In June of 1996 I opened up my site, "Alex's NASCAR Pit Shop," on AOL's point and click page creation tools. I sure wish I still had that page. It had a link to the IWCCCars Project, a link to NASCAR.com, and a link to Papyrus. From there I posted a few cars and soon enough built my first real site. You can still catch a working copy of it here. The site quickly gathered a following and in January of 1997, I purchased the domain nascarnet.com. The original purpose of the site was as a community site and portal to the best NASCAR Sim sites on the Internet. With support from sites like Speed, Pit Road, and several others, the site grew quickly. All the while I was maintaining ANPS. Shorthly after the release of nascarnet.com came the initial re-design of ANPS. Most of you probably knew that one if any. It was the one with the Black Background, bright green text, and old school wwwboard messaging. I continued to create cars for N2 and moved into track creation and editing. I had some help getting started from Gerhard and Dave Noonan as well as a few others and created USA Speedway and California from Tally and Michigan clones. I was always intrigued by realistic tracks that we could not have, so I then sunk my time into creating realistic versions of the converted Indy track.

Then came the dark days, sites began dropping like flies with all of the bickering, blaming, and name calling. The sites had outgrown their current measures and needed constants monitoring due to the outright sabotage from some members of our community. With little support for the site, I closed nascarnet.com and moved ANPS to the nascarnet.com domain. The state of the board and site overall continued to deteriorate, with almost constant name calling and flaming on the board, and six months between updates due to classes while I was in college. Towards the middle of my Senior year at Miami University, I decided to rebuild nascarnet.com and give it a hugely updated and modern feel and allow it to serve the purpose that I had originally intended as well as combine all of the qualities that ANPS originally had. So I began building.

At roughly this time TomM joined us to moderate the deteriorating old board. It seemed every few days an "I hate Gary C" thread would show up and need to be deleted before causing an explosion. I spent roughly four months of all of my free time to develop the site. I employed the community aspect of Discussions and File Sharing, as well as the full featured aspects of ANPS with News, Reviews, Links, and especially Files. The new site was launched in March 2000 shrtly after our 1,000,000th visitor. The site grew quickly through the summer of 2000 culminating with the visits of the Hasbro/MGI guys near the realease of HEAT. Once the Heat hoopla cooled down the site started to stagnate again. Then came the final push to get me back into the swing of things.

NASCAR Racing 4 was released and with it came a huge amount of freedom in painting and an overall greatly improved game. This game release inspired me once again to get back into the site and one more re-design, only this time much more minor that the previous ones. After a slight re-organization, a server change, and a whole bunch of great new team members, the site is now in full swing. I have had lots of fun over the past years and hope this little history lesson has been fun for you. Hope to see you around for some time.