Where is ... D. Marcis? (cont'd)

Marcis won a total of five races during his career, and finished second to Richard Petty for the 1975 championship. What an era it was, with characters abounding throughout the sport.

"I guess we all were [characters] in one way or another," Marcis said. "Cale [Yarborough] had his ways, and Richard did. I did, too. Bobby Allison, Neil Castles, John Sears, Clyde Lynn, Cecil Gordon ... everybody had different goals and sometimes were not in it to truly be racers.

"They were in it to make a living. They loved the sport and they could make some money doing it. We never made the money that you get today, but it's still all relative. What we had to spend was big money in those days. It was harder to come by then."

Between his businesses, trying to sneak in some fishing, deer and turkey hunting and testing for IROC, Marcis stays busy. It's a far cry from his days as the last of NASCAR's full-time independents, when he struggled to make it from one race to the next, one season to the next.

It would be hard, he says, for someone to follow in his footsteps today.

"I hate to discourage anybody from trying," Marcis began. "NASCAR's intentions with the new Car of Tomorrow is to kind of help the little guys, but the cost involved, I don't know if a little guy could make it through that. The number of hours involved that you would have to work to make it would be very, very demanding.

"I don't know how many people as individuals today would want to do that. It takes so much more today than it took in my era because ... you've gotta move so many people. The professionalism of the sport -- the pit crews, the cars, aerodynamics, everything -- you can't accomplish with three or four people any more."

If Marcis could change anything about his career, he might not have concentrated so singularly on making it to every race. He would maybe have picked certain events, and concentrated on running competitively rather than simply making the starting grid. Still, he seems satisfied with the way he did play his cards.

"I think what I accomplished, the way I did it and the money I had to do it with, I personally think I done very well," Marcis concluded. "I think that I was a good racecar driver, a hard racecar driver. I never gave up. I raced hard every lap ... harder than I should have in a lot of instances.

"A lot of people said I raced them too hard, even if I was a lap or two down. But I always had hopes of getting that lap back and getting some better finishes. I believed that the spectators came to see a race, and I raced. I always put my heart and soul in it, and I raced hard, hard, hard all the time."