Where is ... Lake Speed?

A visitor drives up to a nondescript shop in Kannapolis, N.C., and all of a sudden, he's all but playing chicken with somebody roaring around the parking lot in a souped-up Go-Kart.

Things finally get sorted out and nobody gets run over, the visitor or the hotshot Kart driver. Surely, this is somebody's kid having a big time on a Kart that looks like it might've been able to qualify at that weekend's Nextel Cup race in Richmond. It's a kid, alright. A 59-year-old kid named Lake Speed.

Lake Speed

It's been nine years since Speed last drove in a Cup race, but this Kart -- and several more scattered throughout his shop -- feed his competitive fire. Over here is one of his old No. 83 Purex-sponsored Fords, a machine he drove to four wins in Historic Stock Car Racing Association events on Daytona's 3.56-mile road course in 2002 and 2003.

Even now, nearly a decade after his last start on racing's biggest stage, Speed still loves to compete.

Speed's racing career began in Go-Karts. He won six International Karting Federation championships, and to this day, he is the only American to have won the Karting World Championship. He captured that title in 1978 in Le Mans, France, where he bested, among others, the future Formula One star Ayrton Senna.

Speed was reintroduced to karting by NASCAR official Steve Peterson. He's also involved in warehouse rentals and various other real estate ventures.

"When Peterson introduced me back to the Karts, I said, 'This is something I can do again,'" Speed said. "I like to drive them. I like to work on them. I love so much about it. Most of it's carry-over from years past. Some of it's changed a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. I can do this on my own schedule.

"I don't need any help. I can do this myself. When I want to go and run, I can run. If [his wife] Rice calls up at the last minute and says we've got to go do something else, it's not the end of the world. You don't have any obligations to sponsors or teams. You can really just go at your own pace."

That's not to say, however, that Speed doesn't miss driving at the Cup level. He does.

"I'd still like to be driving big cars sometimes," Speed admitted. "There's no doubt about that. It's unrealistic to think I could go back and do that, though. I've pretty much routed that out of my mind. It just doesn't happen. It would have to be so fluke for sponsorship money to put a 59-year-old person in a racecar in a competitive situation."

Speed had some memorable runs during his NASCAR career, among them a win at Darlington in 1988 and a second-place finish behind Bill Elliott in the 1985 Daytona 500. The Darlington victory came with his own team, which he fielded out of this same Kannapolis shop. (Continued)