So a bit of a different perspective for this one, with Joe Moore. If you're wondering who in the world he is, he's in NurfHurdur's stories, Hard Enough Left and Life's Highway as one of Piston Cup's admin people.
Joe Moore had known Lynda Weathers since before she was a Weathers. He had watched her grow up from a young girl, and her blossom into a lovely young woman. He had watched her get married to Strip Weathers and then them becoming the premiere couple around the track. Where Lynda was Strip wasn't far behind and vice versa.
Over the years the couple had been nicknamed The King and The Queen of Piston Cup, and it was fitting that they be called so. Lynda had become known as the track mother as she aged and as for Strip, he truly was king of the track, while keeping humble about it. The two of them made the behind the scenes part of racing a friendly place to be, always willing to lead a hand or show someone around.
This race was the last race before retirement for Strip and it wasn't even one that anybody thought he'd race. No one had seen this race coming and certainly not the outcome of it. Who could have predicted that the last race of the season was going to end in a three way tie, leading up to this tiebreaker race; which in turn, ended up having its own set of surprises and upsets.
First it all started with the rookie going missing, his driver turning up at the track missing both the rookie and his stock car. That had made him think about another racer who had disappeared under different circumstances. Though, he suspected he knew where Jesse Hudson was, and it wasn't dead like some were speculating. When the rookie turned up in a town called Radiator Springs; where he was positive that Lynda's aunt and uncle had lived, though he'd have to check with Lynda on that, but he suspected that Jesse Hudson was her uncle and that the rookie would have run into him. Only for that to be confirmed after the race started.
Kids were only so good at keeping secrets and he knew Lynda before she got to the stage that she was good at keeping them. She couldn't have been more than six the first time Alex had brought her with him, he had then promptly forgot about his daughter being there and left her on her own. That didn't sit right with him, and he wasn't someone who had ever really dealt with kids before that, but he knew enough about them that one so young shouldn't be left alone in a public place like that. So, he had taken her under his wing so to speak, he had taken her to get a snack and had asked her questions about racing to see what she knew. He had gotten back some smart answers.
Then she started talking about her Aunt Emily and her Uncle Jesse, 'I mean Uncle Aaron'. She had told him about how her 'Uncle Jes- Aaron' had told her about Louise Nash and how she had beaten her father in one race particular, saying that was one of her favourite stories he'd tell her. That first time, he had looked after her, she always wanted to call her uncle, Jesse instead of Aaron. At the time he just brushed it off, being relieved when she was retrieved by Emily.
That wasn't the last time it happened though and it soon it became a tradition of theirs. Anytime Lynda was brought with her father she always visited with him and on one of the earliest visits with her, she had taken to calling him Uncle Joe, and it stuck.
He was only slightly surprised to get a wedding invitation to hers and Weathers wedding. He had heard the reaction of Alex to Strip asking for Lynda's hand in marriage, and Alex had made it really hard to keep it quiet about him refusing to go to her wedding. It wasn't a surprise for anyone at the wedding, that Alex wasn't there. He had ended up going though, and when he saw who was walking her down the isle his vague suspicions were confirmed; he wasn't going to say anything but Lynda's uncle was indeed Jesse Hudson.
It had given him a bit of a start, when he first recognized just who was walking Lynda down the isle. It may have been almost 30 years since he had last seen Jesse Hudson, but there was no denying that it was him.
Other than that first shock of seeing him and realizing that it was him, it didn't actually surprise him. Not when he had talked to all the Piston kids at one time and them letting something suspicious slip, something that would only make sense if their uncle was Jesse Hudson.
It had been interesting to watch him at Lynda's wedding, showing the tenderness that anyone who really knew him, knew he had, but rarely if ever showed in public. Seeing him and Emily dance together, made him realize just how much the two of them loved each other, it was blatant to see and nobody would be able to dispute it. It made sense as to why Emily never brought her husband to any racing events she did make it to. He would have been swarmed.
After his crash and when he had tried to come back to race, it was handled wrong. It had never sat well with him how much Jesse had been caught off guard. It was mishandled from the beginning, and at the time all he could do was watch, and help separate him from Alex when a physical fight broke out between the two. Alex hadn't helped anything back then and he couldn't blame Jesse for storming out like he had at the time, after it all went down. So, when he went missing a few months later, he was sad it had come to that. It had spread quickly through the Piston Cup grape vine that Hudson wouldn't be back to racing and that he had vanished.
Which brought him back to what Edward Piston had wistfully told him one day, that he had wished there was some way he could have convinced his son-in-law to take over instead of Alex, he would have been a much better fit. Knowing exactly who his son-in-law was, he had to agree that Jesse Hudson would have been a better fit, not that he'd mention that he knew 'Aaron' was actually Jesse. Edward's health had been visibly starting to fail at that confession though, so he hadn't put much though into it at the time.
That brought him back to today's race again. The rookie had started off racing poorly and obviously distracted by something. Then part way into the race, he had a phone call from a kid in security saying that a Jesse Hudson had told him to tell him, he needed into pit lane to be #95's crew. The kid also mentioned he had shown up in a Hudson Hornet painted with #51 Fabulous Hudson Hornet on the sides. Well, who was he to deny the Fabulous Hudson Hornet entrance, the rookie needed a crew anyway.
Alex had thrown up a fuss, no surprise there, but it was high time for Jesse Hudson to come back to the sport in some capacity. He hadn't thought that he'd come across Jesse again; especially after Emily passed and it made him think that he should take a tour of the pits after the race, it had been a while since he'd done that. It became a necessity after Strip's crash that he go down there, for Lynda's sake of course, not to check on a man he hadn't talked to in over 50 years, but had been in a crash that had certainly looked similar.