Never one to stand still, Brightbill soon jumped in a different direction and was a hero there as well.
“After Reading closed up, I saw that NDRA had late model races paying $10,000 to win,” he said. “Reading had paid $1,200 at the end, so 10 grand looked pretty good.
“I built a car and at the first race we set fast time. But once the track dried out, those guys had the best setups and I finished way back. But we learned fast and won four or five with NDRA — Hagerstown, Brownstown, Metrolina and the Charlotte Fairgrounds in North Carolina — as well as with other sanctions at Tampa and Volusia.
“When I drove some for Brad Malcuit, we had way better funding. When I ran for myself, we’d leave home with hardly enough money in our pockets to get there and had to run good to get back home. It was definitely a learning experience.”
Brightbill also had a fling with sprint cars.
“They were close to where we lived but at the time, Reading was paying more than the sprint tracks. I built a sprint car one winter, went to Florida with it and then came home and ran Williams Grove,” he explained. “It came to me that I had a late model, a sprint car and a modified and hardly any money to run any of them, so I decided to concentrate on the modifieds.”
Brightbill also had a fling at NASCAR interspersed with his dirt-track exploits.
“My first race was in ’74 with Walter Ballard. Pocono had a ‘big chance’ vote and I won it,” Brightbill said. “Walter still had a big block when everyone was going to small blocks, but we timed 19th fastest and finished 10th in the race. A couple of weeks later, Dover rented Norris Reed’s car that Ramo Stott ran at Daytona for me, and we finished eighth.
“My next ride was in Junie Donlavey’s car. We broke a valve, but it stuck in the head and we still ran seventh,” Brightbill continued. “Then I ran Jimmy Makar’s car and got a 12th and a 22nd at Pocono before we crashed hard at Dover. After that, Dick Brooks left Donlavey, so I called him about the ride. He said he had me and Ricky Rudd in mind, but Rudd’s father had $80,000 for tires. He said if he had me for a year, I’d be ready for war, but that’s the way it is.
“I could have kept taking other rides and might have made it but who knows. We ran in the top 10 there at Dover and got $2,000 and I was doing better than that up here.”
Syracuse was another major episode in Brightbill’s career, though he says, “I don’t know yet if I liked the place or not. I do know that you had to run steady, stay out of trouble and be there at the end. I’d get in a rhythm in any race I ran and the longer the race, the better I was.
“I had a Troyer we kept just for Syracuse and I ran it for 10 years,” Brightbill noted. “We sat on the pole the first year. It was comfortable to drive and I had six or seven top-10 finishes with that car. And I should have had two wins there. When Billy Osmun won, I had a half straightaway lead on him and the motor let go. I’d led the most laps, so that hurt.”
When Reading’s Lindy Vicari took over the 1.125-mile Nazareth National dirt track, Brightbill ran there instead of Syracuse.
“I went to Nazareth and it rained, so they ran it a month later,” he remembered. “The track was rough due to a lot of rain, but we won it. That was $15,000 cash. The next year I missed a couple of races there because I was running late models, but he had a $50,000-to-win race late in the season. I got him to use less water and let it slick off and you could run anywhere. Hoosier came to me and said they’d really like to win that race and we got the car going good and won from 15th, so they were happy.
“That was probably the best mile I’ve been on. You could pass and the dogleg where the people sat made it more interesting for them. It’s a shame the track just sits there now, all weeds.”
When asked to summarize his career, Brightbill chuckled.
“I tried to run clean,” he said. “At Reading, everybody pretty much respected each other and if you didn’t, they paid you back. If you’re racing for the money, you might better run the leader clean and finish second instead of not at all.”