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.

According to Speed, when he built the 10,500-square-foot shop in 1986, it was the biggest facility in NASCAR. The team built its own cars from the ground up ... chassis, engines, everything ... with his biggest payroll ever coming in at maybe 16 or 17 people.

It was truly a David-against-Goliath effort. Early in 1988, things were clicking for Speed. He started 10th in the Daytona 500 before his engine let go. He was sixth at Richmond and second to race winner Neil Bonnett at Rockingham. Despite another engine problem at Atlanta, the team seemed to be heading in the right direction.

Speed finally got over the hump at Darlington, where he beat runner-up Alan Kulwicki to the finish line by nearly 19 seconds.

"It was just a huge relief, because I had all the confidence in the world that we could win races," Speed said. "It was like, 'Whew ... dadgum ... how many long fly balls have you gotta hit before you get one to go over the fence?'"

Finally, Speed had arrived. When his sponsor left, he thought that surely another company would jump on board. It didn't work out that way.

At the last minute, just before the start of the 1989 season, Speed settled on a deal for "peanuts." He would never again visit Victory Lane in a Cup event.

"I had bought into the lie that if you went out, ran fast and won races, the sponsorship money would come to you," Speed said. "I was operating under [the assumption] that if I could get this thing to the front and win a race or two, everything would work out. At the end of that year, there wasn't anybody knocking on the door."

After the 1989 season, Speed drove either limited schedules in his own equipment or for other car owners, most notably Cale Yarborough, Bud Moore and Harry Melling. In late June 1998 while driving for Melling, Speed crashed hard while making a practice run on the road course in Sonoma, Calif. Although an initial exam in California revealed no broken bones, the car was turned over to Butch Gilliland -- Cup driver David Gilliland's father -- for the race. A week later, he crashed at New Hampshire.

It would be the last race of Speed's NASCAR career. Subsequent tests revealed a cracked sternum and four broken ribs.

Today, Speed has four grandchildren by Lake Jr., his son from his first marriage. He and Rice also have two daughters and a son: Sara Ann, who is finishing up her sophomore year in college; Maurie, a high-school senior who plans to attend college in California in order to pursue a career in drama; and Chris, a junior who plans to follow his sister to school in California.

After his injuries healed, the phone never rang. There were a few deals on the table here and there, but they were all with what Speed calls "start-up teams" that had little potential for success. For all intents and purposes, Speed was out of NASCAR.

Looking back, Speed feels there was a reason for his departure.

"This is a God thing, as far as I'm concerned," Speed said. "He knew the only way He was gonna stop me from racing was probably to put that concrete barrier in front of me and break me up, so that I had to stop. My kids were at the age then that they really needed Dad at home. To be able to not have your mind focused on the next race all the time and be able to give them some attention and time was monumental.

"The timing was perfect. I fought it, fussed about it and was ill about it for quite a few years, but finally came to realize how blessed I was and, really, that things had turned out for the best."

Speed says that he gets calls on a routine basis from drivers looking to get into the sport. They want to know how they should go about it, where they should start, how they should drive and so forth.

Invariably, he tells them it's not all about what they do on the track. It's a lesson he learned the hard way.

"I really believe that God's got a plan for each one of us, and I think that my plan worked out exactly the way He wanted it to work out," Speed said. "Would I have chosen to do it differently? Yeah, I would have chosen to do it differently. I emphasize to each and every one of them [who call for advice] that there's a lot of people who know how to drive good. There are a lot of people who know how to work good on these things. The difference is that the ones who know how to market themselves, they're the ones that make it. The others fall aside.

"If you can't market yourself and acquire the sponsorship money it takes to race, I don't care how good a driver you are, you're not going to make it. I think God's skilled me with the driving ability and mechanical ability, all that. The part that He left me short on was not knowing how to market myself. I think we had the best value to offer a sponsor out there. I could do more with less money than anybody that's ever come down through there. The way we ran on 10 percent of the funding that everybody else had pretty well stood up for that."

In the end, being out of racing "is not the end of the world" for Speed.

"There is life after racing," Speed concluded. "Most of us have done it all our lives, but believe it or not, there's other things out there ... your family, your children, your friends. It's a pretty cool thing to be able to give them some attention, especially when you realize they forgive you for being gone so much. They still love you and care about you."