In the immediate aftermath of the ValleyStar Credit Union 300, Landon Huffman was walking through the inspection area with a purpose.
However, he was stopped with a question about Lee Pulliam and what the four-time NASCAR national champion means to Late Model Stock racing through the prism of what just transpired — a photo finish defeat at the hands of Landon Pembelton.
“It’s so funny you asked me that,” said Huffman, “because I’m literally trying to find Lee Pulliam right now to tell him that is why he needs to be in a race car every weekend.”
Pulliam — still just 37-years-old — doesn’t race much these days because it’s too expensive. Somewhere around six years ago, it became more financially agreeable for him to compete as a championship winning team owner and crew chief over stacking stats around the Mid-Atlantic.
And yet, in just his first race of the year, second race in two years and third race in five, the time away had taken nothing away from one of the Mount Rushmore drivers of this particular sub-discipline.
Pulliam was two laps away from winning his third Ridgeway Grandfather Clock when a late caution gave Pembelton one more chance. They traded bump-and-runs but nothing was too egregious. They raced like it was their Daytona 500 because that is exactly what the ValleyStar Credit Union 300 is to this community.
Upon climbing out of the car, Pulliam was greeted by wife Leanne and nine-year-old daughter Brantley. Giving a girl dad hug, Pulliam said he gave it all he had. He then turned around to face the media and told them that everything he and Pembelton did was fair game in Ridgeway.
“I don’t Blame Landon,” Pulliam said. “I’d have done the same thing, right? If you don’t do that, you’re not hungry enough. I tried to give it back to him. If I hit him any harder, he’s going to go around.
“The problem was when I had him picked up, I didn’t have enough weight on my back tires to get going off the corner and I just spun the tires all the way off. I tried to hit him in the door a couple of times down the frontstretch just to break his momentum but it wasn’t quite enough.”
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The next question was what this weekend taught Pulliam about himself. Someone in the scrum around him responded greatest of all time and that’s where the tears started swelling up in his eyes.
“This is what I love doing,” Pulliam said already sniffling. “I had such a good career and to come back and show these guys I can still get it done means a lot. I want to be remembered as a hard-nosed racer and someone you could never count out.
“This weekend meant a lot to me, personally.”
There was a stream of tears when asked if he still wants to do this full-time, even after finding a way to make a living guiding careers for the likes of Corey Heim, Brenden Queen and Lanie Buice.
“Of course,” he said. “That’s the dream man. It costs so much money to race nowadays and that’s the real reason I don’t get to do it. I have a family I have to take care of. I would love to do it every single week but it just takes a lot of sponsorship to make it happen.”
But gosh, the entire community wants him to find a way to make it happen, as do the fans cheering him on Saturday that used to boo him across the state for about a decade straight.
Huffman really wants him running CARS Tour with him every week.
“I want to race against Lee Pulliam every weekend because I want to beat Lee,” Huffman said. “No offense to the guys that are racing now but you want to beat the best and Lee has proven he is one of the best all-time.
“I want to go find him right now because I am going to tell him that I respect that everyone has to make a living but he is the identity of Late Model Stock racing. He gets out here and races once a year and almost took home a clock.
“He deserved it and he needs to know how much I want to do this with him all the time.”
Like Huffman, Andrew Grady grew up the son of a local North Carolina short tracker who spent summers racing against Pulliam too. Grady feels the same exact way as his fellow CARS Tour regular.
“Lee is a racer, a blue collar racing that has won everything here there is, but he is still Lee Pulliam,” Grady said. “He doesn’t try to be anyone else. I would run second to Lee Pulliam 100 times before I did anything dumb to win a race over him. That is how much I respect that man.
“He is a great father, husband, all-around great man and I wish he would race more because I think we another grizzly veteran like him to settle these kids down, to be honest.”
And in many ways, the next Lee Pulliam might be emerging in the form of Landon Pembelton, who is starting to gain a resume that suggests he should be racing on weekly television.
He just defeated Pulliam head-to-head to add a second clock in addition to the one he claimed back in 2021. He was 16 back then, 20 now, and was able to make a handful of ARCA starts with Toyota after winning this race the first time.
A second-generation Late Model racer, Pembelton didn’t win in his ARCA starts, just like when Pulliam raced for Shige Hattori in 2014. It wasn’t that neither driver was good enough, but like everything in life, it was about timing.
For his part, Pembelton is just proud to have bested Pulliam on this night and was compared to him in that moment.
“I would love to be in the same class as Lee Pulliam,” Pembelton said. “I am perfectly happy with that. If I could go to work five or six days a week and come race on the weekend, I could be perfectly content with that.
“If that’s what it boils down to, I just want to etch my name in the record books with guys like that.”
So now, after thrilling the short track world with their respective performances, Pembelton and Pulliam are bot waiting. Pembelton, at 20, hopes there is a second national touring look coming his way either from a manufacturer or a sponsor while Pulliam at 37 is waiting for someone to call him too.
“If he comes back and races full-time, we are all going to have to deal with a wheelman,” Pembelton said. “He just has a natural ability to wheel a race car. He makes his race cars look better than they are sometimes.
“When he was leading the race, I could tell it wasn’t where he wanted to be, but he just made it happen. And that’s where I want to be too. I want to find that natural ability and have been working really hard at it.
“All I can do is work hard at is and bring good cars to the racetrack and I feel like we did that this weekend.”
