‘Mr. September’ returns to open NASCAR’s weekend in Charlotte in this special way
Harry Gant answered the phone. He wasn’t sure what to think.
It was May 20. Nighttime. He’d just trudged into his home in Taylorsville, North Carolina, after saying his final goodbyes to his younger brother, Johnny. Johnny had resided in hospice after suffering his second heart attack in the same year. The time was coming, sure, but the loss hurt nonetheless.
Mere hours had gone by since Johnny’s passing, and Harry was still raw, emotional — missing the brother who built houses while Harry himself built race cars and a massive legacy on top of them.
“I was down there when he passed away,” Gant said earlier this week. “So I come home, and when I walk in, the phone rings. It was Andy Petree, the crew chief when I was with Leo Jackson there. And he said, ‘Congratulations!’”
Gant was confused.
“For what?” Gant responded. All that was on his mind was his brother, after all: The U.S. veteran who served in Korea, the lifelong member of Stony Point Baptist Church, the youth sports coach, the husband, the father.
Eventually, Petree told Gant he had been voted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He was “Mr. September,” of course. “Handsome Harry.” “High Groove Harry.” “The Bandit,” because of the acclaim he got from winning so much in that No. 33 green Skoal Bandit car. Gant still, to this day, holds the record for oldest driver to win a Cup race, at 52, and oldest driver to win a Cup pole, at 54.
But truth be told, on that day, getting into the Hall presented “a mixed feeling” for Gant.
“And it stayed that way,” Gant said. “I couldn’t think much of either one until we had the funeral and everything. I’m just now kind of thinking about the Hall of Fame, really.”
That’s what might make this weekend so special to Gant:
He’ll soon get a chance to reflect.
Harry Gant and the car he loved
On Friday night, Gant will lead the annual hauler parade prior to the NASCAR weekend at the Charlotte road course. It’ll begin at the Charlotte Motor Speedway dirt track and carve all the way to Smith Tower; the parade will be punctuated by fireworks and a Tim Dugger concert.
Just like the spectacle always has, it’ll set the stage for the Xfinity Series playoff race at the Roval. It begins at 5 p.m. Saturday; the Cup Series playoff race starts at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Something that makes it even more special: Gant will lead the parade sitting in the front seat of the car that yielded him the name “Mr. September” — the car chassis he ran in and won four Cup races in a row in September 1991. Yes, that one: The green No. 33 car with Skoal as the primary sponsor.
Bring that car up to Gant, and happy memories flood. Of the wins, sure, but also of the close losses that make him chuckle today. He still remembers the North Wilkesboro Speedway race right after his fourth win in a row, the one where he was in a good shape to win a fifth one before his brakes “gave out” on him and Dale Earnhardt ended up edging him out for the win. (He clarified with a hearty laugh: He still won the pole; a healthy payday still came.)
Gant hadn’t seen the car in a long time. He said he’s looking forward to Friday.
But Gant isn’t the only one with memories that could be unearthed on Friday evening. Many have already been rediscovered; they harken back to a special time and place in the sport of racing.
For access to those memories, you need to take a trip to Concord. And meet a man named Pee Wee.
‘It just feels like memories to me’
If you walked into the Trackhouse Racing race shop at some point earlier this week, you couldn’t miss it. It still looked like it did on the outside, with its green and white paint with a whole bunch of sponsored stickers on its right door.
Duck your head inside the car, and you’ll see the same seat Gant once sat in. On the dashboard you’ll see Harry Gant’s signature alongside that of Leo Jackson, the owner of the car at the time. Pop the hood, and everything is the same as it was in 1991. It’s fit with a race motor, and there’s even an inscription written in Sharpie on one of the metal tubes that reads, “X - 100,000.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Eric Hoyle said, pointing at the markings, chuckling.
And if anyone would know, Hoyle would.
Hoyle is the man everyone calls Pee Wee because an old colleague thought he looked like Pee-wee Herman. (“I never saw that in me,” he said with a chuckle.) Hoyle works full-time at Trackhouse and is in charge of the fuel systems for all the organization’s Cup cars.
“I do all the weird projects, too,” he said.
One of the weird projects, of course, has involved tuning up the No. 33 car — the same chassis that won the four races in September piloted by Harry Gant. The car had previously belonged to Andy Petree before Justin Marks, the owner of Trackhouse Racing, bought the Skoal Bandit car from him.
“Everything about it is legit,” Hoyle said. You could see it in the tiniest of intricacies that even Hoyle wouldn’t fully explain for fear I wouldn’t understand: How the tires are tilted a certain way to get better grip, for instance, and how “some motor stuff going on back then required a lot of creativity.” The car represents a particular time in NASCAR history. The only parts you bought from NASCAR, back in the day, were the nose, the roof and the back bumper. The rest was “a flat piece of metal, and a person in the shop made it — and they did it fast.”
It was a sight to see, the making and driving of a car like this.
And it will be again Friday.
“I like the old, vintage car,” Hoyle said. “Back then, they used to look like cars. And I always had my favorites. You think back: You had Earnhardt’s car, or Richard Petty. Everybody stayed true to their brand.”
Hoyle then pointed to the car in front of him: “There will be a lot of people who obviously have no clue what it is. And then there will be people who will love it. I like the way it sounds. … It just feels like memories to me.”
One person who surely knows what the car is, and what it represents, is Gant. Seeing it will probably feel like memories to him, too — ones of a Hall of Fame career that are just now starting to soak in.
This story was originally published October 2, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘Mr. September’ returns to open NASCAR’s weekend in Charlotte in this special way."
