On August 26, 1996, Jayski’s Silly Season Site was born.
Thirty years later, Jayski.com is still here.
That alone is something worth celebrating. The internet of 1996 bears very little resemblance to the internet of today. The way NASCAR teams distribute information has changed. The way fans get their news has changed. Social media didn’t exist when Jayski started. Smartphones didn’t exist. Many of the newspapers, magazines and websites that once covered NASCAR extensively are gone.
Jayski has changed, too.
The site has gone through three pretty distinct eras — the early independent years, the ESPN years and the return to independence in 2019.
One thing that hasn’t changed is Jay involvement.
Jay is semi-retired these days, but he still owns Jayski, remains involved in decisions about the site and continues to maintain portions of our statistics. Jay has always maintained control over Jayski and continues to do so.
So while a lot has changed over 30 years, Jay is still Jayski.
A little early Jayski history
The site didn’t even start as Jayski.com.
In 1996, it could be found at pro-usa.net/~jayski. By 1997, it had moved to www.intserv.com/~jayski.
Then Jay asked readers to help decide what the permanent home should be.
The choices were Jayski.com and Sillyseason.com.
Jayski won by quite a bit.
Jayski.com debuted on June 11, 1997, and that’s where we’ve been ever since.
There are a lot more people and milestones that are part of those 30 years, particularly some of the people who helped Jay during the site’s early days.
But for this anniversary, we’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what Jayski should be in the years ahead.
And a big part of the answer is everything the site already has.
Turning 30 years of information into a NASCAR archive
Jayski has accumulated an incredible amount of NASCAR history.
Much of it wasn’t originally created as “history.” It was just the news of the day.
A sponsorship announcement in 1998 was news. A new paint scheme in 2003 was news. A race result, team change, crew chief announcement or silly season rumor was something fans wanted to know at that moment.
Twenty or thirty years later, those same things have become part of the historical record of the sport.
That’s changed the way we’re looking at Jayski.
We want the site to remain a place to find out what’s happening in NASCAR today. But we also want it to be a place where fans, researchers and media can find what happened years or even decades ago.
Rebuilding the news archives
One of the biggest projects we’ve completed actually started last year.
For years, much of Jayski’s older news was stored on large daily, monthly or yearly archive pages. The information was still there, but finding one particular item from 15 or 20 years ago wasn’t always easy.
News dating back to 1998 was separated into individual posts, giving those old items their own place on the site and making them searchable.
Those posts were also categorized by driver. Today, more than 1,100 drivers have their own archive on Jayski, allowing visitors to go back through years of news associated with a particular driver.
You can also browse the archives by date or search for names, teams, tracks, sponsors and other information.
The scale of the project is probably best illustrated by one number: Jayski now has roughly 98,000 individual posts.
That’s a lot of NASCAR history that is much easier to find than it was a few years ago.
And we’ll keep working on it.
Rebuilding historical race results
Another major project has been rebuilding Jayski’s historical race results.
Cup Series race results on the site now extend all the way back to NASCAR’s first Strictly Stock season in 1949. We’ve also added historical O’Reilly Auto Parts Series results dating to 1982 and Craftsman Truck Series results dating to the series’ inaugural 1995 season.
And we’re doing more than just posting old finishing orders.
We’ve been building individual race pages and season indexes and reconnecting them to original Jayski race-weekend pages where those pages still exist. We’ve restored non-points races and worked to preserve additional information such as sponsors, manufacturers, teams and other race details whenever we can.
We’ve also started making the archive searchable.
The historical race-results search currently lets visitors dig through decades of results by driver and track, with options to narrow results by year and finishing position. It’s something we’re continuing to develop as we work through the enormous amount of historical data on the site.
There’s still plenty to do.
More than 63,000 paint schemes
Few things are more closely associated with Jayski than paint schemes.
For decades, fans have come to the site to see what their favorite driver’s car would look like that weekend.
Those galleries have also quietly become one of the largest visual archives of modern NASCAR history.
There are now more than 63,000 paint-scheme images in the Jayski archives.
We’ve spent considerable time this year going through those archives, identifying images across decades of galleries and looking at how the information associated with them can be organized more consistently.
That’s important because an old paint-scheme gallery shouldn’t have to remain just an old paint-scheme gallery.
Eventually, we’d like to make it possible to find schemes by driver, car number, sponsor, team, season, race and other information.
Someone looking for a particular car from 2004 shouldn’t have to remember which page it might have appeared on and then scroll through dozens of images hoping to spot it.
The pictures are already here.
Now we need to make them easier to find.
Connecting the pieces
That’s really the larger goal for Jayski.
For most of the site’s history, information accumulated naturally.
News went in one place. Paint schemes went somewhere else. Race results had their own pages. Driver information, team news, standings and schedules were elsewhere.
That worked. But after 30 years, we’ve accumulated enough information that we can do more with it than simply store it.
We want to connect it.
A historical race should lead naturally to the other races from that season.
A driver should eventually connect to that driver’s results, news, paint schemes and other historical information.
A race weekend should connect to its results and the information Jayski published at the time.
And information buried on a page for the last 20 years should be easier to find than it is today.
We’re still early in that process, but a lot of the work we’re doing now is being done with that larger goal in mind.
Cleaning up 30 years of accumulation
Preserving history doesn’t mean every page should remain exactly as it was.
Thirty years of adding things to a website creates clutter. There’s really no way around that.
We’ve been reviewing and streamlining sections of the site, improving navigation, rebuilding older pages and looking for better ways to present information.
Some changes are obvious to visitors. A lot of them aren’t.
An old link that works again isn’t particularly exciting until you’re the person searching for a race from 2007.
A historical page placed in the correct archive isn’t glamorous until you’re trying to find it.
And fixing or rebuilding one old page doesn’t sound like much. Do it a few thousand times and it starts to matter.
There’s a lot of that kind of work taking place.
Using automation without losing Jayski
We’re also changing how some current information gets onto the site.
NASCAR produces an enormous amount of data surrounding every race weekend. We’re working on better ways to use that information for entry lists, race results, standings and other weekend information.
Where something can be generated accurately and efficiently instead of being manually rebuilt over and over again, it makes sense to do it.
But the goal isn’t to automate Jayski.
The goal is to make Jayski better.
If we can spend less time copying information from one place to another, we can spend more time maintaining the archives, finding information, improving the site and doing the things that actually need a person.
At the same time, we don’t want important historical information to depend forever on an outside feed or service remaining available.
Technology can help us create and organize information.
Once it’s part of Jayski, we want to keep it.
Still keeping it simple
The technology behind Jayski has changed enormously since 1996.
One principle hasn’t.
Information should be easy to find.
Jay built the original site around that idea. There might have been an enormous number of links on a page, but visitors generally knew where to look.
We’ve tried to retain that philosophy through multiple redesigns and platforms.
We’re not interested in making Jayski complicated just because modern websites can be complicated.
We want to make a site containing three decades of information easier to navigate.
Sometimes that means adding something.
Sometimes it means getting rid of something that doesn’t need to be there anymore.
What about a Jayski app?
We’re also working on something Jayski has never had: a dedicated mobile app.
Development and testing are underway.
That doesn’t mean we’re promising today that an app will ultimately be released. We still have questions to answer, including an important one: Do enough Jayski readers actually want one?
We’re interested in seeing what an app could become.
It could provide a quicker way to get to the information people use most often, offer better access to race-weekend information and give us another way to organize everything available on the site.
Still Jayski
None of this means we’re trying to turn Jayski into something unrecognizable.
The site will still cover NASCAR news.
We’ll still collect article links.
We’ll still have schedules, TV listings, entry lists, race information, statistics and paint schemes.
And although the world of NASCAR rumors is much different than it was during the site’s early years, we’ll still try to help fans figure out what’s happening and where to find the information they’re looking for.
That’s what Jayski has really done for 30 years.
The methods have changed.
The mission really hasn’t.
What comes next
There’s some irony in using modern technology to preserve a website that began when most people connected to the internet through a telephone line.
But that’s also part of why Jayski is still here.
The site has always adapted.
It adapted as NASCAR grew. It adapted as the internet changed. It adapted through different ownership arrangements and new technology.
It even survived being shut down.
And after 30 years, we’re adapting again.
This time, one of our biggest opportunities is sitting right in front of us: three decades of NASCAR information that can’t simply be recreated if it disappears.
We intend to keep preserving it, organizing it, connecting it and making it easier to find.
At the same time, we’ll keep looking for better ways to cover NASCAR today.
Thirty years ago, nobody could have known what Jayski would eventually become.
We don’t know exactly what it will look like 10 or 20 years from now, either.
But we’re working on it.
And after 30 years, we’re nowhere near finished.
— Jay Adamczyk, Scott Page, Amanda Brooks, Dustin Albino
P.S. Have thoughts on any of this? Drop us an email. We can’t promise a response but we will try!