From the moment Bob Tasca III walked into the Bristol Dragway tower, he knew he had a reputation to uphold. 

"I walked in the tower, and I saw a picture of my grandfather's car when he raced there, on the wall, when you first walk in, and I just fell in love with the place. I mean, how can you not?" Tasca admitted. "The setting, the sound is the most unique sound in any venue that we go to, with the cars that echo off the mountains. It's like you're right on top of the racetrack. I mean, I don't know, it's just got an old school with a state-of-the-art, modern facility feel, and I've always loved racing there."

Bristol also has legends. 

For the third generation of the iconic Ford dealership family it's carrying on the family tradition at the drag strip carved out of the mountains of eastern Tennessee. 

This weekend Tasca goes to battle with a Mustang Funny Car cloaked in the family name, and it's not by accident. 

Tasca has a track record of qualifying and running strong at Bristol Dragway, and when he looked at the buffet of races he had open - this event was open in terms of major sponsorship. He understood that he could make a call and easily fill the spot, but on a track with so much rich history associated with the Tasca name, it was a no-brainer to save that one for the family. 

"I don't know whether it was in October or November, or finalizing the races with all our sponsors, and it's like, "Hmmmm, Bristol's available," Tasca recalled. "It's like everyone picked everything but Bristol, for a variety of reasons, nothing against Bristol, but different areas where they wanted to market and bring people in. And I was talking to my cousins and I said I could pick the phone up and get this race taken by one of the sponsors. I said, "Well, why don't we bring Tascaparts.com back? It's a cornerstone of our company."

That's when Tasca began to channel his inner Grandpa Tasca, and the marketing gears began to turn. Bob Tasca Sr. knew how to get the most marketing bang for his buck using the race track as his platform and used his Race on Sunday, Sell on Monday platform to do so. 

"That's what attracted him to racing; that's why he raced," Tasca explained. "I firmly believe it's why we race today. You know, maybe we don't necessarily sell the cars that we race, but we certainly sell the parts that'll be on the side of that car. NHRA is a family of racers. 

"The fans are our family. And when you have fans coming up to you excited about tascaparts.com, telling me stories about how they got their parts on tascaparts.com, and it's kind of like organically happened. We haven't had huge presence with the brand. It's special."

What is even more special is when Tasca admits he has flashbacks in his private times before his Bristol runs to the days when his grandfather and Bill Lawton used to thunder through the valley back in the Sixties, long before he even existed. 

"People ask me how I got into racing, and it was through stories from Bill Lawton himself and my grandfather and John Healy," Tasca said. "I don't know; there's not many times I sit in that race car, and I don't think about my grandfather and Bill Lawton, you know, nearly every single time I hit the throttle because I know those guys are watching down from above. I know they're so proud of what we've accomplished, and we have so much more to do. 

"When you hit those special tracks where I know they've been. Where the history started for my family, and it's not just Bristol, but Bristol's certainly a cornerstone of it. Those races, they mean a little more, And if anyone says differently, they're full of it. These races where you got history, they mean a lot, and Bristol's certainly one of them."