Jeff Fultz and the JCR3 Racing team will be back in action this weekend, as the USAR Hooters Pro Cup Series continues on with the “Four Champions” Championship Series, running at Mansfield Motorsports Park. However, the team will be racing with heavy hearts.
One of their former competitors and closest friends, Charlie Bradberry, was killed last weekend in an auto accident in Alabama. Bradberry was a regular on the NASCAR Southeast Series when Fultz and the team were running there. Fultz finished second to Bradberry in the 2003 Southeast Series Championship point standings.
“I just don’t know. I don’t know how you even word what Charlie meant to people,” said Jeff Fultz. “To me, he was like one of your brothers. Take out the racing part; he was just a great friend and a great person.
“We did a lot together. We were competitors, but at the same time, we really respected each other. I just don’t know how to put it into words. He was a lot younger than me, but at the same time, we horsed around a lot and had a lot of good memories together. It is so horrifying when something like that happens in the blink of an eye. Not just for what his future might have been, but just to lose the guy he was.
“We lost someone who was very talented when it came to racing, but to me, I didn’t look at it as that as much as I looked at it as losing someone who touched us the way he did. With any person he met, Charlie was just kind.
He wasn’t a mean racer. He wasn’t any of that. He was just a good guy. We lost a true friend more than we lost anything else.”
Fultz would love to win the Alan Kulwicki Memorial Sears Auto Center 250 in honor of his late friend. The race is scheduled for a 6 p.m. green flag on Saturday night.
