HICKORY, N.C. -- Ned Jarrett sat on the concrete grandstand of Hickory Motor Speedway on Friday afternoon, peering through the rusty catch-fence that separated us from the lone locally based late-model racer running test laps around the .363-mile oval.

We had just finished taping our interview for Saturday morning's "NASCAR Now" and I had assumed that Gentleman Ned, dressed in a blue golf shirt that was adorned with a sparkling new NASCAR Hall of Fame lapel pin, would bolt for home or perhaps the golf course.

Instead, he said, "Let's have a seat here and talk for a little while."

He told me about the first race he ran on his hometown track. "The first race I ran here was the first race they ever ran here, in 1952."

He told me about his emotional first and only Grand National (now Cup series) win on his home track, coming on May 16, 1964. "It was as big of a win as I had in my career. There were about 10,000 people here that day and I like to think they were rooting for me. I was 0-for-6 before that and I had to beat David Pearson and Richard Petty to get it."

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Ryan McGee/ESPN Ned Jarrett signed over two of his family's plots at Catawba Memorial Park so good friend Bobby Isaac could have a final resting place. The sprawling cemetery overlooks Hickory Motor Speedway.

And he told me about his career as the manager of the facility, beginning in 1967, the year after he retired from driving. "The first year that I was manager was the last year this track was dirt. The plans were already in place to pave it. The morning after that last dirt race in '67 we had the pavers out here working."

By the mid-1970s Jarrett was part-owner of the bullring when Hickory's other living legend came back home to race full time. Bobby Isaac had fallen in love with racing the first time he came to Hickory Motor Speedway. It was to watch that same inaugural '52 race. He watched the local heroes hammer through the dirt, including Ned.

As we sat there in the same stands where Isaac had watched Jarrett that day, Ned explained that he and Isaac had known each other since they were kids. Jarrett's father had conducted some business with Isaac's family, who owned a saw mill. As young men, Jarrett and Isaac became friendly racing rivals. Though Ned got the early jump on a driving career, Isaac soon joined him in NASCAR and made his Grand National debut in 1961. The pair ran in 58 races together at stock car racing's highest level. It was during the peak of Jarrett's career -- he won the '61 and '65 championships. In 1970, four years after Ned's retirement, Isaac won a title of his own.

"There was a real friendship there," Jarrett told me. "It's amazing to think about him watching me race, us racing together, then me covering some of his career as a broadcaster, and then him coming back here to Hickory to race when I was working at the track."

In '73 Isaac was involved in one of the most mysterious moments in NASCAR history. During a race at Talladega he suddenly radioed in to car owner (and Jarrett's fellow '11 Hall of Fame inductee) Bud Moore and announced he was pitting. He climbed from the car and essentially retired from Cup series racing on the spot. He explained to Charlotte Observer writer Tom Higgins that a voice had told him to get out of the car.

Isaac was done with NASCAR's top series (he did make a handful of starts, but nothing substantial or regular), and instead returned to the short tracks, particularly Hickory. During a sweltering night in '77, he said he wasn't feeling well. He was taken from the Hickory Motor Speedway pits to the local hospital, where he died of a heart attack.

"Bobby had only been married a couple of weeks at that point," Jarrett recalled, looking out onto the pit road where Isaac was last seen by the public. "His wife came to me and explained that he didn't have anywhere to be buried."

So, Gentleman Ned stepped in to help his old friend, signing over two of the Jarrett family's burial plots in Catawba Memorial Park. The beautiful, sprawling hillside cemetery overlooks Hickory Motor Speedway, so close that the track operators -- including Jarrett -- have always had to work with local funeral homes to schedule "funeral delays."

"It was always quite a challenge," Ned said with a laugh. "When a funeral procession arrived, we would red-flag any race that was going on to allow the service to be conducted without being disturbed by the noise from the racetrack. Usually 30 to 45 minutes. At first fans didn't understand what was going on, but eventually it became part of the charm of the Hickory Motor Speedway."

In mid-August 1977, Bobby Isaac was laid to rest on that hillside, in a spot that provides a very nice view of the speedway grandstands, as well as Turns 3 and 4. The cemetery administrators said that at least once a week a NASCAR fan stops by the office to ask where they can find Isaac's final resting place, particularly on Hickory race days. I myself went looking for it Friday afternoon and ended up sitting on a stone bench and listening to the sounds of that late-model racer down below echoing off the hillside and its headstones.

One day, hopefully not anytime soon, his childhood friend and racing rival will join him there.

"When my time comes I'll be buried right next to Bobby," Jarrett said as he pointed through the Turn 1 trees and up toward Catawba Memorial Park.

On Monday night, Jarrett becomes a member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. One day Isaac will take his place beside Ned there as well.

I stood at the start-finish line of the North Wilkesboro Speedway on Thursday afternoon, microphone in hand. "NASCAR Now" host Michelle Bonner was about to toss to me from our Bristol, Conn., studios and I was about to begin my live interview with Alton McBride Jr., the president of Speedway Associates Inc. and the man credited with saving the crusty old bullring that racers call, simply, Wilkesboro.

Seconds before we hit the air, McBride leaned over and said, "Man, that's a cool jacket."

Ever since we started our NASCAR Now Classic Track Tour, the majority of the comments that I've received from fans and friends via email and Twitter haven't been about the tracks themselves, but the jacket that I've been wearing during my reports. Everyone from Regan Smith to old college buddies to my producers said I had to wear it all week, so I have.

It's a white vintage-style Petty Enterprises jacket with Richard's name on one side of my chest and vertical racing stripes with STP and Dodge patches down the other. It looks old, but actually isn't at all. It was made by Puma a few years ago and gifted to me by a friend who knew I was a lifelong Richard Petty fan.

I decided to wear the jacket during our first Classic Track Tour stop at Bowman-Gray Stadium. The primary reason was because it was about 50 degrees and pouring down rain. But there also was a historical reason. And when I started researching each stop on the tour I quickly realized that it held true at every track we'd picked for the series.

Richard Petty was good. And his stories about each track are even better.

Take North Wilkesboro, for example. He's the track's all-time leader in wins with ... 15! The first victory came in 1962, the last in '81. He won three in a row there twice and during one six-year stretch he won eight of 12. He also the track's leader in starts (66), top-5s (33), top-10s (42) and laps led (5,315). He made his first North Wilkesboro start during the Eisenhower administration and his last just four weeks before Bill Clinton was elected.

Petty is also the all-time wins leader at Rockingham, where we stopped on Wednesday. He won at The Rock 11 times, the first two on the track's original flat configuration. He won four times at our first stop, Bowman-Gray, trailing only Rex White's six victories. He won five times at Hickory, second all time behind Junior Johnson's seven wins. And he's the career wins leader at our final stop, Greenville-Pickens, with six.

His Royal Fastness is also the all-time leader in top-5s and top-10s at all five of our Classic Track Tour stops. And at all but one he put together at least one three-race winning streak. The only stop where he didn't grab a three-peat was Bowman-Gray, but he did win three of four in 1967-70 and finished second in the one he didn't win.

"Yeah, we had a little success on those tracks your picked out, didn't we?" he said to me via phone Wednesday morning. "Back then the money you made was whatever you won. So running for points wasn't really a realistic deal, you know? So we figured we'd run up front as much as could."

When I told The King about the jacket, he laughed and said he wanted one. When I told him we were headed to North Wilkesboro on Thursday, he laughed and said he wished he could "ride up there with y'all."

"We had a deal up there one day that still makes me laugh. Every time I came through one of the turns, I can't remember which one, I started seeing these two boys fighting. They were just beating on each other. I went by one lap and they were up in the stands fighting. I came by one lap later and they were down on the ground next to the fence. The third time I came around the one guy had the other guy's head struck through the fence out over the racetrack."

So, I asked, what did you do then?

"Nothing. I kept racing. At that point I figured they were going to get it worked out between them, you know?"

Then I asked Petty if he could remember when the track made the change from dirt to asphalt and when the old guard rail was replaced with the white concrete retaining wall. He said yes. Then I asked him to verify a story I had always heard about that wall. Years ago I was told that when the bricks were laid and the concrete was poured, the family that owned the track, the Staleys, had reinforced that wall by throwing piles of steel car parts into the mix, taken from the garage and junkyards and even pulled from old moonshine-running cars that were so common in Wilkes County.

"Yeah, I heard that too. And I always assumed it was true."

He paused, chuckled and coined a phrase that I immediately stole and used on Thursday's "NASCAR Now."

"I guess you'd call that Redneck Rebar."

When we rolled into Rockingham Speedway on Wednesday afternoon, the camera crew had one question. Where were we going to do the live shot for NASCAR Now?

That answer was easy. We all quickly agreed and said in unison, "Turn 1."

Why? Because that's where the greatest moment in The Rock's nearly five-decade history took place, though at the time it surely didn't seem so great.

Benny Parsons came into the 1973 season finale as the NASCAR Winston Cup points leader. This was a big deal to the people of Rockingham because B.P. lived in nearby Ellerbe, N.C. In fact, his entire team was based there. It was owned by local businessman L.G. DeWitt, who also happened to own the racetrack, and the crew chief on the car was Travis Carter, a hometown boy who would eventually go on to build winning cars for Junior Johnson, Hal Needham and Burt Reynolds, and then start his own race team in the 1990s.

Somehow B.P., L.G. and Travis kept up with the big teams all year long. They loaded up their sponsorless racecar in Richmond County and towed it off to faraway places like Michigan, Texas and Southern California.

This was the era of Yarborough, Allison, Pearson and The King. Those factory-supported cars won races by the bushel, but B.P. and L.G. punched out top-10s like a telegraph operator. They had won just once, at Bristol in July.

When The Ellerbe Gang arrived for the season finale at DeWitt's track, then known as North Carolina Speedway, they held a slim points lead over Cale Yarborough. Only 15 minutes from home, there was no doubt as to who the crowd favorite was.

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Getty ImagesCrew chief Travis Carter, team owner -- and Rockingham owner -- L.G. DeWitt and driver Benny Parsons pulled off one of the unlikeliest championships in NASCAR history in 1973.

"It was really something," Benny told me years later, when we were coworkers at ESPN. We were sitting in a booth at the Dixie Burger on Ellerbe's Main Street, having breakfast the morning before a late '90s race at The Rock. "It was a real thrill for me. But I was even more happy for Mr. DeWitt and Travis. It was a big deal for those guys to have that moment in front of their friends and family."

But on Lap 13 those roaring grandstands were silenced by the sight of the spinning number 72 car. Parsons had been caught up in a wreck not of his own doing and when the smoke cleared the entire right side of his car was sheared away -- sheet metal, roll bars, everything. Poor Benny sat there totally exposed to the grandstand. He was stunned and, as he admitted often, quietly accepted his title loss.

That's when it happened. After the car was towed back into the garage, other crews started pitching in to help the poor-but-proud DeWitt team.

Rivals began cannibalizing their own cars and bringing over the parts that Carter needed to rebuild Benny's ride. For over an hour the patchwork of impromptu teammates hammered and welded.

Maybe they did it because they wanted the little guy to win. Maybe they wanted to see the home team come through. Or perhaps they just liked B.P., L.G. and Travis.

Whatever their motivation, the crew of dozens got Parsons back on the track. He ended up finishing 183 laps behind Yarborough, but 67 points ahead.

"Sometimes I still don't believe it," Carter told me standing in that same garage just two years ago. The Rock had been reopened and his son, Matt, was racing there in the ARCA series. "There was a camaraderie in the garage back then, especially among the smaller teams, that you just don't see today. We'd share parts, ideas, motel rooms, whatever it took to get to the next race."

That evening, just as they had done all season, B.P., L.G. and Carter packed their things, loaded up the car and headed back to Ellerbe.

"But," Benny told me, "we didn't leave until we had shaken every hand in the garage and waved to every single fan all the way home."

So when it came time to pick a spot for our NASCAR Now segments on Wednesday, it was a no-brainer. We went to the spot of Benny's wreck. And we opened our second segment with a shot of the press box, which Rockingham Speedway's new owner Andy Hillenburg has renamed the Benny Parsons Tower.

And while we got ready to do the show I received a tweet wishing me luck … from Benny's son Keith, a former AP sportswriter and now a bank executive in Rockingham.

If you're a Richmond County native, and I am, then you always knew that, coming to Cup race weekends from the Charlotte area, one of the best shortcuts to the track was the one that took you through Ellerbe. When I left Rockingham on Wednesday evening, I took that route going home. And yes, I stopped by the Dixie Burger to have a milkshake and remember an old friend and the town that loved him so.

There's an unofficial rule in the world of television production that says: "The best stuff always happens after the camera's turned off."

On Tuesday evening's edition of NASCAR Now we kicked off our Classic Track Tour with a visit to Winston-Salem, N.C.'s Bowman Gray Stadium. We braved the rain to stand on the balcony of Winston Salem State's field house (Go Rams!), which provided a gorgeous overlook of the place they call the Madhouse.

Huge chunks of rubber were piled up in the outside lane. There were still visible marks atop the front stretch guardrail after a wild crash the previous Saturday night. I hadn't been to a race at B-G in more than 15 years and I stood and marveled at how it still looked exactly the same as it did then.

Our special guest for the show was in the last segment. The interview was great. Then, when the show was over, he stood there with me on that balcony and the memories started pouring out.

"You're not kidding," Richard Childress said with a laugh when I shared my observation about the place being frozen in time. "It still looks the same as it did the first time I came out here. And that was around 1953."

Childress, now 65 and the owner of Richard Childress Racing, first walked through the gates of Bowman Gray (actually, he snuck under the fence) when he was around seven or eight years old. He grew up in the neighborhoods around the stadium, the rough-and-tumble streets of east Winston-Salem. The racetrack started out as his babysitter, his stepfather dropping him and his siblings off on Saturday nights. Immediately, little Richard was hooked by the noise, the smells, and the living legends who drove the machines.

"Right here behind us, down in Turn 3, it was Turn 1 back then, there was a pine tree just outside the track. That's where guys like Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts, Joe Weatherly, and Junior Johnson would hang out. The real men. Real racers. I was just a kid and the track didn't want me down in the pits, but as I got older I figured out how to get down there. I would just stand and stare at those guys under that tree. Sometimes they'd call me over, give me some money, and say, 'Hey kid, go get me a beer.' "

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Todd Warshaw/Getty ImagesRichard Childress got his start at Bowman-Gray, and he hasn't forgotten that.

Childress then turned to our right, overlooking Turn 4.

"There was a tree there, too. But the guys who hung out underneath that tree weren't ever as cool as the ones over at the other one."

Then he admitted that even today he still sizes drivers up by which tree they would have been sitting under.

"Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, those kinds of guys, in 1960 you would have found them sitting over under that tree over to our left. Not that other one."

The six-time Cup champion team owner talked about his first job selling peanuts in the Bowman Gray grandstands. A good night meant bringing home a dollar.

"If you made two bucks, man, that was like winning the lottery."

He pointed out the concession stand overlooking Turns 1 and 2 and said it looked exactly like it did when he was a kid, right down to the painted lettering.

"People always sat in the same sections," he said. "You knew who would always buy the same thing every Saturday night and you headed straight for them. Eventually I got promoted to selling drinks. Once you got up to drinks, you felt like a real businessman."

He remembered always leaving the track 15 cents short of whatever his actual take had been. Why? Because that's how much a sleeve of French Fries cost.

"They cooked up real crispy and we'd put vinegar on them," he said. "Man, they were so good it was crazy."

Then he recalled the terrible night in 1958 when Billy Myers suffered a heart attack rolling through those turns and his car suddenly went straight, blowing through the fence and hitting a truck in the parking lot. Billy was dead. One year earlier his brother Bobby had been killed in the Southern 500.

It was tragic year that decimated the "First Family of Southern Modified Racing." From then on, the track's Grand National (now Sprint Cup) races were named for the Myers Brothers.

"I remember after Bobby died down at Darlington they hung a big sheet between then goalposts on the football field down here in this end zone (in Turns 3 and 4). They showed a film of the race and it included Bobby's crash. It was standing room only. Everyone wanted to see it. And then they went racing."

Eventually Childress went racing, too. He bought his first race car, an old taxi cab, for 20 bucks. He bought his second car for 40. "I had to borrow money to buy that one."

Lap by lap, he raced his way out of the toughest neighborhood in Winston-Salem. Eventually he ended up in NASCAR. When Bowman Gray hosted its 29th and final Cup Series race in 1971, the Myers Brothers 250, Childress was in the field. He finished 21st out of 29 cars and pocketed $205 for his efforts.

"Think about all the places I've gotten to go and all the races we've won over the years. Only in America can a kid from the wrong side of the tracks start in these grandstands selling peanuts, end up coming back to race, and then have the kind of success we've had at RCR. And to think, RCR started right here on this track in front of us."

You may call Bowman Gray Stadium the Madhouse. The people who race there may call it The Stadium. But Richard Childress, looking over the rain-soaked racetrack, had another name for it.

"This right here … this is home."

When my daughter was a little younger we used to joke that my pickup was a time machine. We'd joke about jumping in, hitting the gas, and turning back the clock to go visit heroes of bygone days.

This week, my pickup actually will be a time machine.

Starting Tuesday on "NASCAR Now" I'll be living every old-school race fan's dream, meandering through the Carolinas on what we're calling the Classic Track Tour. Just call it a crash course (in some cases quite literally) in stock car racing history as we march into a weekend that will be bookended by the Sprint All-Star Race, NASCAR's modern-day version of a Saturday night A-Main, and the induction of the NASCAR Hall of Fame's second class.

I'll spend the week jumping in my big red truck and going back in time to visit some of the greatest speedways in NASCAR history, bullrings where the men and women who fill the Hall of Fame became legends. All five of our stops played host to races in NASCAR's Strictly Stock, Grand National, or eventually one of the many sponsor-led versions of the Cup series.

All five were hosts to some of the biggest events and greatest stories that NASCAR has written. All five were eventually left behind by NASCAR's biggest division. But all five are still in business today, despite the financial struggles that continue to hamper short track racing. Just last week, one of our five tracks made headlines when it announced that it will be reclosing its doors for a while.

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ISC Images & Archives/Getty ImagesLee Petty is getting into the Hall of Fame. Ryan McGee is visiting some of the places that helped him get there.

On Tuesday (5 p.m. ET, ESPN2), we'll kick off the Classic Track Tour at the place they call the Madhouse, the uber-flat, uber-tough oval of Winston-Salem's Bowman Gray Stadium. I'll be joined there by the Madhouse's most successful alum, Richard Childress. When he was still in elementary school, RC would walk halfway across town to sell peanuts in the Bowman Gray grandstands. As he got older he figured out how to get into the infield, where he fetched cold beverages for the likes of Curtis Turner and Fireball Roberts. As a teenager, he raced there. As a young man, he worked out of a shop just down the road. And now, as a six-time Cup series champion team owner, he serves as one of its living legends.

On Wednesday (5 p.m. ET, ESPN2), we'll head down U.S. Highway 220 to a place where Childress clinched that sixth Cup by stomping the field on a cool fall evening in 1994. Back then it was the North Carolina Motor Speedway. Shortly afterward it was known as the North Carolina Speedway. But no one ever called it that. They called it The Rock. Andy Hillenburg, the man who saved what is now known as the Rockingham Speedway from ruin, will join me to talk about it.

Thursday (5 p.m. ET, ESPN2), we travel northwest into the foothills of the Carolina Piedmont to check on the status of another once-proud NASCAR racetrack that is fighting to stay alive. The North Wilkesboro Speedway sat dormant for a decade and a half, then reopened to much fanfare last summer. Now it's struggling again and the men behind its revival will give us an update.

We'll wrap up the Classic Track Tour by kicking off All-Star Saturday (11 a.m. ET, ESPN2) with a bullring double-dip. First, we stay in the mountains at the place they call "Birthplace of the NASCAR Stars," the Hickory Motor Speedway. That's where 1970 Cup champ Bobby Isaac still overlooks his home track from the cemetery on the hillside above. And Ned Jarrett, barely 72 hours from his Hall of Fame induction, will revisit the track he once owned.

Finally, we'll visit a place that lists its all-stars along a world famous backstretch wall. The Greenville-Pickens Speedway is to Upstate South Carolina what Darlington is to the coastal plains, handpicked by Bill France Sr. to help NASCAR take root in the Palmetto State. It's been there, and at Greenville-Pickens, ever since. In 1971, GPS hosted the first flag-to-flag televised NASCAR race, called by Jim McKay on "Wide World of Sports." Forty years later it'll have to settle for me and "NASCAR Now."

Between the interviews and live shots we'll also teach you a history lesson on each track. Who built them? What was its greatest moment? Who were its greatest legends? What's happening at each racetrack today?

As the week goes along, be sure to check back here for my Classic Track Tour Travelogue. And I'll be tweeting my oil-stained fingers off at http://twitter.com/#!/RyanMcGeeESPN.

So, please come along with me on the NASCAR Now Classic Track Tour. Climb into my big red 4x4 time machine and let's take a ride down memory lane ... the fastest, loudest, greasiest, most barbecue sauce-covered memory lane there is.