Late afternoon. October 15, 2000. Talladega Superspeedway. Forty-five laps to go in the Winston 500. Over that stretch run, Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., John Andretti and Mike Skinner will lead laps.

Another typically wild Talladega finish is anticipated. No one, however, can project the extreme nature of this one. Arguably, it will mark the biggest magic moment of that season, and for reasons that won’t be fully understood until months later.

A Talladega crowd of more than 100,000 is watching, enthralled. Outside the speedway, sitting in his office near the intersection of the track entrance road and Speedway Boulevard, is the man ultimately responsible for bringing all this together.

Grant Lynch, track president.

He is football fields away from the finish, but he will not miss it. The crowd won’t allow it.

“Dale Earnhardt made the pass for the lead on the white-flag lap, and the fans went crazy,” said former Talladega official Russell Branham. “Grant was in his office. He told me later the fans were so loud that he could hear them that far away. He knew there had been an Earnhardt moment.”

And that it was. In one of the most storied runs of his long, decorated career, Earnhardt, beloved by many in the Talladega crowd, charged from 18th place to first in three laps, then led the final lap to finish 0.119 seconds in front of drafting partner Kenny Wallace. He drove from oblivion to sunshine.

The earth shook that day in eastern Alabama. The win would be Earnhardt’s last. He would die in the last lap of the following February’s Daytona 500. But, in the glow of that October moment, Lynch could lean back in his office chair and smile. At his track, on this day, before another bonkers Talladega crowd, it was a wonderful sleight of hand by one of the masters of the art.

It was more than a race. It was Talladega.

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Grant Lynch, 71, died October 2 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He retired as Talladega Superspeedway chairman in 2019. As teams, drivers and fans gather at Talladega for this weekend’s NASCAR playoff events, his absence will feel like a black cloak. His life will be celebrated in a private gathering at the track Friday night.

Few speedway presidents develop the strong sort of ties Lynch carried for 26 years at Talladega. He was a South Dakota native and built the beginnings of his career working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company sports programs in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but home became Sweet Home Alabama.

He took Talladega’s reputation as the biggest, boldest, fastest track to heart and was the speedway’s biggest influencer before that even became a thing. He wore an outsized cap announcing that “Size Matters!” and scoffed at protests from others that their racing might approach the excitement of a Sunday afternoon south and west of Eastaboga, Alabama, where drivers and cars ran wild and free.

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On race mornings, he roamed the infield, garage area and media center, spreading the Talladega gospel. He met with sponsors, other promoters and drivers. But by race’s end, he typically could be found in his office, which served as the track command center if problems appeared. Often, they did. “People come here to have a good time,” he once said. “Sometimes they need help understanding how much of a good time they should have.”

Before Talladega, Lynch built a reputation for getting things done during his years at RJR’s Sports Marketing Enterprises, the tobacco company’s widely respected public relations unit that, under directors Ralph Seagraves and T. Wayne Robertson, led Reynolds’ sports promotions activities. Most notably, RJR fueled NASCAR for more than three decades as the primary sponsor of what then was known as the Winston Cup Series.

Lynch’s work gained the attention of top brass at NASCAR, and he accepted the general manager position at Talladega in January 1993 with the track’s departure of another NASCAR leadership icon, Mike Helton, who moved on to Daytona Beach and, eventually, the NASCAR presidency. Soon, Lynch would be elevated to track president and later chairman as he became Citizen One in the larger world that included the track and its surrounding communities. In Oxford, Eastaboga and Pell City, there were locations where everybody knew his name.

Although his focus was Talladega, Lynch’s reach extended beyond Alabama. He was a key player in the development of Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway and became an important France family lieutenant in handling tough projects. In 2007, Grant was named senior vice president of business operations for International Speedway Corp. and became Talladega Superspeedway chairman in 2009. Although his fingerprints could be found on numerous ISC projects, Talladega was his base of operations for more than a quarter-century, and the track was sacred ground.

Former Las Vegas Motor Speedway president Chris Powell, another “graduate” of RJR’s NASCAR program, said Lynch “was in so many ways a character, but at the same time someone who took his job very seriously. Some in the sport will never know what a hero they lost in Grant.”

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Talladega Superspeedway’s 50th anniversary rolled around in 2019, Lynch’s final year at the track, and Russell Branham, leading the track’s public relations efforts, built the foundation to celebrate what had been determined to be Talladega’s biggest electric moment (of many). That would be Earnhardt’s powerful sprint to victory from 18th in 2000.

This required a Lynch telephone call to Richard Childress. Lynch and Childress were fast friends of many years, hunting partners who probably had more fun away from the track than on it. Evidence of the success of those hunting trips was readily visible in Lynch’s office — various creatures preserved by taxidermy. “You felt like you were on a safari in there,” Branham said.

Lynch asked Childress if he would drive a ceremonial pre-race lap before the October race that year in the same black Chevrolet Earnhardt drove to the 2000 win.

It was an offer Childress couldn’t refuse.

The car, which had not been raced since Earnhardt’s final win that day at Talladega, was in the Childress Racing Museum near the team shop in Welcome, North Carolina. It was refurbished by mechanics and supplied with a new engine.

“I said, ‘Man, I don’t know,’ but Grant convinced me to do it,” Childress said. “I told him I’d do it if I could take Johnny Morris (a sponsor and associate of several NASCAR teams) with me. It’s one of the last things Grant got to do at the track. I wasn’t sure I could get through it, but it’s a memory I’ll never forget. After we did a lap, Johnny told me to keep going. He said he’d pay the fine.”

Branham watched from the infield and “saw the crowd go crazy. After the car went around, Grant came up to me and gave me a high-five and said, ‘What a great idea.’ He helped push the idea across the line.”

It was a final triumph for Lynch and Childress and a vivid reminder of a spectacular day at Talladega almost 20 years earlier.

“Grant brought so much to the kind of NASCAR he helped build through his life and career,” Childress said. “I couldn’t imagine anybody who ever met him not loving him. He was just that type of person.”

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•  •  •

Grant Lynch arrived at Talladega Superspeedway in January 1993 and almost immediately faced the sort of challenges that could batter a rookie track operator, despite years of experience at a vibrant place like RJR.

On April 1 of that year, defending Cup Series champion Alan Kulwicki died in a plane crash in Tennessee. Barely three months later, the pain grew practically beyond imagining. Davey Allison, Alabama’s favorite son,  was injured in a helicopter crash while trying to land in the Talladega infield. Allison died the next day.

Lynch was at the track on the day of Allison’s accident. Much of the state of Alabama plunged into the sort of mourning not seen since the death of beloved Alabama football coach Bear Bryant.

“It was a tough day and a tough year for Grant and a lot of other people,” Branham said. “He would get choked up talking about it 20 years later. What a tough way to start a new part of your career. He was still learning the ropes. It ate him up. But in times of adversity when people needed him to be a rock, he was that rock.”

Lynch settled in to build a life and a reputation at Talladega. He joined local charitable organizations and led a few. He found hunting and fishing buddies and became a prominent member — and later president — of the Alabama Wildlife Federation. He held an annual wild game cookoff competition at the speedway, going so far as to invite long-time NASCAR driver Dave Marcis to show up with his famous bear stew.

Lynch developed a web of traditions at Talladega. Three stand out.

Near the end of pre-race ceremonies, he would step to the microphone on the stage and lead fans in a chant that traveled up and down the long frontstretch grandstand: “This is more than a race … this is Talladega!”

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Lynch wanted a special way to honor America in that October’s pre-race program. Johnny Ray, a former driver who lived near the speedway, said he could bring a diesel rig from his trucking company to the track on race day and use it to carry a huge American flag around the speedway during the playing of the national anthem. Officials tried to time the arrival of the truck at the finish line with the end of the anthem. The flag ride was a big hit, one that continues today.

With tens of thousands of fans arriving at Talladega for race weekend, the days of competition and the days leading to the events are filled with activity for track staff members. By the end of race day, many are exhausted. But Lynch had one final task. He asked staffers to report to the speedway by 7 a.m. the day after the Cup race so they could wave to campers and display “Thank You For Coming” and “That Was Talladega” signs as the crowded rush to leave the speedway began.

“When Grant was in or around the facility, he was a personality,” said Patrick Barfield, now a guest services director for several NASCAR tracks and a long-time Talladega employee. “Everybody knew who he was. He was very popular with the fans, and he’d be out there with us on the highway holding up signs as people drove by.

“It was his way of saying a final thank you.”