Motorsports

Era of owner-driver begins anew, slowly

Robby Gordon's woes sound familiar to Ricky Rudd and Bill Elliott.

By BRANT JAMES
Published March 19, 2005

Ricky Rudd becomes sentimental when he reminisces about his spartan race shop. It's nothing special in terms of grandeur or function, especially in a time when Nextel Cup workplaces are growing to fill city blocks.

But the tucked-away workspace in a Mooresville, N.C., industrial park used to be his. He poured his emotions and finances into designing the building from the blueprints up in 1994, with the dream of owning a NASCAR race team, of laying the foundation of his life and career once he retired from driving. He poured hours of sweat into covering the bare walls. And when he was forced to fold his team, sell the building and work for Robert Yates, a tear rolled down his cheek.

"There are good memories and bad memories," said Rudd, whose current Wood Brothers team now occupies his old shop. "The bad memory is when I look out here and see all these chairs. That reminds me that this is about where they had the auction tables set up here. The auctioneer was up here and all the other people were sitting out there in the seats and that was a tough day. As a matter of fact, I stuck my head in the door and walked right back out. I had to leave. So there are a lot of blood, sweat and tears in this building."

Though scores of drivers have failed trying to juggle both vocations, more seem to be gravitating toward ownership, a decade removed from the lessons of veterans Rudd and Bill Elliott. Most, like Kevin Harvick, Michael Waltrip and Joe Nemechek, own teams in the Busch series and drive those cars part-time. But Robby Gordon converted the Busch Series team he started last season into a full-time Nextel Cup venture this season. Two months into his inaugural year, he's learning how hard a task it can be.

Gordon enters the fourth race of the Nextel Cup season at Atlanta on Sunday 40th in driver points, partly because of problems with the engines built by England-based Menard Engineering Group, partly because he's starting from scratch. Despite finishing seventh in his Daytona 500 qualifying race, Gordon failed to make the opener because his lack of owner points left him on the outside in NASCAR's new qualifying format.

If he makes it and proves his team is, as he puts it, "almost idiot-proof" in its organization, he will back up a bold assessment made in January. If he fails, he'll be flogged with it: "This is not that difficult."

The furrow on Elliott's brow suggests he disagrees. The 1988 Nextel Cup champion drove for himself from 1995-2000. Winless all the six years (though he finished eighth in points two of the first three), Elliott's team struggled to field competitive cars by 2000, when he was 21st in the standings. He folded his operation to sign with multicar Evernham Motorsports, where he won at least once every season until semi-retiring last season. Rudd won six races in seven years as his own boss, and finished in the top 10 the first three years of his program. But carrying the entire burden of fielded a competitive team - about $16- to 20-million - was ultimately too much for both.

"If you dabble in it part-time or do this or do that, that's one thing, but in order to do it each and every week, and be a success - that's where I think Ray (Evernham) and these guys have an edge on these other teams," Elliott said. "If NASCAR makes a change today they can respond to it by this afternoon. Where if I had my own deal and I was having somebody else put my bodies on my car, first it would take me a week to get started, then you would have to be worked into the next evolution with whoever is doing the stuff, that's where these guys have got you covered.

"If I come in on a deal, as far as a small organization, I might be able to run competitively every once in a while, but the handwriting's on the wall. There just ain't no way."

If such was the case, Gordon said, one of the most powerful teams in Nextel Cup would not currently exist.

"Everybody says driver-owners, they don't work anymore," he said. "Well, what is DEI? I'm pretty sure Dale Earnhardt was a driver when he built DEI and he hired the right people and put the right people in position. That's the same philosophy we're going to take. We can do the job."

The difference is, Earnhardt was driving for Richard Childress, with whom he won six titles, as he assembled parts for a team that now fields Cup cars for his son, Dale Jr., Waltrip and a Busch program for defending champion Martin Truex.

Besides, Gordon said, information is laid out for everyone to see in NASCAR. You just have to know how to process it.

"One thing nice about NASCAR - and first when I came to NASCAR I didn't like it, but now I do like it - if I want to do something, hey, Bobby Labonte's garage is open. The car is right there. I can go look at it. You can go see what guys are doing to their cars. We'll make some mistakes, but we'll learn from it."

Gordon thinks his endeavor will work because he has delegated virtually every job except rubber-stamping business decisions and driving his No. 7 Chevrolet.

"We've got a general manager, crew chiefs in place, fabrication managers, paint departments and these departments know what their jobs are and what needs to be done," said Gordon, who has won three Nextel Cup races, two on road courses in 2003. "I'm there. I stop there and talk with the guys. We have the good chemistry thing going on. As far as driving the car I get to focus on that part. If the car doesn't run good the first guy you go to is the crew chief. It's no different than if I worked for Richard Childress."

But the mind often wanders to broader matters. As much as Rudd tried to just race while at the track, pride kept him involved in every aspect of the business. When a contractor botched the paint job on the shop floor, he and some friends slid around on it all night, cutting out bubbles with razor blades.

"If the plan worked, we would have had a two- or three-car team by now," Rudd said. "A lot of plans, but plans come to an end sometimes."

[Last modified March 19, 2005, 01:01:18]