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About the archive

This site is an independent reference to NASCAR racing built around one narrow piece of the sport's record: the practice and qualifying sheets that a news site called Racin.net posted during the 2000 Winston Cup season, and that English Wikipedia still cites in a dozen articles. The domain lapsed years ago and was re-registered. Nobody involved in the original site, in NASCAR, at any track or on any team has a hand in this rebuild. What follows explains the scope, the limits and the method, in that order.

What this site is

Racin.net today is an archive and a reference, kept by an outside writer with a long habit of reading race reports. It holds pages for eleven races from the 2000 NASCAR Winston Cup Series, one for each event whose old Racin.net practice or qualifying sheet is linked from that race's Wikipedia article, plus a page on the ARCA driver Shawna Robinson for the same reason. Around those pages sit reference material for a general reader: the drivers who mattered that season, the ten tracks the archived races used, a summary of the season and a short history of the sport. Every result, date and measurement on the site comes from a page that was fetched and read before the sentence was written, and each page lists the sources it drew on. Where two sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking one quietly. The old addresses that Wikipedia links to resolve here, so a reader who follows a citation written years ago lands on a page that explains what the citation pointed at.

What it is not

  • Not affiliated with NASCAR, with any sanctioning body, with any track, team, sponsor or driver named on the site.
  • Not connected to the people who ran the original Racin.net between roughly 1999 and 2005. None of them were consulted and none of their text is reproduced.
  • Not a news outlet. Nothing here is reported live, nothing is timed live, and no page will tell you where to buy a ticket.
  • Not a store of the original practice speeds. The old sheets listed lap times and speeds; this rebuild says that they existed and what race they belonged to, and quotes a figure only when a fetched source supplies it.

The independence line is worth repeating in plain words: this is a private, unaffiliated project that uses a lapsed domain name because that name is what the citations point to. It carries no endorsement from anyone.

What Racin.net was

The original Racin.net described itself as offering racing news and results directly from the source, and for roughly 1999 to 2005 it did that at volume: results and speed sheets from Winston Cup practice and qualifying sessions, filed track by track and session by session under addresses such as /wcup/races/00/dover/1/prac3.shtml, alongside ARCA news. Those sheets were useful enough that, long after the site went dark, editors writing Wikipedia's race articles for the 2000 season cited them as references for who ran fastest in practice. When the domain lapsed, those citations broke. That broken link is the whole reason this rebuild exists.

How the archive is built

The starting point was a list of 24 old Racin.net addresses gathered from Wikipedia's external-link records, covering 12 articles. Each address was mapped to the race it belonged to, using the track name and race number embedded in the path, which produced the eleven race pages and the one driver page. For each race, the writer fetched the race's English Wikipedia article and took the date, winner, pole sitter, lap count and distance from it, omitting any field the article did not state. Track and driver pages were built the same way from the relevant Wikipedia articles. The text was then written fresh, in past tense, from those notes. The site is a static build: a set of JSON records rendered into plain HTML pages, with each of the old paths mapped to the page that now stands for it.

Old links kept working is the promise. Everything else on the site is there to keep that promise honest.