In the Blink of an Eye

by Michael Waltrip

  I explained to Buff it wouldn’t be much different for me. It was something I’d been dealing with every weekend—being somewhere Dale was supposed to be and he wasn’t.

  Our attitude was: “It’ll seem like old times.” Captain Terry and the crew on the boat always made us feel special when we were aboard. Plus, we’d hardly seen Teresa since February, so it would be fun to catch up with her and hang out.

  And what nice timing this was. Those people were going to be happy to see me. Dale Junior and I had presented a gift to NASCAR fans everywhere. And I still couldn’t get over how the ones in Daytona reacted, how loud their screaming was. I knew Teresa and all the folks down in the Bahamas were doing the same thing that night. Sitting on the boat, watching the race on TV, and cheering.

  This was the perfect little trip for us, going to the Bahamas, staying on the boat that we loved so much, and getting to see Teresa and a bunch of other NASCAR folks. When we got there, the reception was just as warm as I thought it would be. There were smiles everywhere. And even though technically it might have been a little before noon that Sunday morning, we justified the champagne we were drinking by saying we were on island time. We were toasting Dale Junior’s and my special one-two finish. The whole Jimmy Buffett “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” adage was all the cover we needed.

  Can you imagine the stark contrast between the day after this Daytona race and the one in February? The first one hurt so bad. This one felt so good. I knew between the boat and the champagne, those feelings that got in bed with me the night before wouldn’t be bugging me in the Bahamas.

  After a perfect day on the boat, swimming with the kids and hanging with the adults, Buff and I lay down that night. And guess who joined us?

  I suppose there would be no escaping my demons. I realized right there, lying in the Bahamas, that the pain of what happened in February would always be a part of who I was.

  Our trip was brief. We had to be in Chicago for the next weekend’s race. That Wednesday evening, we headed home just three days after we arrived. When we got back to North Carolina, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to tell Buffy that those feelings that had been living with me for the past five months were taking up permanent residence. Those feelings were going to be there, no matter what happened at the track or how many vacations we took. I was just going to have to live with them.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I told her that night. “I don’t want you counseling me. I’m just going to live with it and deal with it on my own.”

  She was sad to hear me say that. That wasn’t the Mike she married. But she seemed to resign herself to thinking that’s just how it was going to be.

  Despite my unwillingness to deal with the pain of Dale’s death, I was done ignoring my career. The attitude I took to Daytona with me, the drive-with-your-heart guidance Dale would have given me—I was going to take that everywhere.

  I had a plan, which was to go to DEI and tell Ty and Richie I was tired of what had gone on up until Daytona. I wanted some changes. “I want a crew chief,” I said. “I want someone to be in charge of my team like Park and Dale Junior have. And boys, if we get the right guy, I promise you I will win DEI some races.”

  I made it clear. I wanted Ty and Richie both to know. They were now dealing with an inspired Mike. I wasn’t messing around.

  “I’m not being treated fairly,” I said. “Give me a guy. Put someone in charge of my team, somebody who can take my car, my crew, and put them on his back. We have been running my team this year with people who seem like they couldn’t care less. I have one crew chief one week and another the next. Heck, I don’t even have a crew chief now. There’s definitely no leader on my team. That’s not fair.”

  They supported me, and the search for my guy began.

  It took a while, but we found that guy. In late September, Richard “Slugger” Labbe joined DEI as my crew chief. Slugger’s presence did just what I hoped it would. He cared as much as I did. He was just who I needed just when I needed him. He was passionate about building my cars. He wanted to make every detail perfect.

  I told Richie and Ty to get someone like Slugger because that’s something Dale would have done. When Slugger showed up, I started winning. In 2002, I won my qualifying race for the 500. When we returned in July, we won the 400. And in February 2003, I won my second Daytona 500.

  How ’bout that? I finally did something my brother hadn’t.

  Mikey: Two Daytona 500 wins.

  DW: One.

  That’s something I know Dale Earnhardt would have been proud of, those Daytona 500 trophies and the success we were enjoying at Daytona in general. In seven straight Daytona races, beginning with the 500 in 2001, my finishes were unprecedented.

  2001 Daytona 500: First

  2001 Coke Zero 400: Second

  2002 Daytona 500 qualifying race: First

  2002 Daytona 500: Fifth

  2002 Coke Zero 400: First

  2003 Daytona 500 qualifying race: Second

  2003 Daytona 500: First

  Because of the success I had racing at DEI, I was building credibility within NASCAR. More sponsors wanted to be on my car. More fans wanted my autograph.

  What a ride I’d had at DEI! Five seasons of ups and downs that changed my life. Five years absorbing the triumph and tragedy that arrived my first day on the job. Those were the most important five years of my life, as I became a winner and learned to deal with losses too. The whole time I was there, I was emotionally all over the place.

  Dale’s team without Dale was definitely not the same, and by the middle of 2005, I could tell the time had come for me to go. I felt sad about that, although no one at DEI seemed too broken up over my departure. I didn’t expect a lot of thanks-Mike-you’ve-been-a-good-partner-for-DEI, and I didn’t get any. I don’t think anyone even said good-bye. All the excitement and enthusiasm I’d experienced when Dale called me about driving for him—that was gone.

  Because of my success with DEI I had a lot of options to consider.

  Various possibilities were being floated. But the one that sounded most interesting to me came from Toyota. Just as I was leaving DEI, Toyota executives announced they were going into NASCAR Sprint Cup racing. They wanted to be up and racing in time for the 2007 season. One of the guys they wanted to go racing with was me.

  Toyota wanted me to be a Cup team owner. That was a huge honor. In addition to my Cup performances, Toyota had also noticed my Busch team and the success we were having. The reason I even had a Busch team was because my sponsor, Aaron’s, believed in me. Ken Butler, the main man at the Atlanta-based lease-to-own company, made us a key part of his marketing plan in 2000. We’d grown together ever since. Toyota and Aaron’s both loved the fact that we were building our Busch cars behind my house. They thought, “If he can build such fast cars behind his house, just imagine what he could do with some of our resources.”

  When Toyota presented their Cup lineup for 2007, of the seven cars they were going to put on the track, Michael Waltrip Racing would field three of them. That announcement got everyone’s attention. For years, foreign manufacturers hadn’t been permitted. So Toyota had had a few barriers they needed to break down. They wanted the fans to accept them into NASCAR.

  So who better to spread the word of Toyota coming to Cup than a couple of Waltrips? DW and I both believed in Toyota joining NASCAR, and we wanted to tell the world about it. The two of us began meeting folks all over the country who were making a living building and selling Toyota cars and trucks. A couple of new plants had just been built in our neck of the woods, Kentucky and Tennessee, and were providing many jobs in those areas. Darrell and I made TV and radio commercials and appearances all over, welcoming Toyota to NASCAR. At the same time, my Michael Waltrip Racing team was busy building our NASCAR Toyota Camrys.

  The guys in the shop behind my house were joined by other guys so we could build more cars. We also needed somewhere to put all this stuff. We were officially out of room
in the little Busch shop in Sherrills Ford. So the search for a new home for Michael Waltrip Racing was under way.

  We found a vacant movie theater and an indoor skating rink located next to each other in Cornelius, North Carolina, and turned them into a state-of-the-art, fan-friendly racing facility. My vision was to do two things at once at our shop: build cars that could win races, and entertain the race fans who loved visiting the shops.

  When Dale first built the Garage-Mahal, people would come from all over the world to see Dale Earnhardt, Inc. They wanted to check out where Dale built his cars. His race shop was nothing near ordinary. It was the most modern shop in NASCAR, the first one that the fans wanted to see.

  I wanted to have a shop like Dale’s.

  I wanted to have a team like Dale’s.

  Heck, I wanted to win championships like Dale had.

  And that was my goal. Not only to produce the results Dale Earnhardt did, but also to run the team like Dale did. I loved walking through DEI by Dale’s side. You could tell that everybody who worked there was into building his cars. Their attitude was, “These are Dale Earnhardt’s cars. We gotta make them better than everybody else’s. That’s what Dale expects.” And that’s what they did. Can you believe my Daytona results? You have to have fast cars to accomplish all that at Daytona. In addition to my wins, Dale Junior won there too. He took the Daytona 500 in 2004, giving Dale’s team three out of the four 500 wins from 2001 to 2004.

  Those guys knew Dale didn’t have to have a team. He wanted to have a team. He had all kinds of money. He had a yacht. He could just spend the weekends goofing off down in the Bahamas. But he loved racing, and he was competitive. So he wanted to build the best race team in NASCAR.

  That became my goal too.

  I was just like Dale in that way. I wanted to walk through Michael Waltrip Racing and have my guys say, “These are Michael’s cars. He’s all in. He loves this sport. We gotta make his cars better than anybody else’s.”

  And that’s how it was in Sherrills Ford. My little hobby team was just a bunch of guys having fun. But now with the commitment to go Cup racing, we had to grow, just like Dale’s team had done over the years. But I needed my small group of guys behind my house to buy into what I was wanting to do. Bobby, Troy, Chris, Glen, Ray-Ray, and David were my main guys. I explained to them that if we were going Cup racing, action was going to have to pick up. In less than a year, we had to be in Daytona with our three-car Cup team, ready to race. From a small Busch team out in the country to a full-time three-car Cup operation was a Herculean task. But my boys all said they were in. We could do it. I believed in them, and those six guys are still with me today.

  I also had to beef up my management team. Ty Norris from the old DEI days joined me early on. Ty knew Dale’s management style better than anyone. He and Dale ran DEI side by side. I shared with Ty my vision of how Michael Waltrip Racing and Toyota would work together. Ty and I made a plan and then began recruiting team members—everyone from front-office types to truck drivers.

  Ty and I were involved in every aspect of building our racing organization. Landing sponsors. Hiring a bunch of people, some of whom came over from DEI and are still with us today. We also had to oversee. construction of our shop. And that was no small task. It was 140,000 square feet of overseeing.

  It was important that we understood our relationship with Toyota, how much help they could offer us to ensure we were building our team properly. Toyota Racing Development, TRD, had all the resources to help us build our team but very little experience in NASCAR. Ty and I were about the opposite of TRD. We had been part of winning organizations in NASCAR. But if you looked around our shop in Sherrills Ford, you would say our resources were limited at best.

  We were smart enough to realize we had a lot to do and we couldn’t do it alone. We needed plenty of help to get from Sherrills Ford to Daytona in a year. The first stop on the way was our newly completed shop in Cornelius. As we prepared for the upcoming season, we leaned heavily on the Toyota people, whose way of conducting business was quite different from what we were used to. Back behind my house, we didn’t have too many official meetings. The ones we did have were held down at the barbecue joint where we liked to have lunch. Generally, we could figure out any issue we had over a pulled-pork sandwich. You know what sounds dirty but it ain’t? Pulled pork. Jokes like that set the tone for those meetings.

  But now we were attending meetings that were much different. We had written agendas. We had PowerPoints. We assigned responsibilities. There was even a girl there taking the minutes. Where did she come from? We even had meetings about upcoming meetings. My stupid jokes didn’t seem so appropriate in these meetings. A typical day in early 2006 would start at seven A.M. with—yep, you guessed it—a team meeting. All the managers would get together and outline that day’s car-building process. What we were building, what TRD was working on, and how the two would come together. Then by nine we were in a travel meeting. Where were we going and how were we getting there? At one of those meetings, a decision was made that we needed three aircraft to transport our teams to the races and testing that we needed to do to ensure we were competitive.

  Three airplanes sounded pretty expensive. Then we had to add on some pilots. And some guys to make sure the maintenance got done. Oh, yeah, and then one more thing. We needed a hangar. We couldn’t just let ’em sit outside. And then when it was about time to go, we said, “Oh, shoot. We need some flight attendants.”

  That was quite an expensive meeting.

  The top teams in NASCAR were all established operations. Those owners had had twenty-five-plus years to figure out how to race their cars, a twenty-five-plus-year head start on Michael Waltrip Racing. That also meant twenty-five-plus years of acquiring all the equipment needed to race. Those owners had grown their teams with the sport. The sport was all grown, and we had one year to catch up.

  I bet the expense of buying all I had to buy in one year would have gotten those owners’ attention—and they were rich. They were old too. Well, let’s call them more experienced. They knew how to run a business. I wasn’t so good at that yet. There was this word that kept coming up, no matter what meeting I was in. It didn’t really make much sense to me. But it must have been important.

  That aggravating word? Budget.

  Buffy and I had never really operated on one of those.

  My philosophy was simple. If Mr. Hendrick or Mr. Penske had a piece of equipment that made their cars faster, then we had to have one too. I had told NAPA, Aaron’s, all our sponsors, that we were going to win. If those other teams had more stuff than what we had, how were we going to beat them? That wouldn’t be a fair fight.

  For a while I was undefeated in those meetings. Airplanes, gotta have, get ’em, check. Shock dynos, chassis pull-down machines, CNC equipment—check, check, check.

  We don’t have the money yet? Simple. Just like I used to tell Mom. Write a check. That’s about how mature I was. And we wrote checks. Lots of them. We had to. We weren’t just going to race. We were going to win. I could not wait for the 2007 season to begin.

  CHAPTER 32

  GOING FORWARD

  You are never really ready to go to the races, I have learned. It’s just time to go.

  And that’s what time it was. February 2007. I was finishing up a few last-minute details at the shop before heading to the airport. On my way out of the shop that night, I met a guy making a late delivery.

  “What do you have there, bud?” I asked.

  “It’s your copy machine, Mister Waltrip,” he said.

  “Cool. We need one of those.”

  As I drove toward the airport that night, the late delivery of my new copy machine started bothering me. I was thinking, “Shouldn’t we already have one of those? What else don’t we have? And who’s supposed to be in charge of getting it? Is it me?”

  I mean, seriously. We just got our copy machine! That handy device just showed up? How did we make it this far without
one of those? All the top organizations had probably had their copy machines for twenty-five years. It was about a half hour’s drive to the Statesville airport, where we kept our airplanes, and that dumb piece of office equipment had me all torn up the whole way.

  You have to understand. We were undefeated. We hadn’t lost a race yet. There was so much positive talk around the NASCAR world about what we were building. I’d never heard so many things said about me. But the time to talk was about over. We were one plane ride away from the whole world seeing what we had. I was really nervous about that. I couldn’t handle going to Daytona and being embarrassed. In typical Mikey fashion, I had gone all in. No one in the history of NASCAR had ever started a new team with a new manufacturer and three cars. Most were just one-car teams at the beginning.

  Was that a good idea? A little late to wonder that now.

  I had bet the farm that we could succeed. Literally. My lovely hundred-acre farm out in Sherrills Ford. What happened next made that a bad bet.

  It was qualifying day, and I was up early, eagerly anticipating my team’s official NASCAR debut. When the cars hit the track in Daytona, race fans everywhere wanted to see how Toyota would stack up in NASCAR against Ford, Chevy, and Dodge. People were also eager to see how Michael Waltrip Racing would fare. Our new team was big news in Daytona. I was proud of what we had built. I was happy that all three cars had performed well in pre-qualifying practice. I was also happy because I was in Daytona again. But this time I felt different being there, more like a proud new father—except this father was doting over three cars, not three babies.

  All cars must pass NASCAR’s technical inspection prior to getting onto the track to qualify. This was a routine that NASCAR teams go through before every race. It’s usually just that, routine.

  So when the phone rang that morning, I had no reason to be concerned. I answered. It was Ty. He didn’t sound right.