When NASCAR was conceived by Bill France Sr. and his gang down in Daytona, the Modified Division was the flagship series of stock car racing and to this day it still is the most widespread form of stock car racing.

Unlike the top three divisions in NASCAR, modifieds race anywhere, all the time, running multiple races every week in every corner of North America and beyond. If you haven't visited a local track that runs modifieds, you're missing what stock car racing is all about.

NASCAR validated it's Modified Division by throwing Evans in the mix on this first Hall of Fame ballot, but then discounted his legacy by leaving off three other modified champions that made "The 50 Greatest NASCAR Drivers Of All Time".

Untold millions of modified fans flinched when they saw the omissions, or choked like I did.

Unlike the three top divisions of NASCAR, the Modified and Late Model Division drivers are intertwined for life.

Richie Evans is a shoo-in for a Hall of Fame spot...but there would be no Richie Evans without a Jerry Cook, and there would be no Jerry Cook without a Bugs Stevens, same for Ray Hendrick, DeSarro, Ruggiero, and the rest. They're linked together for life and for some, in death.

In honor of NASCAR's grass roots and the men and women that race for the love of racing, in honor of the racers that were inexplicably absent from the list of 25 nominees, stock car racing immortals such as Ray Hendrick, Bugs Stevens, Geoff Bodine, Jerry Cook, Fred DeSarro and a host of other national and local champions; One would think that nine national championships, eight in a row, would earn some measure of respect from NASCAR racing fans but I'm willing to bet that when the list of 25 nominees was released Richie Evans was the biggest hit on Google.

Richie Evans was a quintessential New Englander who started racing modifieds in 1965 at his local track near Rome, New York. Ironically, the man that made him and his biggest competitor, six-time NASCAR champion Jerry Cook, was born in the same town...two years and a week earlier.

It took eight seasons to notch his first championship, then, five years later at the end of 1978, he won number two. Evans never relinquished the title, he died in a practice lap at Martinsville Speedway as the reigning national champion for the 1985 season, clinching the title the week before his death.

For twenty seasons Evans traveled, raced, and won all over the east coast from Ontario, Canada to New Smyrna Beach, Florida and any and all Modified Division tracks in between. In 1979, NASCAR got the crazy idea to run modifieds on the superspeedways at Daytona and Pocono and Richie Evans won those too.

Evans won over 480 races during that odyssey and my father and I had the pleasure of watching him work his magic on the asphalt of Martinsville, Hickory and Winston-Salem in the late '70s.

The atmosphere at those races was nothing like the demeanor of today's Sprint Cup crowd. It was tense. It was serious. It was real fans, leaning over the back rail, checking for numbers on cars pulling up to the infield gate, there was going to be racing here tonight, hard racing.

I can see them up there leaning on the back fence at Martinsville now, pointing and whispering, elbowing each other as another trailer turns into the track...

"There's Ray and that flamin' #11 from over Richmond way...Ol' Blue #3 showed up, Freddie made it! There's the 'Woodchopper' #15 coming in, you know Bugs is here!, I see the #1...Charlie's here, Bodine brought the #99! I don't see...there they are! The #38 and the "Rusty Nail" are coming in together!"

For giving me bigger goose-bumps at Bowman-Gray than I had at Charlotte, Dover and Darlington combined, I nominated #61, Richie Evans, as a first ballot inductee to NASCAR's Hall of Fame.

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