The wildest of blue yonder tributes at Charlotte track

Weather permitting, the sky over Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday is going to be filled with aircraft of the ages.

The always highly anticipated prerace show for the Coca-Cola 600 this year will feature a tribute to military aircraft that have flown for our nation in many of its wars.

The flyover, continuing the track’s annual and laudable Memorial Day tribute to U.S. troops, will include a World War I biplane that’s almost 100 years old. World War II planes, such as the beautiful, sleek P-51 Mustang – a few of which are now in the hangar of NASCAR team owner Jack Roush – will be up there, too.

P-51s were flown in combat by the famed Tuskegee Airmen, courageous African-American pilots who escorted B-17 bombers into the heavily defended airspace over Germany.

Fast-forward to the present conflicts in Afghanistan and Irag.

Supersonic bombers and fighters with deadly, still highly secret weaponry will make passes over the speedway in Cabarrus County, just northeast of Charlotte.

“We feel it’s going to be our most exciting show ever,” says Jay Howard, who has organized and overseen the track’s prerace extravaganzas for almost two decades. “Fans should bring their cameras. They’re going to be wowed!”

I remember that it was a whopper of a “WOW!” response that former track president and general manager Humpy Wheeler foresaw for a Coke 600 prerace production featuring an airplane in the 1980s.

The plan was among Humpy's most outlandish, and that’s saying something.

Over the years he staged a stunt in which “Jimmy The Flying Greek” jumped a school bus over a long line of junked cars. He brought in New York taxi drivers to race on a specially built short track in front of the main grandstand. He assembled 200 parachutists to jump from planes over the speedway in 1992 in honor of the retiring Richard Petty, matching the number of Petty's victories.

I’ve written often about what Humpy wanted to do almost 25 years ago. Because of the spectacular air show scheduled for Sunday, the tale bears another telling.

Here’s what Humpy envisioned:

After a dazzling array of aerobatics, a stunt pilot would fly upside down over the crowd in salute. His flight path would be from Turn One over the infield to Turn Three. After turning the plane upright, the pilot would then dive into a deep gulch that existed at the time behind the third turn.

He’d be out of sight of spectators, and it would appear as if his aircraft had gone down. Simultaneously, a huge dynamite charge would be set off in the gulch, creating an explosion, fire and smoke.

The idea was to simulate a humongous crash.

Ha!

That, of course, wasn’t going to happen.

The pilot would pull up and, still out of view of the those in the grandstands, fly very low above the ravine behind Turn 4. Moments later, he'd circle back, buzzing the grandstands in salute.

“It'll be an incredible trick," said Humpy. "People will be telling about it for years."

Ed Clark and Eddie Gossage, Humpy's associates on the speedway management team at that time, were aghast. Clark now is president of Atlanta Motor Speedway and Gossage heads Texas Motor Speedway. Both tracks, like Charlotte’s, are owned by Bruton Smith's company, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

“What it'll be is an incredible disaster,” Clark told Wheeler. “It’ll scare people to death!

“There aren't enough doctors in the Carolinas to treat all the heart-attack victims we'll have," added Gossage.

Wheeler went through with much of it, but eventually changed his mind about the "grand finale."

"I really doubt Humpy would have gone through with something as brazen as that," Clark said a couple of years later. "Not even if Eddie Gossage and I hadn't spoken out against it. I feel that suggesting it was his way of shocking us and making us think of alternatives.

"But it was Humpy, so you never know."

Enjoy this year’s show!