If you grew up around auto racing, American style, over the past 40 years, then you’re aware that Sammy Swindell, the soft-spoken star from Germantown, Tennessee, is one of America’s greatest Sprint car drivers, ever, going back to the days of Bob Burman and Babe Stapp. If you were lucky enough to chase Sprint cars in the 1980s, when the World of Outlaws was a relatively new thing, you know that Swindell was part of the GOAT trio of legends that did battle at every single show, the others being Swindell’s fellow megastars, Steve Kinser and Doug Wolfgang. There’s a lot more to the Swindell story, however, and there’s finally a book that tells it all.
The book’s cover is no exaggeration: Swindell, who tells his story here with the help of the acclaimed racing historians Bones Bourcier and Bob Mays, has been winning consistently for more than 50 years now, and is still doing it to this day. He’s primarily a Sprint car guy, but this sprawling 348-page hardcover reveals he had the pure talent to dabble strongly in other disciplines, including IndyCar, the NASCAR Busch series and even on Trans-Am road courses. An icon like Sammy, one of racing’s true good guys, deserves an iconic piece of literature to tell his story. Sammy!, with a foreword by our friend Dr. Dick Berggren, is offered for sale by Coastal 181 of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which publishes and stocks a bushel of vital books on racing just like this one.
Jim Donnelly On Wheels 