| Lee Collins Is Sportmanship Award Winner | By Jack Smith
 When an extremely popular race car driver and race teacher named Pete Orr left us in November of 2002, the racing community was indeed saddened. You can get a good sense of this in the Florida History section of KARNAC.com, just click on "Legends", and then Pete Orr.
In early 2003 FASCAR, reacting to a huge burst of public sentiment, renamed the Orange Blossom 100 the Pete Orr Memorial 125. After that first race in February 2003 we at KARNAC.com decided that one of the best ways to honor Pete Orr and what he meant to Florida racing was to create the Pete Orr Sportsmanship Award.
Orr was known as a tough racer and tough competitor, but also was always known as a gentleman and a good ambassador for the sport he loved. Pete Orr and was also a teacher of racing who tried to instill those qualities in his students. Among those students were B.J. McLeod and Travis Kittleson.
This year we were very proud to present the Pete Orr Sportsmanship Award to Larry Lee Collins. Collins is an Open Wheel Modified race car driver from Felda Florida, a small town east of Ft Myers.
 Collins began his racing career in 1990 after seeing his first race ever at Bradenton's DeSoto Speedway. He was impressed enough that he bought Pure Stock Champion Mike Minks' Pure Stock the next week and showed up a week after that at Charlotte County Speedway ready to race.
Lee ran Pure Stocks for about six months, then bought a Limited Late Model from Mike Greenwell. Lee describes the two or three years racing Limited Lates with the likes of Randy Fox and Rusty Hillman "more of a crashfest than racing, we did a lot more wrecking than we did racing".
Lee moved onto Open Wheel Modifieds and it wasn't long before he was making a name for himself. He ran a year with the Southern Automobile Racing Association (SARA) Open Wheel Modified division and finished 6th in points.
Collins returned to DeSoto Speedway, this time a competitor instead of a fan, and in 1997 came in second in the Open Wheel Modified Championship race. Lee was one of the most popular racers at DeSoto Speedway that year, and he picked up the next year right where he left off, winning his first Track Championship.
The year 1999 saw a real change for the Immokalee Florida based race team. Lee Collins raced both Limited Late Models and Modifieds all across Florida during that year, and in 2000 he bought a Super Late Model and raced with the FASCAR touring series and elsewhere.
Last year Collins won the FASCAR World Series of Asphalt Stock Car Racing Open Wheel crown and this year won the FASCAR Pro Modified Series Championship.
Since at least 1998 anytime Lee Collins is in a modified race, he is one of the favorites to win.
Don Nerone, the FASCAR General Manager and Promoter said recently "Lee Collins has been racing with me last five or six or seven years, and Lee is real special to me because he knows how to win, and he knows how to lose ".
Nerone continued, "he does both gracefully, and there are very few race car drivers that can do both gracefully. When he loses it is his fault, and when he wins he brags about his crew and everybody else."
Rick Warren, photographer and media writer from the Gulfcoast Modified said of Lee Collins, "He is always laid back, he goes to the track to race, not to argue."
Warren had the opportunity to see Lee Collins over the course of a whole year and was impressed with the even temperament displayed by Collins, "He always conducts himself as a gentleman, he is a good hard racer, he is competitive, he knows what it takes to run up front and he is willing to do it."
When Lee is at the track he is always with his wife Linda, and usually in the winners circle you will see him with his young son Larry Lee Collins III.
When Lee was asked what motivated him to gear up and go racing every year for these last 15 years, he credits his wife Linda as the chief factor. Collins stated, "you would have to know me, before I started racing I gator hunted (and frogged), I stayed out in the woods all the time."
Lee with wife Linda and son Lee in the winners circle in 2004,
"My wife, she loves racing just as much as I do because we are together everywhere, where back when I was hunting, she didn't know where I was at or what I was doing." Collins said.
"What about that gator hunting Lee", we asked, our curiosity peaking.
"I did it for years even after I started racing, every September...ever since they first started licenses, I would be paid as a guide for people who won the permits in the lottery to find them a gator, I did that for years."
For three years Lee Collins worked with an airboat operator as a guide, taking people out on private land to bag alligators. As Lee described it, "six months a year hunting gators, and a whole month looking for eggs, it was pretty much a full time job."
Lee described to me in great detail and with unconcealed excitement the process of catching an alligator.
No wonder Linda wants her man racing short tracks on Saturday nights.
As to his racing future, "I have talked about getting out of it two or three times, but she keeps me pumped up and wanting to race, and her and my son love it just as much as I do", Collins said.
"We have really enjoyed it, we are together and I guess that's what it is all about."
Collins represents exactly the type of racer the Pete Orr Sportsmanship award was meant to honor, and in our mind and in the minds of dozens of people who gave us input on this years' award, one fact stands out clearly:
Lee Collins is a gentleman and a credit to out sport, and someone we can be proud to hold up as an example to young up and coming racers.
We think Pete would concur.
-Jack Smith
[ED NOTE: And one final note about Pete Orr. The Pete Orr Insurance Anti-Fraud Act, the result of a bill introduced by State Senator Bill Posey, himself very involved in Florida racing, and signed into law by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, continues to protect Floridians against unethical activity by insurance agents and companies.]
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