In the Blink of an Eye

by Michael Waltrip

  I was just a teenager, but I was beginning to get a real appreciation for these sponsor people. The combination of me being able to drive and someone else being able to pay for it was the reason I got to race. That appreciation has never gone away. See NAPA reference above.

  But for some reason, the man who sponsored my go-kart didn’t think I was ready for stock cars yet. Clearly, he was wrong. But when he pulled his support, it was just me and Kerry.

  I had a pretty good job for an eighteen-year-old. My dad had put me to work at Pepsi. I was making $4.35 an hour, and that was a lot. Before I got hired at Pepsi, I had worked at Wendy’s for a week. And Wendy’s only paid $2.65 an hour, minimum wage, and I did not like working there. One night I cut my finger on a tomato slicer and that was it. I never went back. Working at Wendy’s was way too dangerous for me.

  Despite the premium wages I was bagging at Pepsi, I didn’t have the money to buy tires and pay parts bills. Fortunately for me, however, all the winning I’d done in go-karts had finally gotten my dad’s attention. Dad asked his bosses at Pepsi in Evansville if I could paint my car like Darrell’s Cup car that year. Darrell was sponsored by Pepsi’s Mountain Dew brand. They agreed and bought me a set of brand-new Goodyear tires. I still hadn’t come up with enough money to pay the bill at NAPA, but the tires secured me the ride.

  But there I was: Opening day, a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Owensboro, Kentucky, at the Kentucky Motor Speedway. I’m telling you, I was looking good, and I was feeling good too. My car was painted just like my big brother’s. And unlike when I started in go-karts, my family was there to watch. Mom, Dad, Bobby, my sisters—they were all there to cheer me on.

  All the same cars that were there the day I tested were in the pit area. I was feeling very confident. I was faster than any of them at the test, and I’d be faster than all of them again, I was sure.

  But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a big truck pull into the pits. “Who’s that?” I wondered aloud. “That’s a fancy rig.”

  We had a sharp race car. The #11 Mountain Dew Mercury Capri looked awesome. But we hauled our car to the track behind Kerry’s old truck. We looked like farmers. Not these cats. Their truck was painted up like their race car. Where were these guys from? Tennessee plates, I noticed. And wow! Their crew guys, they had matching uniforms! As I got a better look at the side of the truck, I could see written in big letters: Driver: NEWT MOORE IV. “Aw, shoot!” I thought to myself. “I’ll bet he’s really fast.”

  Suddenly, my confidence was shrinking. As well it should have been. That Newt sucker could move!

  In qualifying, Newt won the pole with a new track record. I was second. He won both the preliminary events. Again, I was second. I was already starting to dislike this Newt Moore IV person, and I didn’t even know him. Now it was time for the main event. As I buckled in, I tried to figure out how I was going to beat this Nashville cat and his uniform-wearing crew.

  The main event was a twenty-five-lapper. When the green flag waved, Newt and I quickly grabbed the top two spots—me leading and Newt right on my bumper. With about five to go, Newt made his move and passed me, just like he had done in the two prelims. But this time, when he drove by, his car slipped, and he drifted up the bank. The door was open for me to slide to the inside and retake the lead. I made the crossover move perfectly. I’d seen Darrell make that same move. I just reacted. And it worked. I took the lead and held off Newt Moore IV for the win. My first big win on my first night out. And I had to conquer a giant to do it. It was a true David-versus-Goliath story, and Mikey won.

  When I grabbed the checkered flag, it felt so perfect. What a race! What a win!

  Dad came out on the track to congratulate me. When I pulled into the pit after my victory lap, my whole family was there, as was my crew of three—Kerry, Barry, and Barry—all dressed in different shirts.

  What a moment that was!

  That turned out to be a big summer for me. I graduated from Apollo High School, barely. I won the track championship at the Speedway by a lot. I was eighteen years old, and I asked myself: “What am I doing still living at home?” With all I had going on, what I needed was a place of my own. My buddy Scott Mercer agreed with me. He thought it was time to get out on his own too.

  I knew he’d be the perfect roommate. If you made a list of the most responsible eighteen-year-olds in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1981, neither of our names would have made it. There might have been a Mike or a Scott on there, but it wouldn’t have been either of us.

  Scott came from a family of farmers. They raised tobacco, beans, and corn. His job was to work in the fields. His parents provided well for Scott. He had a nice car and always had plenty of spending money. The family lived in a big house out in the country. Heck, they even had their own gas pump. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes late at night, Scott would let me slip in there and fill up with gas. The gas was made for the farm equipment. But it worked fine in our cars. Scott had a hot-rod Oldsmobile. I was driving around in my mom’s 1972 four-door Ford Gran Torino, affectionately known to all my friends as “Margaret’s car.”

  Don’t laugh at the car. Mom’s Ford had two very long bench seats and a customized Kraco car stereo I installed myself with a little bit of help from my brother-in-law Dave. I only needed his help when I got done and turned it on and nothing happened. He had to uncross a couple of wires for me. When my friends and I wanted to take chicks to the drive-in movies, everybody wanted to be in Margaret’s car.

  Scott and I took time off from our day jobs. We looked around and found a two-bedroom, two-bath villa. Rent was three hundred bucks a month. It was an affordable villa. We agreed Scott would pay a little bit more and take the big bedroom with its own bath. That made sense to me. He could afford to pay more. Now it was just a matter of us breaking the news to our parents. I was pretty sure Mom and Dad would be okay with me moving out. All my brothers and sisters had left home early. What I was uncertain about was whether they’d be okay with me taking Mom’s car. I couldn’t afford a car and an apartment. The keys to Margaret’s car were key to the move.

  Then I thought: “Who am I kiddin’? I’m sure they want me to move. Taking the old Ford with me won’t matter.” And I was right.

  I walked into the house and told Mom and Dad: “Me and Mercer got an apartment. I’m moving out.”

  Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Good,” he said. “Take that damn waterbed with you.” I’m surprised he didn’t also throw a garden hose at me.

  I knew he never liked that waterbed.

  I packed my stuff, and I was getting ready to walk out the door. “Well, I’m leaving,” I said.

  “All right,” my dad said, barely looking up from his chair. “You’ll be back.”

  “No, I won’t. I’m movin’.”

  “Okay, we’ll see ya.”

  “Well, ’bye then.”

  I wasn’t looking for any tears. But I thought at least somebody would get up and give me a hug.

  I went straight to Mercer’s house to help him get his stuff together. The scene was very different there. His mom was sitting on the couch sobbing. His dad had a concerned look on his face. “You’re too young,” his mom wailed. “It’s too soon. You can’t move out. You don’t know what you’re doin’. Don’t go.” It was like he was moving to California to join a cult. Man, his parents didn’t want to let go.

  You know that saying “If you love somebody, you gotta let ’em go”? I knew my parents really loved me. And I wanted to show them how much I appreciated that. So when I moved out, I moved on, and I never moved back.

  PART 2:

  DRIVING

  CHAPTER 6

  FINDING RIDES

  Back in the day, if you dreamed of racing with the big boys, you had to get there one step at a time.

  There was a set pattern. You got your start on local tracks running modifieds or late-models or whatever you could get behind the wheel of. If you won some races, then you’d move up to Dash Series if you coul
d. This was entry-level NASCAR. These cars were four-cylinder subcompacts, but they were real race cars.

  The Dash cars would compete on tracks like Daytona and Darlington and Atlanta and North Wilkesboro. You got to race on the same tracks on the same weekends the Cup stars did. You did well there, people would notice.

  After Dash, the next logical thing to do would be to move up to the NASCAR Busch Series. At every step, the competition got tougher and tougher. The cars got faster and faster. The driving took more skill. And if you were successful in the Busch Series, you just might have what it took to make it into Winston Cup, the pinnacle of NASCAR racing. That was the perfect road map to racing stardom.

  But my opportunity didn’t come that way.

  My early years of racing couldn’t have gone any better. All I did was win. In 1981, I won my first race at my local track. I went on to win the track championship there. In the ’81 season, it didn’t matter what the challenge was, I met it. Whether I was racing as a rookie making my first start or racing for a championship, I won. I was a winner. The sky’s the limit, I thought. I got this. I’ll be just like my brother. He was winning. He won the ’81 NASCAR Cup Series championship. He repeated it in ’82. I was racing locally and beginning to take my car to other tracks.

  In 1982, I ran a couple of races in the Dash Series. I did well and got a ride in 1983 with one of the top teams in Dash—Richard Mash Racing. The winning continued. I won a record number of pole positions in ’83. I won six races that year. I was the most popular driver in the series. I got my first NASCAR championship trophy, the first of many, I was sure.

  There I went again!

  That kinda sounds like the little boy who got on the bus that day back in Kentucky, don’t you think? All full of himself about what he had accomplished. It was important for me to remember the lesson that little old lady had taught me—not to take winning, or these trophies, for granted. Be thankful, always. But things were really going well with my career. That one year, 1983, had taken me from the local track in Kentucky to winning in small cars on the big tracks of NASCAR. Now I just needed to figure out what my next step would be.

  After the 1983 season, I moved to Louisville to work at Komfort Koach. They had become my sponsor during the 1983 championship season. Komfort Koach was a luxury custom-van conversion company. The president was Bill Borden. Bill loved NASCAR and provided NASCAR officials and some drivers with their own vans in exchange for advertising and endorsements. Darrell had a Komfort Koach van. So did Richard Petty. I moved to Louisville to work for Bill because I needed to be able to travel more if I was going to pursue my racing dreams.

  Living in Owensboro, working for Dad at Pepsi, was getting to be too difficult. With all the time I was gone, my paycheck wasn’t enough to keep gas in my car. All I was paying for were my travel expenses, and I couldn’t even do that anymore. Bill said I could live with his family and work at the van factory during the week. And I could travel as I needed. Bill would still pay me even when I was off racing. That sounded like a much better deal to me than working at the Pepsi plant. Even when I wasn’t there, I’d get paid. I liked that. But working for Komfort Koach in Louisville was just a stepping-stone for me to get to North Carolina. That’s where I really had to be. You couldn’t build a NASCAR career living in Kentucky, working on vans. That’s not where the action was. That was like being a country singer and not living in Nashville.

  Fortunately, Bill’s connection to the NASCAR world wasn’t just through his sponsorships. He had become friends with lots of NASCAR people as well. After I’d been with the Bordens for six months or so, Bill, knowing I wanted to be down south, had worked it out for me to move down there. He actually pawned me off on Kyle Petty, a racer and real prince of a guy. Actually, a NASCAR prince. His dad was Richard Petty, the King.

  I went to live with Kyle and his wife, Pattie, and their children, Adam, Austin, and Montgomery Lee, and work at Petty Enterprises. Finally my job was to work on race cars, not flip burgers, deliver soft drinks, or fix some dumb van. I had always worked on my own race cars. But now I was working on Kyle’s cars, the cars that he raced in NASCAR. And I was getting paid. All I had to do for rent at Kyle’s house was keep my room clean and occasionally watch the kids.

  The oldest of the three, Adam, he was a real pistol. He used to tell me he was going to be a race-car driver just like his daddy and his grandpa. The family lived on a lake way out in the country, and sometimes I’d let Adam sit in my lap and drive when it was just me and him. He got a real kick out of that.

  Living with Kyle was going really well for a few months. Then came the infamous tennis-shoe incident. My shoes stunk. They were old. Most all of my stuff was old, but it was all I had. I woke up one morning and my shoes were missing. I asked Kyle if he’d seen them.

  “Yeah, I saw ’em,” he said. “I’d guess they’re floating down by the dam about now.”

  “Why would they be at the dam?” I asked.

  “Because,” he said, “you left them lying in the middle of the living room floor, and they stunk. So I threw ’em in the lake.”

  This wasn’t good, I sensed. I was guessing if my shoes got thrown out the back door, it wouldn’t be long before my ass got thrown out the front.

  So on the way to work that day, I began thinking about what I was going to do next. I had a long time to ponder that. It was about an hour’s drive to work from Kyle’s house.

  “I have a job now,” I thought. “Maybe I’ll just get an apartment or something.”

  But before I left work that same day, Lynda Petty, Kyle’s mom, approached me and asked if I wanted to move in with her and the King. “It’s a long drive out to Kyle’s,” she said. “And we live right around the corner from the shop.”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “Thank you very much. I’ll be there tonight.”

  Then I thought, “Wow! Kyle just kicked me out of his house. I’ve never seen it done quite so nicely.”

  Later that night I showed up at Lynda and Richard Petty’s house in Randleman, North Carolina. It looked a little dark, but I nervously rang the doorbell. Richard opened the door. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him without his hat and sunglasses.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said in his thick Carolina accent. “I hear you’re coming to live with us. Where’s all your stuff?”

  “It’s just me and my suitcase,” I said. “This is about all I got. I used to have another pair of shoes, but your son threw ’em in the lake.”

  Living with Richard was cool. He was a night owl. We used to sit on the couch well past midnight some nights, eating popcorn and talking about racing. A pattern was developing here, I suppose. Anytime I could sit around and talk about something, that something was racing. It started with my dad at McDonald’s in Kentucky. Same thing when I got in the car and drove down the road with my brother Bobby. And now I was sitting on the couch with Richard Petty, talking racing to him. I had a one-track mind.

  At this point in my life, 1985, there was one person I hadn’t had the opportunity to talk racing with. That was Darrell. We just couldn’t find time to do something like that.

  I loved hanging out with the King. We were friends. One night he asked me about my racing plans.

  “I got a great plan,” I told him. “So far, I’ve done everything by the book.”

  I explained I’d won in go-karts. Then I’d won in stock cars at my local track. Then the NASCAR Dash Series championship. “Now I gotta get to Busch,” I told him.

  Richard didn’t answer me directly. He just asked a question. “What’s your goal?” he wanted to know.

  I told him straight out. “My goal,” I said, “is to make it to the Winston Cup Series and win races just like you.”

  “If that’s what you want to do,” he said, “then that’s what you should do now. You need to go race Cup right now. You don’t need to be messin’ around with those Busch cars. You just need to get a Cup ride.

  “What are you, twenty-one, twent
y-two years old?” Richard asked. “You need to start getting experience in the cars you want to end up in. You will just be wasting your time in a Busch car.”

  Hmm, I thought. Interesting. That’s an idea I’d never heard or thought of.

  “All right,” I said. “Sounds good to me, Rich. I’m just wondering though. How exactly am I gonna do that? Are you asking me to drive for Petty Enterprises?”

  I was joking. The King looked at me like I was kinda stupid. “Just kidding,” I said.

  Back then, established teams didn’t hire kids like they do now. You had to be experienced to get a Cup ride. And in order to get that experience, you had to race Busch, I thought.

  Not according to Richard. “Go get a Cup ride,” he said. “Figure it out.”

  And that was indeed what I was going to do. This was Richard Petty giving me career direction. I had to figure this out.

  Getting a Cup ride was now my focus. At work that day I asked around the shop to see if any of the guys had any ideas. No one really came up with anything. So the following night the scene was the same. Late-night popcorn on the couch with the King.

  I told Richard I’d asked around and hadn’t come up with any ideas. I didn’t want to be aggravating. But I was hoping he had some ideas for me.

  “Can you give me a little more direction here?” I asked him.

  The King thought for a minute and then said: “Maybe you should go see Humpy Wheeler at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The World 600 is coming up over there in a few weeks. Ask him if he’ll help you get started.”

  I’d heard of Humpy Wheeler before. He was a track promoter extraordinaire. He liked to be an innovator. The track promoter’s ultimate responsibility was to have fans in the stands. And Humpy wasn’t so particular how he got them there, just as long as they came. For example, his pre-race shows were legendary. He had motorcyclists jumping school buses, junk cars catching on fire—you name it, he did it. One of his pre-race stunts involved fireworks. A spark hit the owner of the track, Bruton Smith, and set his hair on fire. I think Bruton might have been wearing too much hair spray.