Motorsports

A quarter century later, crew chief back near top

Doug Richert won a title at age 20. Turned out his trek was just beginning.

By BRANT JAMES
Published November 12, 2005

AVONDALE, Ariz. - Doug Richert turned 17 in the back of a home-built stock car hauler, rolling down some dusty highway in the middle of Texas.

A duffel bag loosely packed with his possessions at his feet, a wild notion in his head, Richert didn't feel so much like a kid at a turning point, just an ambitious one on a wild ride with his buddies.

On that defining day, June 14, 1977, the world was him, six gearhead friends from Saratoga, Calif., and the father of one of their girlfriends, who was a rich California land developer. They were a NASCAR race team just because they wanted to be and because Rod Osterlund had the wherewithal and will to keep writing checks.

Most of those friends have since faded out of the sport. But Richert went from a car chief, engine installer and car loader to NASCAR crew chief. In 1980 he became the youngest to win a championship at NASCAR's highest level. Today, three days from the 25th anniversary of his title-clinching race with the late Dale Earnhardt, Richert's wavy brown hair is tinged with gray flecks, and a mustache adds distinction to a face that has been seen in NASCAR garages for a quarter century. His narrow-rimmed reading glasses suggest lessons learned on a long road.

Richert has watched his sport evolve from one in which on a lark a group of buddies can dream big and win a title in three years to a multinational corporation in which money and the expertise it buys rules all. His crew chief tools were once a manila folder, a stopwatch and a sheet of paper with car setups. Now, as crew chief for Greg Biffle's No. 16 Ford, he has all the techno-generated data and equipment million-dollar sponsorships can buy.

"Twenty-five years?" he said. "Man things have changed."

Richert and Dave D'Ambrosio grew up racing everything with wheels in northern California: bicycles, motorcycles, dune buggies. Richert, quiet but fiercely competitive, generally found whatever was going fast that day, D'Ambrosio said, and as they grew up, their attention turned to fast cars and weekends at local speedways. Their circle of friends grew into a race team. Then D'Ambrosio started dating the daughter of Osterlund, a local developer.

"He got interested in it because his daughter was interested in us," D'Ambrosio remembered. "He invited us over to the house, and then he came by the shop and saw the race cars. He kind of grew on us a little bit, or we grew on him."

Roland Wlodyka was a carpet installer for Osterlund's companies and a weekend Super Modified racer when he joined the budding team. Because he was a few years older, he became team manager. It didn't seem like the start of a career. But it seemed very cool.

"It was quite the deal," Richert said, grinning. "I was young, you know."

Richert and D'Ambrosio would not be left behind when the team packed for a June 19, 1977, race at Michigan with the plan of continuing on to Charlotte to set up a full-time shop.

"We kind of figured that was our path," D'Ambrosio said. "It was one of those deals where we started this racing team, we'd built it up over a couple of years and the team was leaving and we kind of decided we were going with it."

The boyhood friends lived in a tiny Charlotte apartment, decorated with two bean bag chairs and a large stereo. They slept on the floor but didn't care. They were racing, and fairly quickly they were competing.

Though Osterlund's team struggled early, it used a litany of drivers - among them Dave Marcis, Neil Bonnett and Janet Guthrie - until a swaggering North Carolinian named Earnhardt signed on for a race in 1978. He finished fourth at Atlanta. In 1979, the 28-year-old Earnhardt raced 27 more times for Osterlund, earning their first win at Bristol and a rookie of the year award.

It was a magical time to be young and playing in the big leagues. And it was an incredible time, Richert said, to know someone who grew into a legend.

"I think we had a good relationship," he said. "We spent a lot of time together. We kind of hung out together. I wasn't married at the time. He wasn't married at the time and we bought dirt bikes. We went water-skiing. We liked doing all those things, and we did them together, and it was fun.

"I considered us friends. Any time you hang out with someone as much as you do when you work with and for one another on a race team, you spend a lot of time together. We spent a little extra because we'd leave the racetrack and we'd go water skiing until it got dark and we'd fly back down and then we'd go ride dirt bikes or something."

In 1980 he won twice in the first six races when crew chief Jake Elder seemed to scuttle the season by deciding to leave.

" "Suitcase Jake' was his name, and he'd stay at a place for a period of time and then he'd move on," D'Ambrosio said.

Osterlund named Richert crew chief and the team hardly flinched, winning three more times.

Richert said the change in job titles had little affect on his daily life.

"It was really business as usual," he said. "Back then you still did all the same things. It's just a title. I didn't change what I was doing. I still had to set the cars up, still had to go to the racetrack, we still had to get in races. You had a different title. Okay, instead of the other person saying, "Okay, four (tires),' it was you saying, "Okay, four.' "

Richert and Earnhardt won consecutive races at Martinsville and Charlotte late in the season to pull 115 points ahead of Cale Yarborough in the standings. Yarborough won the next two races and finished third at Ontario Speedway in the 31st and final race, but Earnhardt held on to win by 19 points.

"We all got together and made it work," Earnhardt later said. "We did the best we could with it and we made it work. It's amazing that we could to that."

The reward was much more in the winning in those days before NASCAR exploded into a national sport. The banquet was held not at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York but the Whitehall Hotel in Daytona Beach. No morning talk-show appearances or multimillion-dollar bonuses.

"I guess the biggest thing I display is the big belt buckle," Richert said. "Winston gave you a big championship belt buckle and a leather belt that went with it. That's probably really the most memento thing that came out of the championship."

The group of friends assumed it was in for the long haul, but in 1981, blaming a flagging California economy, Osterlund called a meeting and announced he sold the team to coal mining entrepreneur J.D. Stacy.

"It was pretty hard on us. It kind of blindsided us," D'Ambrosio said.

The team eventually scattered. Earnhardt left late in the 1981 season to begin the defining era of his career at Richard Childress Racing. D'Ambrosio faded out of the sport in 1982 and now works as a manufacturing engineer for a medical device company.

Richert moved from shop to shop before landing his next big break in 2003, when he was hired to run the truck series program for up-and-comer Carl Edwards at Roush Racing.

Sometimes, he wondered if people cared or even remembered that he had won a championship at the sport's highest level.

"You work just as hard for that chance, but as years go on, it seems like your chances keep getting smaller and smaller because the competition range is up," said Richert, who became Biffle's Nextel Cup crew chief in September 2003.

Richert, a calm communicator who has worked well with the blunt Biffle, helped right a program that Biffle said started "from scratch - below scratch," and made it one of Roush Racing's most consistent. All eight of Biffle's Cup wins (five this season) have come since Richert came aboard. Biffle challenged points leader Tony Stewart for the points lead last weekend, but after finishing 20th at Texas, has little chance in the final two races of winning Richert's second title.

Richert keeps in touch with D'Ambrosio, they visit four or five times a year, but he has lost touch with the rest of that unlikely title team. He occasionally sees Wlodyka, who drives the truck for a parts wholesaler that serves the NASCAR garage. Osterlund has not been heard from in years.

To the members of that team, 1980 seems like a lifetime ago.

"We didn't really understand what we'd accomplished because we were 17, 18 years old and we went out there and everything kind of went our way and we won everything there was to win those couple of years," D'Ambrosio said. "It wasn't until a couple of years after that I realized what we had accomplished."

To Richert, it's still amazing how much one bold choice can direct a life.

"It was just one day, and then all of a sudden I'm packing my bag. I had nothing, literally, a bag," he said. "It's amazing how things work out sometimes."

[Last modified November 12, 2005, 00:55:15]