Rumor has it Jayski just turned 30: Appreciating the website’s rise and rebirth

The most powerful website in NASCAR during the nascent days of the Internet was operated out of a tiny yellow and orange bedroom near the Jersey Shore. It started as a side project in a college computer lab. Its mysteriously unusual but extremely catchy name was derived from its founder, who wrangled carts while loading C-5s as a crew chief in the U.S. Air Force. [caption id="attachment_523393" align="alignright" width="400"] Jayski.com[/caption] Jay Adamczyk kept correcting a tech sergeant’s pronunciation of his last name to "A-DAM-sick” from “A-DAM-ski” when being summoned on the base radio. “He was like, ‘Hell, we’re going to call you ‘Jayski’ then,’ ” Adamczyk said with a laugh. “All I heard was, ‘Hey Jayski, we need a cart.’ Then it kind of just laid dormant until I started the site. Who would have known?” The nickname morphed into a moniker that became omnipresent in stock-car racing during the late 1990s and early 2000s. At its peak, Jayski’s Silly Season Site drew close to 100 million page views annually and became the indispensable best source for NASCAR information. It was a favorite of the late Kyle Busch, who gleefully checked daily in the offseason for paint scheme releases. “I used to pull up Jayski every day,” Kevin Harvick said in 2019. “That was really where I went to get all my racing news.” The site’s improbable success story is hard to fully comprehend without having lived in the moment when NASCAR champions, reporters and die-hard fans spent a significant portion of their days constantly refreshing a spartan website sporting yellow-and-black overtones and an emphasis on goofy clip art-style smiley faces. “Jay just caught lightning in a bottle for some reason,” said Scott Page, who joined Jayski in 2006 and now oversees its daily operations. “None of it makes sense. How he started it, how it got traffic, how somebody decided to email him. It was really organic the way it developed, although the site had everything you could ever want in it. It was overwhelming. “But how he did it, I don't know that you could ever explain it.” Jayski celebrates its 30th anniversary today after surviving its rockiest decade. The rise of digital and social media and the decline of traditional media fundamentally affected some of the core attractions of Jayski, which blended a heavy dose of rumormongering with well-curated links to stories by the best beat journalists covering NASCAR. Bought by ESPN 20 years ago, Jayski went dark in January 2019 for four months. ESPN soon returned the site and its URL to Adamczyk (whose request to reclaim ownership was granted at no charge). The resurrected Jayski aligned with NASCAR Digital Media in May 2019 and has enjoyed a seven-year renaissance. Once known as the place where fans flocked to read hourly rumors (often unverified) about which drivers were getting fired and hired, Jayski is now a trusted repository for recalling the paint schemes and headlines of bygone eras. Its voluminous archives are housed across more than 100,000 posts, pages and images, and the site still churns out more than 2,000 news items annually. “It’s kind of crazy,” Adamczyk said. “I never expected it to last 30 years.” Simplicity that even a mother could love Adamczyk launched Jayski as a basic tribute to favorite driver Ernie Irvan, fulfilling a class assignment to create a webpage as he learned HTML coding. Fans emailed him with questions about the status of other drivers, so he created a team chart to track their movement and rechristened the site as “Jayski’s Silly Season” on Aug. 26, 1996. Shortly before starting the site, Adamczyk had moved back in with his parents near Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he worked as a contractor for the FAA on Y2K computer programming. Until he moved to Mooresville, North Carolina, in 2004, Adamczyk ran Jayski out of his little sister’s former bedroom, which was barely large enough for a computer and TV amid its garish 12- by 18-foot walls. “I eventually had to paint it,” he said. “I couldn’t work in that.” Adamczyk loves Internet searching (AltaVista was his web crawler of choice in the early days) and falling down rabbit holes while researching arcane trivia. His curiosity sparked Jayski’s first big traffic win. He stumbled across a page on the University of Nebraska website about sponsoring the Melling Racing car driven by Lake Speed. The link was posted on Jayski and drew an unheard-of 10,000 views within a month (as well as an email from Speed). “That was probably the first thing I put up that no one else really knew about,” Adamczyk said. “I just happened to be hunting around, and that was the fun part: Searching around the Internet trying to find stuff you didn’t see anyplace else.” He built readership traction by sharing Jayski’s unique content in the newsgroup message boards that were ubiquitous in the pre-Google era. His posting methods are considered primitive now. There was no content management system, and Adamczyk posted everything through HTML (which he still uses when working on the site, even though Jayski is now operated through WordPress). Because of its limited bandwidth, the site consisted mainly of easy-to-load links and headers. Page was told that the design was geared toward Adamczyk’s mother, who read the site daily (and often informed her son of his spelling errors). “He wanted simplicity because he wanted his mother to be able to know where to find information,” Page said. “You don't want to bury things under three sublinks. There may have been a hundred links on the old main Jayski page, but you knew it was all there. We've tried to keep that as best as we can. ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ is still kind of the theory.” As traffic grew beyond Adamczyk’s immediate family, so did the tips with news and nuggets. He estimated getting 100 daily emails from NASCAR sources (and laments having lost access to most of the messages after changing servers so many times). He tried to respond to and verify as many as possible amid 15-hour workdays, seven days a week. “It was totally by the seat of my pants every day,” he said. “I sort of had a little bit of a schedule, but nothing written down.” Until Page was hired as his right-hand man (and the “designated survivor” for ESPN, which worried what would become of Jayski if anything happened to its workaholic founder), Adamczyk never took a full day off while running the site as a one-man band from 1996-2005. His laptop accompanied him on ski vacations to the Italian Alps or sightseeing tours to the San Francisco Bay. He built many of the site’s team pages during a trans-Atlantic flight (“back then, you could work offline”). Adamczyk focused heavily on updating the “Article/Story Links” page, which was inspired by the “Law and Order” show (“I heard, ‘Here are their stories’ and thought that was cool.’ ”). The comprehensive list of breaking news and feature stories by NASCAR beat reporters at newspapers around the country was an agenda-setter. Reporters emailed Adamczyk to highlight their work and then stayed up until midnight as their stories made the site’s last refresh of the day. (He usually worked until 2 a.m.) “I would just try to get some kind of news up every day,” he said. “I’d save some things so people had something to read.” When Adamczyk quit his job to work on the site full time in 1999, he briefly considered buying a new domain name to rebrand the site. “I put a poll out there and Jayski.com won overwhelmingly,” he said. “After that, I never really thought about changing it.” Give me the paint schemes, not the spotlight During a mid-2000s induction ceremony for the North Carolina Auto Racing Hall of Fame that was emceed by Benny Parsons, the spotlight suddenly shifted onto a surprised Adamczyk. “There’s someone in the house that you all might know,” Parsons said. “Here’s Jayski!” Adamczyk was briefly mortified. “I”m like, ‘Oh crap,’ ” he said. “And then everyone gave me a big ovation.” The rest of the evening was spent taking photos with fans and meeting with NASCAR industry members. The extended family of Wood Brothers Racing were among his biggest admirers. Darrell Waltrip greeted him with a big hug. “He's like, ‘I read your stuff every day before I get on the air, so I know what the hell I'm doing,’ ” Adamczyk said. “All that was kind of cool.” It was a rare instance of personal interaction with the people that he devoted his life to detailing. The race track was the least likely place you’d find Adamczyk, who hasn’t attended a NASCAR event in 15 years. When he went, it was usually as a dignitary -- a fan Q&A with Ricky Rudd at Las Vegas Motor Speedway or the Grand Marshal of an ARCA race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The main appeal of being at the track was taking photos of cars and their liveries from multiple angles. He tried working a few times in media centers but was discouraged by unreliable Wi-Fi and hours that weren’t conducive to a night owl. Plus, there was the awkward feeling of being surrounded by laptops all open to Jayski and being checked constantly for news. “It was surreal,” he said. “A lot of people would come up and talk to me. ‘Are you really Jayski?’ I’m like, ‘Yep.’ ” Some big scoops were owned by Jayski, which appeared annually in early 2000s on the Charlotte Observer’s list of the 25 most influential people, places and things in NASCAR. After being announced to head Dodge’s entry to Cup in 2001, Ray Evernham joked with reporters, “I’m going to do a lot of things. Don’t you read Jayski?” But there were also some huge misses. When Jayski reported that Budweiser was considering a sponsor reunion with Waltrip, the driver’s business manager sent a categorical denial. On July 5, 1999, Jayski cited sources at Richard Childress Racing confirming the impending release of Mike Skinner. The next day, the team said Skinner was expected to be re-signed. “Richard Childress wanted to kill me at one time,” said Adamczyk, who eventually made peace with the team owner in a chance meeting at his winery. Those dynamics have changed in the age of teams controlling the message through social media channels. “Most of the teams want to work with you now, especially our site,” he said. “You're not going to get the rumors like you used to because the teams will put them out before then.” Page, who staffs Jayski with Dustin Albino and Amanda Brahler, said the goal is emphasizing its historical treasure troves while staying true to its roots as a focal point for modern-day information. A mobile phone app is under development, and Page is working to improve the search functionality of its database. “Jayski was known as a rumor site, but now I consider it through all those years to have been more of a clearinghouse,” Page said. “It took all this information from other sites, and all those sites have gone away. So, we've at least got the mention of what was posted. The links are bad, but there's still that record of history.” Adamczyk, who will turn 65 later this year, has downshifted his involvement but still works on Jayski’s stats section. “Stats aren't a big draw. I pretty much do it because I enjoy it and want to keep it updated,” he said. “That’s kind of the point of the site: Helping people find info.”