Fred Lorenzen is a busy man, even today, at the age of 72.

Call back in an hour, he tells a reporter who dialed his Chicago-area number. He's got a lot on his plate today.

An hour or so later, he's still busy. Would tomorrow morning be any better, the caller asks. Nope. Lorenzen, one of NASCAR's first superstars in the 1960s, is going to be tied up then as well. He can take a few minutes to chat, but that's it.

Fred Lorenzen

These days, Lorenzen says he's no longer involved in real estate. Instead, he's heavily into the stock market and lives off the dividends of his portfolio. His offering of choice? A simple answer.

"ExxonMobil ... that's the biggest stock in the world," Lorenzen said matter-of-factly. "That's the only stock to really invest in. It just keeps going up, up, up, up."

As of around 9:30 a.m. on July 19, a share of ExxonMobil was going for more than 91 bucks, up more than a dollar from just two days before. Lorenzen, evidently, knows of which he speaks. Son Christopher, 31, is a day trader.

"He makes big money, more than I ever made," Lorenzen said, adding, "He makes in a year more than I ever made in my whole life."

Another child, daughter Amanda, 29, is a recently married first-grade school teacher at a private school in Chicago.

Lorenzen could almost always drive. At 13, he cobbled together a car that had as its power source an old washing machine motor. As a high school student, he won a demolition derby. His career in motorsports was off and running.

He ran modifieds in the Midwest and then USAC stock cars. He turned his attention to NASCAR's Grand National (now Nextel Cup) circuit in 1960. Although not once did he run a full schedule, or really anything close to it, he became a legend, the "Golden Boy" of NASCAR's golden era.

At the height of Lorenzen's success, Richard Petty won the 1964 -- his first -- and 1967 championships. With the backing of Ford and the famed Holman & Moody race team, Lorenzen could've mounted a serious challenge for those titles if he'd chosen to do so.

If Lorenzen had made a concentrated run for the championship, would Richard Petty have seven to his credit? Lorenzen says he doesn't know what might have happened. He just doesn't know.

Still, it's an interesting thought, an alternative history that will never be.

"I didn't really want to [run a full schedule]," Lorenzen said. "It's too much traveling. I get tired of traveling. You're gone all the time. These guys that are doing it right now, I don't see how they do it. You're never home."

In a seven-year span between 1961 and 1967, Lorenzen won a total of 26 races in just 112 starts. In 1963, despite running just 29 of the year's 55 races, Lorenzen became the first driver to amass more than $100,000 in winnings in a single season. Two years later, early in 1965, Lorenzen won a rain-shortened Daytona 500.

What made Lorenzen so good?

"It's just something I wanted to do," he said. "When you decide you want to do something, you put your mind to it and you can do it. You've gotta really want it, though. I gave up everything to go racing. I didn't party, nothing."

Fireball Roberts' star was on the rise at the same time as Lorenzen's. The winner of 33 races between 1956 and 1964, Roberts also never ran a full slate of races and therefore was never crowned champion. Still, he was a star.

Roberts was a star, as it so horribly turned out, that flickered out far too soon. The driver would linger for more than a month after sustaining burns in a crash at Charlotte on May 24, 1964, before passing away on July 2.

And if Roberts' death had an effect on the racing world in general, it particularly touched Lorenzen. Asked if Roberts' tragedy had an impact on him, and Lorenzen answers simply, "Yep ... did," and leaves it at that. How did he react to the loss of his fellow competitor?

"It hurt," Lorenzen admitted. "He was a very good friend of mine, very close. I saw it happen. I saw it coming, the accident. He didn't have a fire suit on."

Lorenzen ran just 40 races over the three years after Roberts' accident, and while he won 10 of them, he quit after starting five of the first 10 races in 1967. At the time, it was said that Lorenzen left the sport due to stomach ulcers.

According to Lorenzen, the loss of his friend Roberts "might have" contributed at least in small part to his decision to retire. Other than that, he figured it was just time.

"Tired of traveling," Lorenzen said. "I'd won everything I'd set out to. I got burned out."

Still, Lorenzen came back into the NASCAR fold to make 29 more starts from 1970 through 1972. He didn't win, but settled for a couple of runnerup finishes at Dover and Darlington. He had "unburned" out, and gotten "tired of doing nothing."

He ran his last race at Martinsville, in September 1972, at the age of 37. Was he satisfied with his comeback?

"Not really," he began. "But you've got to take into consideration, the big thing is age. The older you get, the slower you get. That's my opinion. 25, 27 years old ... that's the peak of your career in auto racing."

Lorenzen is a member of more than one motorsports hall of fame, and should almost assuredly be inducted at some point into the NASCAR Hall of Fame once it opens a few years down the road. Ultimately, how does Lorenzen want to be remembered?

"As a good driver," Lorenzen said. "If you want to be the best and be good, you've got to put everything else aside and go for it. Anybody can go to the top if they want to bad enough. If you want it bad enough, you've gotta give everything else up and go for it."