that they weren't incorporated in use in 1970's. But this notion is
wrong. In fact,
several teams, including Bud Moore, Junior Johnson and the Wood
Brothers were
using radios from 1960 on. Bud Moore had one in Jack Smith's Pontiac
for the
World 600 in 1960 (in the film of the event, you can actually see this
***y huge
CB antenna on the trucklid!). Glen Wood still talks about how many
races Curtis
Turner could have won for them in the late '60's if he would have
stopped turning the
radio off (typical Curtis :-). Petty Enterprises never said yes or no
to when or if they
used radio's back then, but I've got film from the early 70's of Dale
Inman at
Martinsville picking up a Coke can to take a cold sip of cola......but
if you look
close, you can see it's not a drink at all, but he had a mic for a
two-way hidden in
the damned can!!!!
Now, mind you, they weren't necessarily two way radios, and probably
the "spotter" as we know it today wasn't common. Mainly, they were
for
crews to communicate with the driver's,and the driver normally had a
signal system
worked out. The reason for this was that the radios' weren't very
reliable, as I
understand. You'd end up with trucker's talking on the channel,
houswife's gossiping, and it
could make for a mess, with some driver's coming in to soon, or
staying on the track
too long, hence running out of gas (per Richard Petty's autobiography,
"King
Richard I").
But the point is, there were some teams (not all, mind you, but some)
who used
radio's in those days. The call as to weather the player should use
them would
depend on how you'd like to race the era.
Brandon Reed
Reed Racing & Engineering/Team Tabasco