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Do I miss the grind? After 20 years of writing about 80 percent of the stops on the NASCAR tour -- somewhere around 500 Sprint (and Nextel and Winston) Cup races, and God knows how many Xfinity, Truck, IROC, modified, late model and dirt races -- I go now to none.

Insofar as Cup is concerned, my streak of not being there has reached 126 races.

For every race run since January 4, 2013, I haven't been present.

My one visit to a track has been Laurens County Speedway, a 3/8-mile layout conveniently located just eight miles away. A friend from out of town drove over, and we had a ball.

No. I don't miss the grind. I'm as happy as a clam to sit in my living room, watch the race and take a few notes. I scour the transcripts for words of wisdom. Finding little, I settle for remarks that make some modest sense. It's hard to comprehend the vast array of pertinent questions no one seems to ask.

Some years back, I spent a weekend at Michigan International Speedway as "a TV guy." The newspaper owned a TV station in the area, so I was assigned to appear on some morning variety show and had a camera crew follow me around for interviews from the track.

For the first and last time in those two decades at the track, PR reps were asking me to interview their drivers. It was the journalistic version of "no shirts, no shoes, no problem," though, of course, I did wear shirts and shoes.

Since my job at a North Carolina newspaper was eliminated in early 2013, NASCAR has stopped providing estimates, laughable though they were, of attendance and disclosure of how much money each team won. I can't believe my onetime colleagues let them get away with it.

I can't say for sure. I can merely make educated guesses, but it seems to me that writing about NASCAR has become a matter for most print journalists of taking the same information and trying to outwrite everyone else who has it. I liken it to the annual Soil and Water Conservation Essay I entered when I was in junior high school.

I miss my buddies in the garage, the ones who'd usher me to some private place between the haulers and tell me the latest chicanery NASCAR was trying to pull. I don't miss the PR reps who would respond to my requests for interviews by putting me off until I just gave up. It got worse and worse the last few years on the beat. I’m satisfied it’s much worse now, partly because of what friends tell me.

"Well, thanks, Mike, but what I really wanted to talk about was getting ready for the Brickyard 400, and since I started asking you and emailing you and leaving messages on your cell a month before Indy, and now it's a month after Indy, ah, just forget about it, I reckon."

I outlasted lots of my colleagues, and, though it didn't seem that way at the time, it now feels like fate scheduled my departure at an opportune time.