The road to Lee Pulliam’s three national championships didn’t begin on the track or in the pits, but on the other side of the fence as a dreamy-eyed little boy in the grandstands on Saturday nights at South Boston Speedway.

“As a kid growing up you always want to be something; you want to be a firefighter, you want to be a policeman, you want to be a race car driver, whatever you have aspirations to do,” Alton native Pulliam said Wednesday after getting the official notice he had won a third NASCAR Whelen All-American Series national championship.

“Since I was a little kid, we went to South Boston Speedway every Saturday night,” Pulliam said. “Those guys were heroes to me. They were just as special as the guys running on Sundays, so it’s an honor to be listed as one of the top ones in a Late Model Stock Car.”

This year Pulliam won 10 times at South Boston this year and overall had 29 victories in 51 starts. For the season he totaled 46 top fives and 48 top 10s while racing at seven different tracks in four states. Over the last five years Pulliam has won 120 races in 210 starts.

Along the way Pulliam become one of the nation’s top weekly racers. “When I first started I didn’t have a clue. None of us (family and friends) had ever worked on a race car. I got a lot of help from H.C. Sellers (Sellers Racing). He played a pretty big role in helping me learn about these cars,” said Pulliam, who now builds and prepares cars for other drivers in addition to his own. Pulliam concedes it’s going to be hard to top this season and the three championships, but he says it is all worth it.