Most of today’s racers at the Willamette Speedway were in diapers or weren’t even born when Tom Pitts started driving on the one-third-mile dirt oval track.
The year was 1964 €“ as close as Pitts can recall now, 45 years later €“ and he’d actually been driving in the destruction derbies in Salem with his buddies when the idea of racing stock cars first came to him.
“My dad used to scrap cars on the…