISC Discontinues Pursuit of Speedway in Staten Island: International Speedway Corporation ("ISC") today announced its decision to discontinue pursuit of a speedway development on Staten Island. The Company will explore alternative strategies for the 676-acre parcel of land it currently owns in the borough. ISC had been evaluating the feasibility of developing a motorsports entertainment facility on Staten Island since late 2004.

[WestCoastGal]

After six decades in the lifespan of stock car racing from its launch in the pre-NASCAR bootlegging era, Earnhardt's death marked the beginning of the inevitable passing of the last great era of self-taught drivers who were harder than chrome-moly steel, flintily honest if a reporter sparked them, never predictable and brilliant behind the wheel. With the retirements more recently of Rusty Wallace and Terry Labonte, the old school drivers are now almost gone, replaced by the inevitable new generation, a different breed altogether.
The new guys have taken over a sport built in earlier times on the backs of those impelled by the toughest kind of ambition: fear turned inside out. It was the kind of case-hardened drive that gets a man killed despite a world of riches from Sunday money.
There was no way I could have realized five years down the road how many times I would wonder, what if Dale had been here -- what then?
What would he have to say about his son Junior, about the Dale Earnhardt Inc. team that was his racing future and now his epitaph, about NASCAR, about some of the drivers who can't get out of their trailers without a PR person? Or what about that kid Carl Edwards, yet another Missouri raider, this one with the smile of Petty and Earnhardt's own brand of impatience?

Very long amd VERY good article on Big E and other Nascar history.