If you were in the NASCAR garage at any time starting in the early 1970s, you would have eventually come across Steve Waid, who spent almost fifty years there. Steve Waid could be seen walking the infield at Darlington or standing in the press box at Talladega with a notebook in hand and a two-way radio crackling. He was the focal point of the sport’s growth, and his weekly work at NASCAR Scene had a significant impact on the journalism that covered it.
After what colleagues described as a protracted and challenging battle with cancer and its lingering aftereffects, he passed away in North Carolina on June 15, 2026, at the age of 77. Tributes from drivers, broadcasters, other writers, and the kind of loyal readers who still store old NASCAR Scene issues in basement boxes because they can’t bring themselves to discard them quickly followed his longtime collaborator Rick Houston’s confirmation of the news. Most people would probably underestimate the size of that final group.
In 1972, Waid started working for the Martinsville Bulletin, a local newspaper in a Virginia town that was located next to one of NASCAR’s most iconic short tracks. He then went on to work for the Roanoke Times and World News, where he spent ten years honing the particular instincts that would characterize the next stage of his career, such as patience in the garage and access gained through connections rather than credentials. He began working for Grand National Scene, the weekly magazine that would later become NASCAR Scene, in 1981 and remained there for almost thirty years. Later, he expanded his portfolio to include NASCAR Illustrated, which functioned as a sort of institutional memory for a sport that was moving faster than anyone could accurately record.
Waid was unique, and it’s important to be honest about this, because he genuinely seemed to comprehend the emotional significance of stock car racing for those who followed it. He wasn’t explaining the sport to strangers. He was writing with the fans who already adored it in mind, taking their investment and intelligence seriously. One former sportswriter recalled that his press box seat at Talladega was one row above where the Scene team coordinated coverage by two-way radio, and that watching them work was its own kind of education. Fans on Reddit recalled precisely where they sat when they read his work. That kind of information sticks.
In his later years, Waid co-hosted The Scene Vault Podcast with Rick Houston after retiring from full-time reporting in 2010. People who thought NASCAR had lost something in its transition from regional spectacle to national entertainment property became devoted fans of the show, which featured retired drivers and crew chiefs sharing stories from the sport’s less well-documented eras. Even as his health deteriorated, listeners observed that Waid continued to be witty and perceptive throughout his final episodes—”witty as fudge,” according to one regular listener. That’s a big deal.
The individuals who created NASCAR’s media and competitive culture during the sport’s early decades have clearly suffered in 2026. The list of names grows. Each one embodies not only an individual but also an era’s worth of institutional knowledge that is difficult to translate to a highlight reel or Wikipedia page. Before the disease finally returned and overtook him, Steve Waid was a cancer survivor. He used his Facebook presence in part to reflect this, publicly identifying himself as a survivor and then an advocate. Each reader will determine for themselves whether or not that framing has any meaning. The extent of his absence is more difficult to dispute.