Last November, I sat down with Rich Kuty. Rich was the man behind a wonderful tribute paid to two of the most heralded drivers of Modified racing at the track where we lost them, Martinsville Speedway. Kuty convinced Dave Malcomson, the owner of the #8 Craftsman Truck Series team for which Rich works, to honor Richie Evans and Charlie Jarzombek at the Kroger 200 last October.

WN: Tell me how you got your start in racing.

RK: I started off racing go-karts on Long Island at Islip Speedway. My father was a race driver at Islip Speedway, raced in the Figure-8’s in multiple different cars. I never had the top-notch equipment but I was always able to make the races. We moved off of Long Island in 1980 to Upstate New York. I got into a little dirt racing up there but never had the money to really do anything so just farted around with it.

WN: Why did your family move Upstate?

RK: We moved up near Syracuse just for a change. My parents just wanted to get away from everything. That’s exactly what they did. They moved from Long Island to where our nearest neighbor was about a mile away. My uncle bought an apple farm and that’s what we did. My father’s pool business had kind went south in 1980 so that was sort of the ultimate decision maker. And [I] really stayed involved in racing here or there because of my father.

WN: What brought you down to North Carolina?

RK: Weather? [Almost sarcastically] We had a twelve foot snow storm last year and that was kind of the final decision maker. We’ve got two kids, four and a year and a half and the younger one had really never seen grass before. We came down here in April to visit my father in-law. We had to make the move before my son started school. We didn’t want him to start school and have to pull him out and put him in another school. We chose Charlotte because of the racing.

I raced legend cars for three years. I did a tribute to Richie Evans by driving the #61-5/8 because the Legends are 5/8 scale. We knew Charlotte was the home of racing and I had done some marketing for a couple of teams but never really got any credit for it. We figured we’d come down here and make a go of it.

WN: You’re working with MRD. Tell me how you were able to convince MRD to put this tribute on the back of the truck?

RK: Martinsville is a very special racetrack to me. It’s where two of my favorite drivers were ultimately taken from the sport. Those are Charlie Jarzombek and Richie Evans. We have Garmin and the GPS Store as our sponsors for the year. Knowing that Chad [McCumbee] is going to Petty Enterprises next year we did leave two races available for driver development to see which direction we may go next year. Those two races [Martinsville and Phoenix] are unsponsored.

With the association that I have with Martinsville I said to the owner, “I know we don’t have a sponsor. There are a couple of drivers that were really special there that were killed at Martinsville and I’d like to make a tribute to them. Since we did not have sponsor obligations or have to confer with anyone he said “Let’s do it.” Looking back, I wish I could have had contact with both families to talk to them and let them know ahead of time what we wanted to do and that sort of thing but this thing came together in a matter of a week. We thought at that point it best to do it and beg for forgiveness later. We’ve gotten a lot of positive response from it.

WN: In speaking with Rick Jarzombek, he felt that the decals your team used were fantastic and incredibly authentic looking.

RK: We got those decals from a fellow Modified enthusiast in upstate New York. I believe that whoever did them furnished them to us free of charge as well.

WN: I guess they thought this tribute was a long time coming too.

RK: I’m just glad we could do it. I am shocked and amazed that no one has done this before. These are two people that when you talk about NASCAR in the northeast; those are the first two people you thought of. They were not in the Nextel Cup or Grand National Series. These were two pioneers of the sport and nobody had really done anything outside of the Modified Tour for them.

Rich no longer works with MRD. He started a business called Kuty Motorsports Marketing and is working with some fast company. Teams like DEI, Red Horse Racing and Eddie D’Hondt work with Kuty on their promotional endeavors. Rich can be reached by email at kutysmotorsportsmarketing@hotmail.com.

I know that I can speak on behalf of everyone in the Modified community. This was one of the nicest things that anyone could have done to remember Richie and Charlie. Our thanks go out to Rich Kuty, Dave Malcomson, the MRD team, to the this point anonymous person who provided the graphics and Rob Havens, who shot the photos.