Welcome to The Pits Museum. As the longest continually running simulator racing site on the internet, we finally felt that we should put up something where people could see all the old things and what it used to be like. Yes, being a packrat sometimes is good...we've still got backups of The Pits from all of these years ago, so we edited them and put them into a museum!
It's very interesting to go digging through old junk and see what you find. You also probably wouldn't believe the amount of stuff that has NEVER been released. At right you'll see a GT40 body for NASCAR 2 that is seen for the first time by the public...don't remember why it never was released.
It's very interesting assembling a virtual museum...much different from putting together a real one. The internet is a strange place in ways. You can have a website that thousands of people visited and remember very clearly. However, once it dies and all backups are forgotten...it is almost as if it had never been created. The Internet Archives is a great resource, but many times they do not have everything that was originally there. TPTCC.com was one such victim..for a few years, Sean ran the site on it's own domain, but then it was removed for about two years. No backups were kept, and none could be found. Luckily, we managed to get enough to put most of it back together.
We had other problems as well. Some pages had to be re-written because the way browsers worked when the pages were originally created is NOT the way browsers work now. Some pages were broke and needed to be fixed. Advertisements...some were dynamic and very difficult to find. We had to remove invisible counter buttons that led to long-disappeared websites. All in all we tried to preserve the original look and feel, and in most cases, 95% of the website is unchanged.
One other thing that has changed over the years is technology. When The Pits was first built, 9600 & 14400 baud modems were still common. To load higher end graphics took some time, so you used a "LOWSRC" image tag to load a very low quality image before the higher end image loaded. Connections are so fast now that you don't see the lower end image loaded, but we've modified the front page gif in the March 1996 Pits to load much like it would have on a lower end modem back then.
Most of you are only here to see the cool stuff, so we won't keep you here for too long. First we'll go down a few backups of The Pits by date that it was backed up. Then we'll show you some other pieces of The Pits that some may a remember, but that were not part of a general site backup. As well, we've got the history of The Pits Touring Car Championship as well as the annual race, the Bullrun 1000. So pop some popcorn and enjoy the virtual museum!
Please note that if you click on 'The Pits logo' (or a large logo) on the main (index) pages, they take you back UP a step (without having to use the "back" button a million times).
Enjoy!
- Jan