The Dale Jr. Download - 351 - Will Cronkrite: The Storyteller

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

He's not just a humble man with gray hair, an old Goodyear hat, and red suspenders, Will Cronkrite is a former NASCAR crew chief and car owner full of amazing stories that Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants the world to hear. His #96 car gave Dale Earnhardt what many consider to be his big break in NASCAR and Dale Jr. gets the low-down on how it all happened. As a "scrawny kid" he stood in his father's truck at Cronkrites shop as they readied the car for the World 600, a part of Dale Jr.'s life that Will brings to life in this fascinating conversation. The story was so much more! How did Willy T. Ribbs and Humpy Wheeler help create a chance that would springboard The Intimidator's career? Cronkrite details the early days of a father and NASCAR Hall of Famer.Cronkrite's life changed with the tragic death of his wife and children. It was at this moment that everything pivoted to Auto Racing. He took his intense work ethic and desire from the cornfields of Ohio, to Indianapolis, and eventually the top-ranks of NASCAR. Along the way, he worked with legendary drivers like Benny Parsons, David Pearson, Donnie Allison, Mark Martin, Ricky Rudd, and more. He also worked around some characters, like tough Minnesotan Joe Frasson. Cronkrite shares a crash story for the ages with Frasson, bloodied, insisting on Cronkrite taping his hand to the steering wheel.Before he arrived in the southern stock car world, Cronkrite experienced a different side of racing in the Chicagoland area. He reveals how things were different in racing up there and how he was rewarded with diamonds for good performance. He also tells the tale of a gruesome fight that led to jail time and the fear of what was to happen when he was sprung by a "connected" individual involved in the racing operation. It's a story you have to hear to believe.Cronkrite talks about many racing topics from DiGard Racing, to working with a gutsy racing pioneer named Janet Guthrie. He also shares stories from his months working on the hit Burt Reynolds movie Stroker Ace, including when Dale Sr. shook down the Chicken Pit Special. The colorful Cronkrite tells a story about actress Loni Anderson and a lucky penny that he still has to this day.Before bringing in Cronkrite, Dale and co-host Mike Davis have an open discussion about how "me" turns to "we" after marriage. In AskJr presented by Xfinity, we find out what Dale Jr. predicts for 2022 with Roush Racing and new co-owner driver Brad Keselowski. He also talks about going radio-style at the Glen and the origins of his popular skeleton driving gloves. Check out Dirty Mo Media on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DirtyMoMedia  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When is it supposed to click the right chemistry? Sparks flying, energy, and the sleep. This is a production of Dirtymo Media. Hey, everybody. It's Dale Jr. back again for another episode of the Dell Jr. Download with my co-host, Mike Davis. What's up, Mike? Hey, buddy. We got a great guest coming in today.

But before I introduce who that is, I want to tell you that Leah's here, Matthew's here. And we're going to have a lot of fun. Ash Jr.'s on deck. It's going to be a great show. but the guest for today, his name is Will Cron Crite. And he wrote a book, and we're going to talk about that. But who is Will? He owned race cars that my dad drove.

There's one on this desk here at the studio, and it's a white number 96 cardinal tractor. I'm sure if you're an Earnhardt fan, you recognize this car. Well, that's the car that Will owned, and he's got an interesting story about how dad became the driver for it in 1978. That car and the Blade Dad competed with that car. kind of led to his full-time ride with Rod Austerlund, and then, you know, therefore sent him into, you know, the rest of his career with everything he accomplished.

So this car and wheel had a major influence for dad. But anyway, reading his book was a lot of fun. Mike, you read it? Yeah. It's a great book. So, dude is a heck of a storyteller, really eccentric, and you're going to love it. So I've been wanting to get him on here for a really long time,

and I finally convinced to Mike Davis to let us have him on here. Matthew, you had a lunch and spent four hours talking to the guy. Yeah, that wasn't hard at all. He's just an amazing, talented, bright, articulate human being. All right, well, hang on to your seats. It's going to be fun. It's going to be good. So the other day I was sitting in.

Me and Amy sometimes debate on what might be an open topic, a good conversation for open topic. This is her idea, not mine. All right, I brought it up. So a couple of us are married. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think so.

He is practically. Pay attention. Matthew, I don't need you on this one. Uh-oh. So when you're single, right, and you've got, you know, you're talking to your buddy, Bob, and you're like, hey, man, I got my truck, got the oil changed in my truck the other day. You want to come over to my house? Mm-hmm.

And when you hang out, right? And so when you get married, did you keep saying my? Or did you change it to our? Ooh. So this is the debate you and Amy have. Yes. Because sometimes I still say my, like my house, my car, my truck, my, well, I mean, my truck is, she's not really complaining about that. But I sometimes have said my daughter in her presence, talking to someone else.

It's not false. Isn't it understood, though, that you have a co-creator in the daughter and that, like, you shouldn't have to be literal? I mean, like, I think that, like, there's something, context matters. But in that case, I think that everyone just naturally assumes it and gives you grace. Unless you're the Virgin Mary, everybody assumes that you had a business partner. Sure. So, yeah, I hear you, 100%. But Amy's argument to that is, so when we first got together, and I'm going to come to her defense here for a second.

So when we first got together and she knows nothing about racing and she's going to the races with me, she's like man how come every time you talk about racing and anything you do you always it's us we it's it's always you never take ownership of an accomplishment or a milestone or anything and i said well you know you you you don't want you want your team to know that you look at this as a group right i didn't do it all and and i can't do it without my team and so i just programmed to saying we we did this we're happy we're excited when somebody will come up and go, man, you made the playoffs. What do you think? We're excited. Right. Right. Not, I'm excited. You know, I was just programmed. I made myself never,

never single myself out and always tried to group in the whole team into the conversation. And any time. So I always did that. And that kind of would annoy her sometimes because there were moments, I think, when when the person that was talking to me was speaking specifically. about me and how I felt about a certain thing and a certain accomplishment in racing. And I would always say, well, we're happy. We're excited. We, we, you know, we're thrilled or whatever. That always, she, she couldn't understand that. And so she wonders why it was so easy for me to do that. And then when we got married, it wasn't easy for me to transition from my house. We're going to, you know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is my, my this, my that.

She's like, well, with your racing, everything was we, everything was ours, everything was us. But with your marriage, you're still, you still forget that I'm here sometimes. Ooh. Yeah, that's, it's right. Let's unpack this for a second. Because it is exactly that. When she brings, she doesn't, I mean, she's not on me on this every day. But so if me and Amy are in a conversation with another couple about coming over for dinner, right,

you guys can come to my house and Amy's sitting there going and she won't say anything she's not like that okay right but later on she'll go my house really yeah I'm like right here and so that's when she's like I don't understand you know for years in racing everything was a team me

me it was never me it was never I was we us them you know and so that that was she's like maybe y'all could have this conversation see what your your co-host Mike Davis thinks about it I got an opinion. Yeah. I think it's formulating right now, so it's not polished, okay?

Yeah. First of all, let's just rule out one thing, because the absolute dumbest thing you could do is try to go play that my card in an argument. You don't do that. Like, you don't be like, this is my house. Right. You're driving my car. You do not do that.

That would be smart to not do that. You would be wrong also. Yeah. Because, I mean, when you get married, everything, you're shared, that's a beautiful part about marriage. You're sharing your life. You're sharing things. Everything's equal.

All right. So I just want to make sure we're rolling that out. A lot of us, we can't really relate with you because there's a couple things that we've got to remember in context here. One is from the, I guess from about 2003 to 2006 or seven, you literally were fighting for ownership of your name and your things. Like you did not even have that. So like I don't think you could make an argument for if you want to get into the psychology. and going to deep therapy sessions, you could say that your whole life, you never really had anything. God, you got shipped to 47 different schools. You didn't even have friends,

really, before they were basically taken away from you. So I could make a good argument that your whole wiring up until 40 has been a fight to get ownership and to, you know, and to protect what is yours. And so I don't think you mean anything bad by it. I think that that's probably just some of the wiring, like you said, you're wired in the race team, all of you race car drivers the same way. Now, so I would, do you make, do you do this? No, I don't think I do this. I was trying to think about that. What if you did do it? Well, I do it, but again, I think that there's a, you know, there's a tremendous amount of grace where that is shown and people just know that it's understood. Like, if I say my recliner, everybody knows that everybody can sit in the recliner,

more, you know, by this, but I don't think that everybody's trying to get their stakes in the ground on defining what is who's is who in the house. But I'm different because, see, I think that one is your wire differently. Two, I mean, Amy probably, I don't know what Amy's insecurities would be, but if I'm Amy and I'm entered into a marriage of somebody like a public figure, you know everybody's sitting there got their eye, but she's under a microscope. And she, you know, on, oh, is she going to try to go and take this or take that?

Like, you know, how is the dynamics of Dale going to change now that he's married? And you've lived a very bachelor life and had a bunch of friends that you really allowed liberties to come and go and walk into the motor home without knocking. I mean, it was a free-for-all. There were no rules, really, in your life for 20 freaking years. And so people would stay on the bus. Well, the dynamics change when you get. married and I'm sure that that's something that probably you should extend a little bit more grace to Amy because yeah something that maybe just kind of insignificantly just brushed off as like whether you're

saying mine or ours well in her life she's probably had this more of a prominent thing for her to have to you know settle out and you know since day one since you guys you know fell in love and and all that stuff I mean so like I said to you from the beginning I remember there was some things that were changing with Amy in the picture. And, you know, you had to make some decisions on, well, this friend or that friend or this person or that person is going to have to get over it. Yeah. And I remember telling you, you won't remember this, but I remembered it. It's like, listen, everything that you have belongs to Amy now.

And that's the way it ought to be. And it is certainly going to be the way your mindset has to be if you're going to last. You know, you can't sit there and draw boundaries right off, you know, right on day one. Like what's mine is yours. I want to share this with you, and you get as much say-so in that. So I don't know. I guess I'm rambling at this point, but I do think that Amy has some, she lives in a different fish bowl to where that probably taps into what might be an insecurity a little bit.

Yes, right. That's what that does. So it triggers this little thing. Yeah. And so, Matthew, do you experience this with your life? A little bit. I think it comes down to listening to what you've brought. both were saying, though, is innocence and intent.

You know, like, like a lot of times when we say that as husbands, and I can only speak as a husband, I don't think it's like there's any intent there. It's more innocence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an honest mistake. Yeah, it's just an honest mistake, and it's like, you know, you could get tripped up over it. You know, both sides could get tripped up over it. But, yeah, I've said it before, and I was more conscious of it earlier in marriage. Did she shoot you a look or say something later?

No, Erica's never been like that. I'm not trying to kiss her butt there, but no. Thank you. No, I can see both sides. Like when, like when Taylor and I got together, he had a house. I had an apartment. Eventually, he sold his house, moved into my apartment. And we still, it was still like my apartment since then now we have our house together. You know what I mean? So we like combined our lives. But the whole time it was his house or my apartment. Like it was never. That's true. It was never the same, you know, it was always his or mine. Now it's, now it's our. And this, like, we don't have any kids. We have a dog. And it's our dog. Yeah.

You know? That's what. Is it? It is. Like, I got the dog before him, but it's definitely like our dog. So if he says my dog, if he says my dog. He doesn't, mm-mm, he won't say that. But if he were to, yeah, that's what we're trying to find out.

If he were, would you have a reaction? Oh, for sure. So there you go. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So that's what. That's a great, this happens with the dogs quite a bit.

Because Amy, Junebug was Amy's when she lived alone, and I wanted Gus. And so, you know, there was some ownership at a point. But now that we're married and together, and Amy's eyes, Junebug is ours, right? Because I'll be like, you know, I still look at Junebug as Amy's dog. I really do. I can't break from that. I can't, I can't, I love him and we're, we're great friends, but he's not, I don't look at him as my responsibility. I'll take him out, I'll do, I'll feed him and do those things for him, but I don't

look, like, I just can't, he's not my dog. Does that make sense? Like, I don't know how to, but Amy bugs a hell out of Amy that I don't look at it as our, as Jew mug is ours. Well, yeah, that would bug me too, actually. Right. Yeah. I, I mean, we're, he is great. I think my actions show different. My actions would make you think that, man, you know, but man, when I talk about him, it's apparent, right, to Amy, like, wait a minute, no, this ain't, it's not my dog, this is our dog. Isn't it fair to say, though, that you don't really, like, you don't really go think through,

you don't follow your swing all the way when it comes to everybody's, you know, reactions or deep thoughts, but in other words, your intentions are always good, and you may upset me something. You have no idea that you did it. And then if you did know you did it, you would go change it in a heartbeat and be like, man, I don't know what you're talking to talk about, but you said this. You said lost speedways, you know, whatever it is, whatever nonsensical thing that gets us all route up and we all got those moments, right? A lot of it could be mood driven. But I think that you get kind of put into a place sometimes where you dictate a lot of people's reactions and moods just based off of being the boss in this place and the

you know the public figure that you are and in a lot of times you know we read you wrong and your intention is no no way like if you're on an airplane and you say zero words to anybody a lot of people be like what's wrong with dell yeah and I'm like nothing's wrong with dell what do you mean he ain't saying anything to anybody and I'm like well that's just yeah I mean there's nothing wrong with him he doesn't sit there and chat it up a lot of times but people I hate small talk. I know, right? Yeah.

You were never real good. You're way better at it than you used to be. God, you used to be. It was painful. We used to go to these national... We used to have to go meet with politicians in Washington, D.C. I'll never forget these. And it's like, we'd go to these like gala's balls,

government, like senators and stuff with the National Guard. I mean, literally having to play politics, right? God. Dale stuck out like a sore thumb. Hated it from the moment he walked in. people, you know, you'd have their wives come up and just, we want to pay, Dale was like, this is so awkward. I don't like small talk. I don't like any of it.

You'd play, you'd get through it. Yeah. Hey, is it also true that sometimes we want to transfer ownership of our kids? Like, like, like, when they're having a nuclear meltdown over something ridiculous. We do that. And what do you say? She's your daughter. That's your kid.

Hey, when she wants to wear a sweatshirt in July, that's your kid. That's, we and Amy don't do that, but we do, you will. Well, we don't say, we, we approach it a little bit differently. And we'll be like, that's you right there. Like, it's, you know, like when Nicole was born, she looked just like me. It doesn't so much today a year later, but I, I mean, it was, when you looked at her, you saw it. And so, but anyways, when they do things, um, me and Amy will be like, uh, that's you. That's you.

That's your side coming out. Because I think I'm sensitive to her concerns of our ownership, right, responsibility that I don't go, that's your child. No, I do it all the time. I don't want to, I don't know how that's going to go over. So we instead say, that's, I see you right there in this little, yeah, hissy fit. What's going on.

We all got stuff that gets under our skin or our nerves. that doesn't make sense to most people. And I don't think that's a problem. I think everybody's entitled to one or two pet peeves that just crawl your skin. And, you know, I'm sure you got them. You know, if Amies is about the ownership thing or mine and ours, she gets that. She gets that one. New topic for an open segment in the future.

Just the word pet, just pet peeves. Oh, my Lord. I could go on for three hours. I just think about that one. Oh, I know, man. I got mine. I cannot stand it when my wife were ordering food and she says, I don't want anything, but then she wants to eat half of yours.

Oh, God. I've never experienced. Oh, go to dinner with my wife. She will not order a meal for her own. And I'm like, and I'll say, I know you're going to sit there and want to eat mine. I don't want anything. I'm not hungry. I know better than this.

You are definitely hungry and you are going to want. I'm not hungry. I don't want anything. and we will go down that road and there it is. Boom. She's eating a chicken finger. Off my plate. Now you're down to four.

It's such a bad thing. It's my pet peeve. I don't like it. I'm not saying. Everybody's got one. I got to think about it. I don't think I got one. Oh, bull.

Save it, man. Think of a look. When Matthew nods? Oh, well. Freaking it. Yeah. Do you, have you noticed that I've been having a conscious effort to... Yes, there's been less nodding.

Okay. It's hard for me, dude. I'm expressive. I think if you didn't wear those big bucket hats, it wouldn't be so noticeable. So I wear a lowrider like you? He wears these big giant, colorful, throwback hats, and it's in there going, it looks like the mascot of the football game, you know. Fobble head.

He does. See, I didn't even have to work for that pet peeve. Nailed it right off the bat. Matthew nodding. Dale can't stand it. We'll stop the show to make him stop nodding. Okay, Mike, let's bring in Will. Let's do it.

With the thermometer near 100 degrees in time. There he is. You brought something? So fit Matthew, you'll have to deal with him for him. Oh, well, thank you. We asked Matthew if Will had any T-shirts for us. He said, absolutely not. No, no T-shirts.

You're saying he kept it for himself? I'm kidding, of course. He didn't. kidding, I'm kidding. That's awesome. Well, thank you. Well, you're welcome. Good morning. Good morning. How you doing? I'm doing so good. I can't stand it today. So Will Kronkwright. You, you know, we've had this car on this table for a long time, right? And I've known who you are for a really long time. I've been curious. I read your book and Mike is now read it as well. Oh, thank you. So you wrote this book and it's called I was a NASCAR redneck. And, uh, you know, you know,

You're from the north. Where were you born? I was born about 25 miles west of Detroit in the little town. I was born in a hospital in Howell, Michigan, but we lived in Brighton, Michigan. And so you've lived a pretty interesting life. You've done a lot of different things, been all over the place. And, I mean, I only know that after reading the book. And you on this car and reading about how you, we're going to talk about all that,

how you bought the car and all that. And there's a little bit of a story, too, that blew my mind about me. And I had no clue. Like, I don't have any memories, right? Nobody really does of their childhood before, like, five, four years old, right? And to, to, to, I didn't know, you know, I don't, I don't know how much I spent time with dad when I was two, three, four, dad and mom going through a divorce and all that. And so to hear that little story, you'll have no idea how cool that was for me.

I'm glad. So we'll dive into that too. But anyways, let's talk about, so you're born up in Michigan. What was your connection to racing? Where did you first, like, get the bug? What was the first thing that you saw? I didn't do much racing at all in Michigan. As a young story, we moved to Middletown, Ohio, and I got involved with go-karts.

Why did y'all move? My dad got a job. What's your dad's job? He was an electrical engineer. Yeah. I was pretty proud of my dad. I missed my dad, too. I spent time with him, but he didn't go to my sport events.

I played little football and a little basketball, and I sort of sucked, so I probably wouldn't have gone anyway. But we had a complete family, and he got a job down in Middletown, Ohio. So we moved down there, and then I found out about go-carts. and I got into the go-karts pretty deep. How did that happen? I guess I don't know how I got, I know how I bought the first one. I don't know what enthused me to do that. But what got me into racing was Dad said,

you can't be growing around in the yard, digging up to dirt. We need to take it to a track. And when we went to the track, I found out you could race. Well, that was it. I mean, I can run against that guy or I can go faster than that. What kind of race track? It was kind of a kidney-shaped. road course, it wasn't an oval, so it was going right and left.

That was when I first started trying to go faster than somebody else. We used to wear leather, and it was the motor was to my right, so I put one of those ladies perfume squatters inside my driver's uniform with a hole in the back of that right arm. And if I needed to get by somebody, if I squeezed my arm, that thing would add Amai's water out right in front of carburetor. I got an little oxygen and a little water. It's enough to you get by.

Yeah. Oh, and how old are you when you're doing this? 12 or 13 years. You're innovating at 12 or 13 years old. You're going to make a career out of innovation here, and you're doing it with a perfume bottle. I guess that's right. They didn't think about it like that.

I mean, this is the first chapter. This would be my first chapter of the book. No, wait a second. What were you doing to your dad's lawn that made him, say, go to a racetrack? Driving a go-cart and spinning up. You were just tearing up the grass. Yes.

Yeah, I'd want you off the lawn. Pretty severely. That's something like when you get a go-cart and yard cart, there's got to be a dedicated spot for that, or you could get yourself in big trouble. Yeah, he pointed that out to me. He told you to get off my lawn. So you said you got heavy into the go-carts.

How heavy? I won enough trophies one year. I traded them in for a free pass to race at that track the next year. And then I won the state championship with that little, I wish I got West Bend motor. Yeah. And I figured out how to stuff the crankcase, which was sort of common. But then I took... What do you mean to stuff it?

Fill the crank case. You know, the piston comes down, it sucks gas in, puts it in the crank case, and then when the piston comes down, pushes it back up the side porch. So the piston pulls in the same amount, but if you put crap inside the crank case, it compresses that. when the, you know, piston comes down. What kind of crap? Well, they actually made a port for it, but I epoxyed more to make it thicker. And then I took elbows from electrical conduit and ran two extra ports up the side.

So I could run the same intake port right port position, but then I put these two round ports in that started it. It's like advancing the cam. So when that piston came down, it pushed up through the three side ports and those two new ports that I put in. So I How do you know all this? I know that's what I'm thinking. Well, you know, you just know that's where the gas goes. And if you want more, you just make a more place.

Were you, were you good in school? Were you a good student? Were you smart? Yeah, probably. Probably. Well, my grades were about medium, but. Okay. That's, that's, you passed.

Yes, yes. But so you're sitting here figuring out how, you know, how to tune up this race car. So it's just common sense? No teachers ever ask me them questions No, you'd have made all A's if you had, right? Yeah. All right, did your dad teach you this? No, he was, no, he was an electrical engineer.

So you just kind of trial in there, pulling it apart, understanding how it works, fixing it, repairing it, and your mind starts taking off, and you've got a creative mind that allowed you to sort of see these things and develop this engine to make it better. So you won a state championship? It blew the living crap out of that motor about 10 feet away from the checkered flag. The biggest part of that motor was a spark plug. Oh, my God.

It did. Then little ports I put in when that thing blew up, it split the case and blew the head off. But you won the state championship? It's only about six feet. I mean, it blew up and was like skidded across the finish line. So, you're, are you, you know, I didn't know you'd have done any driving. So this is kind of a surprise to me to hear that you actually drove. I could road race.

I race sports cars and I was really into road racing. Yeah. But I get motion sickness pretty easily. So oval track racing wasn't, I didn't want to try it because I didn't want to puke in front of everybody. So how did you not get sick in a road race car? That seems like that's the one that would make you sick. No, just right and left, right and left.

This crap builds up in one side of my brain or something. I mean, I don't know why. So you went from go-carts to sports cars? I had a little triumph that I race, just like Jim Conn and stuff they put up. What are you doing for a living? Now? No, then. Oh.

So you're right, you know, you're right. No, when I started the go-cars, I was still in college when I was doing the go-carts, and then I had a job where I was a draftsman. I worked for a steel company, and they'd, somebody wanted to put up a building like yours or a shopping center. we'd get to steel structural drawings and it was my job to make a list of all those steel pieces and then if we got that job I was responsible for making the drawings. And so how did you get to IndyCar?

That was the very first thing I did in racing. There's a section in that book that's not a humorous section of book. And at some point right before Christmas in 69, I lost my wife and a couple of kids and a couple girls in a car wreck and I wanted to do something else. I didn't want to live there. I didn't want to do that same job because I was at that job when they notified me. I just didn't want to be it. You wanted to change your entire life. I just something different yes sir. I wrote in the book I just made a list of of the things I thought I was good at, a list of things that people told me I was good at and then I took those two lists and made a third list and it just was competitive trying to use your brain a little bit

and mechanical. Sure. So I started looking for a job kind of just as a mechanic on race cars. Do you, so I don't want to dive too deep into that event in your life, but how, when you look back today, how did you get through that? How did you persevere? In hindsight, I can tell you, I was sharing with Matthew yesterday. I worked 13 years and six months and never had a day off.

After that? So I was busy. After the funeral crap, I looked for a job and I got hired by a guy named Howard Milliken over in Indiana, just west of Indianapolis. And I went over there in April, and I just was a gopher. Learned to rivet and do just bolt together stuff and help him. No fabrication. Just a free helper guy. And then we went to Indianapolis and was Jigger Soroyce was the driver of the last turbine car to ever attempt qualifying.

And I was working on his car. And Rick Muther was the other guy. And he actually finished a race in eighth or something on the lead lap. That car went pretty well. But Jigger's car didn't. So after that, I found a job at Ray Nichols in Griffith, Indiana. Ray Nichols. When David Pearson was up there driving Pontiac.

So after this happens to you, you changed your whole life. You went and just put yourself to work. You went to IndyCar. You moved to Indiana. No, I didn't move. I was still living. When the accident occurred, she was actually killed on the last trip we were going to make to a new piece of farm property that we bought. Where?

In Hamilton, Ohio. We were living in Lebanon, Ohio. The accident was in Lebanon, Ohio. But we were moving to Hamilton, Ohio, and that's when she got killed. Sure. And so I lived there, and I'd go to Indianapolis because I was by myself, you know, if that house stayed empty for a couple weeks or something, it just, it wasn't anything to it. And then, but when I went to Indianapolis, I had sold, by then I had sold my property, so I was gone from the area. So what was, you, you had some IndyCar experience, you worked in IndyCar and then you ended up in stock cars. What decided your fate between those two? Like, how did you not?

There wasn't a big change. The deal at Indy was over when Indy was over. He didn't want to pay me, and I didn't want to stay in Indiana working for free. Right. So I just, I went back home and worked out of my shop for a little bit. Doing what? I actually fixed a sprint car for a guy. Just peddling?

Well, yeah, just welding. Just welding with race cars. Yes, sir, yes, sir. Are you working a job? No. A nine to five at this point? No. So you've left that behind, and you're mentally, you're thinking racing's in.

I want my minds. Right then I was just in, I just wanted to be in my shop building stuff and making stuff. I had a car at that time. The Manta, I think, and it was a car, a fiberglass car, a kit car. I bought the kit chassis. It was a mid-engine small block Chevy with Corvair transaxil and front suspension. So I was working on that. What was it for?

That was, I was going to drive it, but it was. Where? It was built to be a street car. Okay. And then I carried that with it. with me to Joe Frasones and then up to Cecil Gordon. Joe Frizzan? Yeah.

And... ...Missot, Minnesota Crash Factor, yes. Yeah. So, all right, keep going. I know all these things. This is great. Okay, so I'm working up at Cecil's, Gordon's. Doing what?

In horse... I was actually the crew chief by then. I worked for Benny Parsons for... Wait, wait, wait. So... Yeah, you got it back up. Yeah, we got back up. So...

Okay, I'm working up at Nichols Engineering. Right. Doing what? Well, I'm actually in the motor room building a... a flowbench for Harley Davidson out of a big old oil field valve. Okay. A tulip to point. For a Harley Davidson.

Yeah. I built the fixture that for a motorcycle framed at one Indie that, or Daytona that year. I didn't design anything. I just built it. So you worked on the motor, you working on things and. Not NASCAR stuff. I was in a NASCAR stuff, but in a NASCAR shop, but I was doing engine work for Harley Davidson and not engine work. I was building stuff for Harley Davidson.

I was kind of the guy in the shop that did his Harley work. Are you making money? Yeah, yeah, but that's a job, and I'm being paid, yes, sir. And Ron Purrier was up there, and he was having some outs with the guys building the motors, didn't agree with how they were doing, and was getting frustrated. So he went to work for Benny Parsons, and he wanted to know if I would like to go with him. I mean, I was. I didn't know anybody anywhere, and here was a chance to go where I thought was warmer weather.

Yeah, so I went down in Lerby, North Carolina. So you're going to work for Benny Parsons on the 72 car. Yes, sir. DeWitts race car. Most of 72, I think I was there the whole year for 72. And Bill, I mean, that's like Benny's just getting into it. He hadn't been in a Cup Series. He's running Arc cars in Detroit and so forth.

So he's just in a Cup Series for a couple years. He does win the championship in 73. So that was your first job in NASCAR. Yes, sir, where I was actually. 72. Doing work on the race car and changing tires. All right. So what was that like for you?

You've made this massive, your life's changed quite a bit in the last few years, but now you're down in North Carolina working on a stock car, traveling to the racetrack, I imagine. I mean, the 70s seem like a pretty amazing, awesome time. Were they as fun as they seem? In hindsight, there might have been. some fun involved at the time. I don't remember that.

We worked, one of the things, I have a great mom, and this place I was working at at the engineering work, I was making $350 a week. I went to work for Benny Parsons. Mr. DeWitt thought I was worth $100 a week. Oh, Lord. Well, you know, it was better than free at Indies. Yeah.

So I took that job, and there were times when we worked at least $100 a week. Sure. I was working, you know, a dollar. A dollar an hour. And I was a little embarrassed about that, but I didn't have, I just tell you to that, I didn't have, I didn't have time. You know, you just, you just work, and then you sleep, and then you work, and then you sleep. But work was pretty fun. Well, it was, I liked what I was doing, so it wasn't miserable.

It just was hard. Intense. Yeah. Who's the crew chief? Travis Carter. How was he to work with? I like Travis. Yeah.

Yeah, I like Travis a lot. Travis taught me a lot of stuff. My whole history has been, I've worked for some real. good people. They took care of me, taught me stuff. I'm pretty appreciative of all the people that I've learned from in NASCAR. Let me give you one. Well, go back to Nichols for a second. Chris Vallow. Tell everybody who was Chris Vallow was. I'm afraid to. And why would you be afraid to? Well, I think he was, is a word, connected. Connected is a word. That's one way to put it. Yeah. Is that as far as you want to go as far as Chris Vallow? I'd be happy to, yes.

I'd be happy to tell you some of those things, you know. Tell me what happened with Chris Val. Yeah. Tell me the story about the diamonds. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, I'm working in this back room of the engine department. I have a window on this side, on the right side of where I was working.

And when they'd get the car ready to go to a race, they'd bring in their big truck with a trailer and load the car on it. And when they were done loading the car, the trailer would be just in front of my window. And then Chris Valo would come in. and a long Lincoln, and they'd close both doors to that bay through the shop. And the driver would get out and go around to open the door for Mr. Vallow. He'd go up and talk along the side between the wall and the race truck with Ray Nichols. And Chris would, Mr. Vallow would turn around and wiggle his hands like that.

And this driver would be right outside my window. And we never talked, but we waved and, you know, say hello and stuff. He'd go to the trunk of this car, and he'd go to the trunk of this car, He'd open up, I guess this is okay, he'd open up this trunk of this car, and there were boxes of lettuce in there. But when he lifted the lid, you know, it was green, but it wasn't lettuce. And he was pulling out stacks of money, you know, like an inch thick, not like I get at the bank. Not that one dollar an hour you're making. And he'd take that, he'd pull that thing open, and when the trunk was open, he'd take two or three of them and set them on the edge of the trunk.

And to this day, I don't understand how I did this. But he'd take another one of them wads of money, take it up to his ear and go, blimp. He'd separate that, put it with it and give it to. It was like he could count it here. He could count it by his ear. I mean, I, or maybe he only had to get close. I don't know.

Man. But they do that, and this went on for a number of times. And then finally the motor stayed together, and David won the pole, I think, at Michigan. So Mr. Vallow comes in the engine room when he's talking. to Minnie and Franz and told Minnie to clear off the top part of his toolbox. The little shelf sticks out off everybody's box. He cleaned it off and then he says to this, his driver, he says, let me have that bag. And he reached in his left pocket and he says, no, the other one, so he reached in this bag.

Pulled it out, tipped it up and it was a pile of diamonds. And he asked Minnie, he said, you know, I don't know, get you three or four of them. I'm watching from back in the motor room and Franz gets one, the other guys get some, Ron Purier gets some, and this driver just turned around and said, well, what about that guy back there? You know, Chris, they pulled me up there, and I got, he said, pick three of them. I just, you know, looked around,

so I'd get the three biggest ones I could. That's sort of terrifying. It gets worse, yeah. That part was fine. I took those things to the heart, to the pawn shop probably three days later, and this would have been 1970, one or two. I got $1,200.

I'd take $1,200 now. Yeah, I would too. But that was the terrifying part? I mean, not taking the diamond? No, the diamond was, there's more of that story that I spent time in jail. Was that where you were? Yeah. I mean, we like a good jail story.

I've just lost my family, and I'm in Griffith, Indiana, working at Ray Nichols, and I'm working at night in this back room by myself. And I'm the only one there at night because, you know, nobody else has to work. I just got nothing else to do. I just, you know, I got nothing else to do. So I'm working on this float bench. And I've been hearing rumors around there that people were kind of losing some tools.

I didn't think about it. Nobody was accusing anybody of anything. But then I'm working back in this back of the engine room. And to get into a shop, you had to punch a keypad. And there was a sound that says like, Camp Town, Rady's sing this song. And so you could hear, you know, if somebody came in, they just, they didn't own a key. They had to make that noise that you could. here.

A little jingle, yeah. So I look back, and here comes this real odd character who we'd been working around and he'd scare the crap out of it. They had a big men's room. And we'd go in there sometimes, and it looked like this guy was hanging himself, but he had a towel around the back of his neck, and he just was stretching his back. But when you first look at it, it just scares the crap of it. He's really, I thought, a creepy guy.

And it's him. So I'm thinking, oh, man, he takes a handful of screwdrivers out of my, the old, friend that I'd met there at the time. And I can say, oh, man, there's tools are getting stolen. This is how they're being stolen. There's going to be somebody knows I'm working here at night. I can't let this go. If I don't do something, it's going to look like it's me.

But I didn't impress him. So he was, asking what he was doing. He said, he's changing the battery. And he said, you know, it takes six screwdrivers to change the batteries. So he's all over him. And he's pretty much kicking my butt to tell you the truth. He knocked me down. You're getting a fight.

Here we go. You're rolling. Mostly him. Oh, you're losing? Big time. Okay. And I'm on the ground, and at the bottom of this toolbox, I remember that this friend that I had made, had made him a hammer. About a three-inch diameter cold roll about five inches long, and it had a 12-inch long piece of one-inch round rod welded to it.

It was just a crude hammer. But we used it to put behind the shocks and hit it with another hammer to knock that taper loose. Yeah. and I reached in that toolbox, pulled out that drawer and took that hammer and turned around and hit that boy on the foot. And he commenced to not hitting me anymore. So you're on the ground getting pummeled. You know where this hammer is. It just happens to be you're getting pummeled in the same area and you remember where the hammer is. You took one good whack at him and that was it.

Only took one. It only took one. He dropped? Flat. All right. Then what happened? Well, he started bleeding really bad. It severed his being. toe and popped it out the end of his tennis shoe. It was a mess. It was a mess. You got him a good one. But that splattered me with blood and stuff.

So I go in this men's room and clean up, and when I come out, he's crying. Man, you've got to help me here. I told him to, I questioned his heritage pretty strong and said, I ain't messing with you. But he was bleeding. So I had to call the ambulance. So now you're helping him. Now you're a best friend. You got to.

Nice best friend. Hey, you're the only friend he's got at that moment? If he survives tomorrow, I'm in trouble. Right. So I call the ambulance, and of course they call the cops. He's the hitter, and I'm the hit E, so there I go. It took me to jail. Wait, but you're the hit E?

How are you going to jail for that? Well, I'm the one that hit that guy with a hammer. Yeah, you're the hitter. But you called the cops. I didn't call nobody. Oh. The ambulance people called the cops. Oh, but who called the ambulance?

I did. Okay, so you are a little, I mean, you did help the situation, but you got arrested. Well, because I was, I guess, the aggressor person, I guess. He didn't really explain too much. So what happens? Well, so I go to, I'm going to this jail. And I'm in my work uniform and I got a lot of, some blood on me. And I get in there, and then people, I'm in a cell with maybe eight or nine other guys.

Again, I'm, I was a lot scrawnier back then than I am now. I was intimidated. I thought I was in jail in Chicago, Illinois, and I didn't want no part of that. I was actually in Gary, Indiana, but I thought I was in jail in Chicago. I was intimidated. Yeah. And about 3 o'clock in the morning, I hear this sound says, you got a kronkerdite in here? Cronkernkernik.

So I'm thinking, you know, whoever that is, I don't know if it's me thereafter. And if it is, they don't know me real well. Right. And I heard him say, somebody said, you want me to go get him? And he says, no, give me the keys. I'll go get him. So this guy comes walking home. He comes up to this door to the cell.

All them other guys go to the back of the room. All them guys know who that guy is. Oh. So now I'm terrified. I don't know if that guy I whacked was his brother or something. But it was the driver of the car. It was the guy that counted the money. Yeah.

So I figured, well, okay. He knows you. I think we're okay. Wow. But I was kind of worried maybe that guy was his friend or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, he takes us to his place. I'm still in these buddy clothes,

and he gets home and tells his wife to fix me breakfast, and they let me take a shower, but I had to put them old clothes back on. He says, come on, we've got to go downtown. We go get in his car again. We go just like in the movies. We drive up between these two real tall buildings up an alley, you know, and them big trash cans under that.

And I am petrified completely. Completely now. I just, I don't want no part of it. He knocks on the door and his little guy comes out, and it's the back room of a high-end men store. And we go in there, and that guy takes really fancy clothes and cuts them all up to make them look like my uniform. You know, fixes my pants,

tailors them, and puts my uniform on, cut the buttons off the collars, and puts my uniform, my patches on that shirt. And we go back to, go back to the shop about 7.30 in the morning. And when I get out, I said, you know, thanks for everything and he said hey this never happened hmm no okay so i go in mr nichols is up on a little like at the top of a landing just outside the door to his office and he just looked at me not that he said like that and then like that told me to go to work so you went back to work boy that's one that's that's a

crazy story what happened to the guy who's toes got smashed never saw him again when i got back in the toolbox was put up the blood was all cleared up nobody knew nothing Nobody ever asked me nothing either. Dang. And then about 10 years after that, I heard that, they found that guy in the Fox River. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, the guy that helped me. The guy that helped me.

The driver? Yeah. Rock? Found him in the Fox River. Yeah. Big boots. He had some concrete shoes? I don't know that, but he, I believe the person that told me because he knew some other stuff.

My goodness. Now I'm scared. Yeah. Are we the first person to ask about this since this incident happened? Yeah, what's your name? Dale, my name's Dale. No, no, no, no, no. Holy moly.

It was a long time before I was willing to share that story. Well, thank you for sharing it with us, I think. Maybe I'm not thankful. Maybe you could have just said you don't want to ask that move along to Benny Parsons. Dale, let's take a break for a minute, tell you about a great partner of ours. These guys were a great resource for Lost Speedway Season 2 and someone we always look forward to getting some more racing information. Yeah, that's right.

Everyone knows. I love to learn about the history of the sport. Aside from our Lost Speedways research, I like digging deep and finding stories and have a huge passion for NASCAR and racing in general. And that's because, like many of you listening, I'm a race fan at heart. Nobody covers all the forms of racing as well as speed sport. Speed sport, man.

They go back with big time. Chris Economack. Yeah. And it's still around today. It's crazy. Yeah, buddy Ralph Shaheen does a great job for sports. From Daytona to Indy, Monaco to Knoxville since 1934. 1934 Speed Sport has been telling the story of racing.

That's 87 years. And they're truly an American motorsports authority on racing. And I trust SpeedSport to tell me the real story and you can too. Check them out at speedsport.com. So you worked with Benny and 72, but you kind of bounced to rank. different people you helped Donnie Allison. Yep. I went from Joe Frizona, I mean from many Parsons to Joe for his own.

So when you work with Joe, so Joe, everybody is most famous for, he's famous for a lot of things, but he once missed the race at Charlotte. He qualified or failed to qualify for the Charlotte race and took a sledgehammer to the hood of his dodge. Like a 74 Dodge or something. Pontiac. I think it was a Pontiac. Was it a Pontiac? Really?

So he beat this car to death. Were you around for that? No, sir. No, I didn't. But why, what kind of guy was Joe, if he's a kind of guy that could take a hammer to his car and destroy it right there in front of everybody in the garage? He was funding his own operation, so he wasn't concerned with sponsorship or, you know, anything like that. How was he able to fund his stuff? He and his dad owned a concrete company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And he was kind of a wild guy. right he was but you know he was he was always nice us he was he was tough i write in a story at talladega when i was working for him this would have been 73 i guess they started 68 cars at talladega and about the ninth lap ramos dot lost the motor i think in juney denlevy's car and he spun in the ground into the infield and there was no grass so a lot of dirt just dust and everything and we had radio so i called joe i said you know and I didn't hear from him. I call him you okay. And so I figure he's in the wreck. And he comes around and then I still not hearing from him and I stand there now, I don't know what to do. And very soon I hear him key the mic and he says that effing driver, I don't want to say that driver's name,

just backed into me. And somebody had missed that wreck the first time, went all the way around the racetrack and spun and hit Joe. Oh, he was maddered. So was that. Of course, yeah. So he says, we're going to need a windshield, get a windshield ready. And we had one, so common practice, you come in, take it out, go a lap, and come back and put it in. We come in, we took it out. I'm changing the driver's side. When he leaves, something's just not sitting right with me. It's like, oh, I said, Joe, what kind of uniform you got on?

He says, it's my union, 76 uniform. And I said, are you hurt? He just didn't say that. He always said, yeah, he said, shut up. He comes back around, we go to put that windshield in there. I can see that much of the bone on this arm. He's got a nasty, I mean, I'm not kidding you, I can see four or five inches of that bone right there on his arm.

Hey, I said, Joe, you're hurt. He says, yeah, don't worry about it. Put the windshield in. And I said, then what do you want me to do? He says, I want you to tape up my arm, tape my hand of the steering wheel. And I said, I ain't going to do it. You can't. You can't do it.

And so he says, you work for me if you don't fix that. I'm going to come out of there and kick your butt. And he's bigger than me, so I'm not enthused about that happening. But I ain't fixing his arms, so I raised the hood and I wish I hadn't done it, but I pulled that coil wire out. It just ate me up. I didn't want to have any discussion about him driving off. Sure.

You know, just driving off on his own. So he comes out of the car. I wisely head to the infield care center, and he passes out before we get there. Oh, we lost blood. God. That is tough. Oh, and then since after that, he was sharing with me, he was trying to mount some sort of a truck tire and had to fill.

52 stitches in his right arm. Jeez. And we, yeah, I'll pass on that one again. So that was, that's Joe Frizan in a nutshell. Why did he take a sledgehammer to his Pontiac? What was the reason for that? He was mad. He went out, failed to qualify.

His car was too slow. He came in, parked at the garage, and beat the hell out. His quote in the papers, I have it prep for you guys, was, uh, it was not a fit of anger or rage. I did it simply to signify the end of the Pontiac era. I feel I have the right to put it in the grave any way I want to. He was unhappy with the Pontiac part of what I do remember. Well, all right. So you worked with Joe for in 73, then what?

Went to work for Cecil Gordon. And then I was that, well, how was that? Because Cecil becomes a member of RCR, worked on Dad's teams in the 80s. So I know Cecil well. So how was working? So Cecil was an independent driver at the time in 74. How was working with him? It was fun.

It was fun. He'd work us hard, but he played hard. He got us put in jail one time at Daytona. How? Well, sort of, I guess. We were just sitting at a hotel, so you know him. He's a practical joker, and back in them days, the crew rides with the crew chief of the car owner. You don't have separate cars.

So you eat wherever they go and stop where they go. Well, we went to a holiday inn in Daytona Beach, and the service was slow. He's just kidding. I mean, we know him. He just was kidding around. He says, if I don't get me to dinner here on time, he says, I think I'll just burn this place. We just was screwing around.

Well, about six or eight minutes later, here come to fire department and the cops. And we went downtown. We didn't get incarcerated or nothing. Maine just wants to dinner on time. What's the problem with that, right? Well, we had nothing. We just were sitting there just goofing around,

but somebody at the hotel took that serious. Yeah, well, you've got a guy saying he's going to burn it down. I guess you've got to take it serious. You don't want to know if he's kidding later. We probably didn't look like a pile of upstanding citizens either. You don't think so? Probably not. The optics were a little not in your favor?

Yeah, let's go with that. So after working with Cecil, where did you end up? That's when I went to Donnie's. Donnie Alice? Yes, sir. That's the best, that's the most I learned. It was the hardest I worked. It's the most productive mental part of my career.

I had learned a lot from Donnie. Donnie and I used to butt heads a little bit, never anything physical, never anything ugly. He never disrespected me. But he was very quick to walk up and put that finger in my chest and say, let me tell you one thing. And I listened. I mean, when I first went to work for him, I brought a box of books. I'd read at that time 52 books. I was a prolific reader of all suspension stuff.

I thought I'm going to impress Donnie with how much knowledge. I have because I brought my box the books. I said, where do you want me to put these books? And he says, are they important? And I said, yeah, these are my chassis books. He says, well, put them over there behind the air compressor and set that case of oil on them. And that was the last we had of discussion of reading material. Yeah.

I won't. So you're working, I just want to clear this up. You're at Diagard Racing in Florida. No, we're in Huey Town at this point. Yes, sir. And his. You're working at his shop. Yes, sir.

Okay. What were you working on? Just his race cars. He had his own personal short track stuff. Yes. No, they were dieguard at that time. Oh, they were dieguard cars. They were dieguard, but they were, Donnie had committed his entire operation to dieguards.

All the stuff that was Donnie's is now die guards, and we're all working for dieguards. Who's working there with you? I only remember Mario Rossi. What happened to Mario? Boy, if I knew. It's missing. Yeah. Didn't he?

Yeah, and I, I, Rossi was very instrumental in my education as well. I'd like an opportunity to thank him. In hindsight, I've had a couple of people really good to me. What happened to him? To who? Mario. If I knew, I sure wouldn't tell you after I told you that in Valo's doing. It had to be worse than that.

I believe you. But he came up missing, right? Like, that's the thing, right? The plane crash that they, the plane that he crashed in, I've been told, they thought it was totally, you know, he got killed in a plane wreck. But his voice told me that that plane had been sold twice since that wreck. And I guess I don't know what I'm supposed to be talking about. I don't know what we're supposed to be asking about, to be honest with you.

There's a lot of questions. The plane still exists. No, I just know that the plane still exists. That's a fact. So the plane did crash. Fact. The plane did not crash. See, I didn't know that either.

Fact. There you go. I know that. But that's all, that's everything. So clear this up. Like Mario Rossi. was a car owner mechanic in NASCAR back in the 70s, and he just disappeared.

And there's no real, it's unsolved, I suppose, as to what happened to him. His boy, Billy and I've spent some time talking, and he said that they were adamant about trying to find out what happened to their dad, and they were talking to congressmen and senators and that sort of stuff, and apparently they got some sort of a face-to-face confrontation where somebody just says, you just better, shut up and sit down. Yeah. Good enough. A congressman said that? No, I don't know who it was. Somebody. If you're asking me, I'm going to tell he's an FBI guy. It was a, I gotcha. It wasn't

somebody. But somebody just said, you just better leave this alone. Leave us alone. Man. So you're working with Rossi and Donnie in Alabama on the 88 dieguard. Diagard's a kind of a new team at this particular time, but they're good. I mean, they ran fast. Almost one Daytona, I think the 500. Yes, sir. In 1975, the car we built sat on the pole for the 500 and for the Firecracker 400. Right. That's what got me started on my little book with that engine for that. What was it about that car and that engine?

I've asked Donnie about that, and the people in Daigar, at Donny's shop in Hueytown built that particular car. And I wish I could think of the name of the man because he just, he did the slick body work. I mean, it was. It was a nice, it was a nice slick. car and then we had done some testing before we painted it we got that new laguna nose and we felt we were testing and we were deforming the center section of the hood so we were tilting that nose back and forth and and i kind of figured out that if you were if you tilted it more straight up the more straight you tilted that thing up that little indentation in the hood moved to the

back so i stood it up we stood it up until it that high pressure area he was at the base of the windshield. That's pretty cool. That's clever. But if we'd had a stout hood, we wouldn't have learned that. Go back to Donnie real quick. You worked with Donnie. Didn't you go there for a little bit?

How did you work? His sons. Yeah, so his sons, Donnie's boys, Kenny Allison and Ronald Donald. Ronald Twins. Yeah, the twins. They were solely the manufacturer for Legends cars for Legends racing. That's right. And when I needed a job one summer, they employed me.

Okay. I'd see Donnie over there some. You would? Donnie strikes me, and the nicest way I could say this is hard to work with. Am I wrong? I didn't find that at all. But you did butt heads. He was demanding.

And it just took me a while to figure out the old boy knew what he wanted. Just quit screwing with him. I mean, just do what he asked because he's not fishing. He knows what he's. he wants and that was when the light went on for me it dawned on me one day he was talking to some people who were sitting at the table and he and the original Alabama gang there were years where they ran 300 races a year you can't screw with a guy's brain that's race like that he's got to you know he no matter who he is he's picked up something yeah and when i when that dawned on me i quit arguing with him i said you know

okay why and what donnie was good for me was i like to read i like to make drawings And so I knew the words, you know, so I knew what loose and push were. But Donnie made it be real to me like what you would think. You know, what I think from a piece of paper or a book is different than what a guy feels, you know, when he's got his foot under gas or, you know, just different stuff. And Donnie was very good for me in making my book knowledge be real information. Is it a simple answer on how he did that? How would he, how is he able to explain that for somebody that can't feel it themselves? Because they're not in the situation.

Well, I guess I don't know. Well, how would he illustrate it? Well, he just would say, you know, when you think there's oversteer, here's what's happening to the tire, here's what's happening to the wheel, and I can feel this part of the car coming up. I didn't understand everything every time he explained it to me, but just by osmosis, it finally, some of these things dawned on. Got it. So in 1976, you went to work with Ralph Moody and Janet Guthrie. Janet, that is a big deal to have a female competing in NASCAR. And she did really well.

What was your experience like there? I was working with Ralph Moody, and I just was the car chief on that car. Right. Before car chiefs were a thing. Yeah, I just know it was the lead mechanics. Right. That's right. And one of the things, if you look at any of these pictures of my cars and stuff,

I had this little emblem, this WC, I signed my name in WC around. And I had little things made up when I first started my own race shop. And I still had my own race shop when I was working with Ralph. I got to looking at that very first car that we got from Foyt for Janet at Charlotte has one of them little WC stickers back behind the corner. Yes, sir. And I didn't know that until just two or three days ago. I wonder how I got away with it.

So Janet ran Charlotte. She also run top ten at Bristol. We ran Dover in Ontario. So, you know, pretty good at Ontario. Yeah. So, you know, I've always kind of been fascinated by her, but what was it like to work with her? She was, uh, she was all business. She would not buy a book that had the word redneck on it, I can tell you that.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I don't know how to, she was a pleasant enough person, very intelligent, and I was, I admired her stamina and her guts. Right. I bet it had to have been a little bit of a rough road to get you out there and run with them guys. For sure. Well, you lived it. You lived it with her.

You were part of that team. So, I mean, what was that like? You couldn't hardly work just people everywhere. Right. People everywhere. You couldn't do stuff. What was that like, though, is a big difference between what you'd been doing? So, I mean, this is sort of the moment where you're transitioning to.

toward where you ended up owning your own cars, right? Was this experience with Janet and Ralph Moody, you know, influence you in any way to start your own team? No, the start of my own team actually came about with Ralph and your dad. I mean, that's how I got into being a car owner. At that point, I just had my own shop. I was fixing cars, building cars. Still, we're at?

In Fort Mill South Carolina. I actually, I don't know if you've been following anything on Facebook, but there were some guys on that USAC team, came down here. We had a 47-year reunion with me and three of the guys that used to be on that team. Wow. They brought us some Adam's automotive shirts,

and we just went around, you know, talent. And I just said, let's go see if my shop's here. We went from my place in Fort Mill, Rock Hill, drove up, and it wasn't much of a ride to go over to Fort Mill. We went over there, and that shop was still there. Really? It was still there. People had expanded on the buildings a little bit.

They'd not done anything to my race shop, but they'd put big temporary awnings and shelters sort of in front of it and put storages underneath the guy. He does restoration of electronic stuff doing really well, but he knew who I was. And he said, boy, he still thinks he is, said there is still pieces of car bodies outside, out behind that shop. And I don't remember doing that,

but when it gets unsnake weather, I'm going to go back there and see it. Oh, it's covered up, overgrown and stuff? I didn't even go back and look at it because I ain't going to do nothing with it. but yeah that's cool that you all went in you that was an unplanned unprompted yeah no i just wanted to show those guys where my i got started you know i just wanted and so the guy said well it says yeah you come in here he says these people they all know who you are i there's like six of them you know but they're just in that building they know what happened in that building is all because of your dad's reputation so let's get there um is that the building that you

were working in when you buy this car you bought a car from Budmore. All right. This car won three races in a row at Talladega. It only ran five times, I think. Did it? So it won, if not all three, it won one of the Talladega races. So it's a good race car.

Yes, sir. And if you look at the paint scheme and you look at the, you know, Budmore and his Talladega races with Buddy Baker, I mean, it's obvious what calls. car it is, which was a fun thing for me to put together in my mind when you think about the history of race cars. You, you know, I've known about this car. It's seen pictures of this car on my life. Did not know that you bought it from Bud Moore. Looking at it, it makes perfect sense. Did not know that it was so successful. I ended up going to Talladega and breaking that record

that Buddy set of three in a row. So I have, I've watched those races and know about those races that buddy ran in that car. So you buy this car from, from Bud Moore. Talk about like what led up to that. What made you want to go buy a race car? I didn't. The story is Humpy called me and wanted to know if I'd be interested in being a car owner. Why did Humby call you? Well, because he was wanting to have an African American race car driver. Willie T. Ribs. My only question was, you know, am I going to get paid? He helped me buy the car too, by the way. It wasn't. I just decided to go buy that car. I wonder why he said, I need a car owner. Will. I'll call Will. Why didn't he call? Well, this would have been in seven. This would have been in 78. When I was working with Ralph Moody on

Janet's car, I had my shop. So I'm building stuff for people and putting skins on them. And then I, in 77, I worked with Ricky Rudd that whole year. During his Ricky year. So I, you know, and Humpy put that deal together for us, too. So he knew what I was doing, I guess, and maybe what I was capable of. And he knew that I was no longer with Ralph, with Ricky Rudd. Why did you not stick with Ricky? I think they quit. I think they just ran out of money.

Okay. Got you. Why is Humpy orchestrating all of these deals for everybody? Like, how is he the person sitting there placing drivers with themes? He's a promoter. I know, but he's a promoter of a... race track. I know, but that's what they do. That's what they used to do. I'm big time impressed with Humpey Wheeler. He's a huge part of my career. Huge part. So Humpy is trying to,

in the interest you're saying, is like, you know, in order to make a good race at his speedway, he's literally getting involved in saying, hey, this driver can go to this team and create a field. Yeah, so he was a big player in bringing Janet in. Janet was trying to qualify at Indy, and that wasn't working out. And so Humpy's like, I'll get you a car if you can come here and race at Charlotte in 600. And so they did, right? Yes, sir.

That was back even before that, I think Humpy learned this from working at Charlotte Motor Speedway because in the early 70s, there was not a formidable Chevrolet on the racetrack. Chevy wasn't involved in the sport. Humpey or the racetrack needed those. Chevrolet ticket buyers. But to get them there, they needed a fast Chevy. So they worked with Junior Johnson, got Charlie Glott's back to drive the car.

They got a fast Chevy at the racetrack. Charlie was whooping their tail tidily and they ended up wrecking the car. So I think Humpy, that sort of was the thing. And it started probably somewhere else, but Charlotte Motor Speedway did it really well, where they would have a, not a gimmick, but they would have a story. They would have something. A hook. A hook that was out.

outside of the traditional Petty versus Pearson thing. You know what I mean? So in 78, the hook is you're going to own this race car. He's going to help you get it. And Willie T. Ribbs is going to come drive it, right? Yes, but it didn't pan out. It didn't work out. Willie comes up, and for two days we're practicing,

and he's not going fast at all. I'm staying in touch with Budmore and Humpy knows. I thought quite a bit about cars at that time. So I'm just certain that the car was okay, you know, that it wasn't something wrong with the car. You know, I checked stuff like the tow in and weight and the bite and all that stuff. And there's nothing unusual. And I'm talking to Bud Moore. He says, no, he says, just tell that guy he needs to drive in a different place.

And that's what Humpey was telling him. Humpey was drawing on a paper napkin. He would draw. When you go by the gate, you need to be here. When you go around that orange ball here, when you go over that hump, you need to be here. And, you know, he just was saying, connect M dots, and you'll be fast. And it just wasn't, it wasn't working. It wasn't working at all.

And finally Willie T. Ribs comes in, comes down pit road. He goes about three spots past us, pulls right up next to the wall. And when he gets out, he steps over the wall. And I haven't, to this day, I haven't seen him since. Well, no, wait a second. In the book, I'm a little, I'm a little confused. First of all, was Willie T. Ribs a part of those first two practices that you said?

Because in the book, I read it as if he didn't even. and show up for practice. No, he was there. Okay, so he was there at practice. Yes, sir. All right. And so then afterwards, he storms out of the track and gets arrested. Does he not?

Yes. Okay. My answers to those are going to be things I've read in the newspaper and heard from... You don't know firsthand. You don't know firsthand. But stuff was in the newspaper, and then who was a newspaper writer for the... Higgins? Yes.

Tom Higgins. Tom Higgins and I were pretty close and he shared some stuff with me too. Okay, so, but it is fact, though, that you never saw Willie again because he got arrested and all of a sudden he's not racing. He got sent home. He got sent home to California or wherever, right? Yes, sir. Okay. So now they need a driver.

Humpey needs a driver. Well, Humpey calls me and he said, don't be disappointed, he said, but I've sent your young man back to California. And I'm, oh, man, now what? I'm all geared to go to Charlotte, thought I was going to be a car owner, and I got a fast car. What am I going to do now? And he says, just don't worry about it. He says, we'll figure out something. He says, you're going to hear your name on TV tonight, and he said, don't.

We'll figure out something's what he said. So Howard Johnson comes on the TV, and he starts talking about, well, Cronkwright's lost his driver, and that's all I hear. The phone rings, and your dad. He says, can I drive that car? How did you and dad know each other? We weren't friends. We didn't hang around at the racetrack. Somehow we got connected.

We were both having problems with right front springs breaking. And he and I just, I don't even remember where we were. Oh, yeah, we were actually at your grandma's house. Oh. You know what? If you see her, you tell her I was asking about her. I will. She has fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for me to eat.

Now I'll never forget that. You and me and your dad go sit on that back porch. Yeah. And she'd bring out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. in wax paper. But we were at your dad's shop. And we'd both been breaking springs. You know, you'd cut a spring to size

and then you'd weld a pin on the end to keep it from back and out to lower controller. I just would ground the spring and hold a pin and weld it. And it just seemed like, to me, looking at your dad's spring and mine, the two springs that we were looking at, I could felt I could see

a little inclusion in the top part. of that coil so that arc just set up a stress concentration area and that's what the springs broke that seems implausible to me but that's all i could think of so from then to now i'm sure your dad did and i did too we'd hold a pin with the ground and welded on so we weren't grounding we were grinding the pin not the spring so yeah that was just it you know a two or three hour conversation conversation all right he did show me a little box that i think he had five or six of them screwdriver things on your dad, your grandpa used for axle keys, yeah.

He was pretty proud of that. I mean, he was proud to show me. It was a big story. Yeah, so, yeah, the story is, is that, I guess in the 60s, racing dirt tracks, they were breaking axle keys, and Granddaddy found or figured out to use the screwdriver. To cut a screwdriver up into pieces and use it, it was a little bit tougher than the stock axle key

because they kept breaking them. It was my understanding it was one particular brand. One brand. It was a store. He was going to buy them up, right? Yeah, he went to all the stores around town and bought every screwdriver of that brand. Your dad told me that. The rest of the guys in the sport didn't have those.

So dad calls you and says, let me drive that car. And I said, you know, it's not my car. This is a deal program. I said, I'm not in charge. He says, well, do you care if I ask Humphie? No, I don't care. Herbert Johnson's still talking about it on the television. Humpy calls.

He says, you care if this young boy drives your car? Humpy says, I said, do you think he can keep it off the wall? But I'm telling you, I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I said, sure, I'd like to do that. So then Howard Johnson's just signing off on that story. On the news. And he says, I'm coming down.

We're going to fit that seat. And we needed to it. The race was in the morning. So he says, I'm bringing him a seat. We're going to fit the seats. Well, I'm figuring I'm going to change some holes. The race was win? It was the next morning.

It must have been Tuesday. So Wednesday would have been the first day. at the track. I mean, it was, it was, so it's happening. We had to do it. I mean, it's on, if it's going, we're starting right now. And I wrote in the book, I think we, he lives 52 or 53 miles away and was there in 45 minutes. Yeah, he's hauling. And he had this little scrawny kid in the front seat with him. Yeah, I can't believe I was there. Sitting at the table right now. So yeah, that's, that's true. I mean, that's, that's a, that part sir. Yes, sir. So the, the, the way I read in the, in the book is that y'all spent four hours or so.

Right, hammering on this car, and we'll talk about that a little bit. And I sat in the passenger side of the truck looking out. You stood in the passenger side of this truck. I was watching the whole time. The window was halfway down. You must have had a cold because there's a lot of snot on that windshield. You had a runny nose. Or you spit on it or you're not.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure. Probably drooling. Oh, yeah. But did I say? Did I say it? Never said nothing. Really?

The most well-behaved young men. No kidding. Woo! And no issues with your dad. He'd look out to Windland. You're doing all right? You're okay? You need anything?

Yeah. Never? You never. That's it. All right. He checked on me. That's good to know. He did.

I know. He couldn't rule it out. I don't know. Right. You don't know. You never know. So, all right. Give me an idea of what time of day this is or night.

It's at night. If you were watching the evening news. Oh, it's 2 o'clock in the morning by the time we. Woo! And he's in the truck at 2 o'clock at. the morning? Hell yeah, man. Hang of a dad.

Where's he going to go? I don't know, bed. He wasn't missing nothing to it. He was right. I'm serious. Every time you looked out, the same, he was sitting there watching. He was a nose hanging over the top of that glass and that right side door. That's crazy.

Wouldn't it be irony if Dale did that so my boy will have a memory that he'll always be able to rely on the time he came to work on a car with me? And then Dale Jr. has no recollection of it whatsoever. That's probably only four. Right. Again, I don't know if that can get you Dad of the Year awards. You had blue jeans on and a short sleeve pullover, not a sweatshirt, but a shirt like that, you know, short sleeve, you pull over your head. So, so Dad walks in, all right, to work on this car to fit this seat.

The night before race. And he had a, I can't believe he did this, but I didn't know he was doing this this early. But he takes the seat out and cuts your... He brought a seat with him. Okay? What kind of seat? Why do you bring a seat? What was there on with a seat in it?

I don't know. Okay. Just now it's coming to mind. I don't know why. So he brings a seat with him. Anyways, he takes a seat that's in there and cuts it out and cuts your car all the pieces. We go in there and we're changing the brackets in the seat. He gets in and out.

This ain't happen. I want to do this. We'll drill it. Move it back. Do this. And then we rewerew it. welded the brackets for the seat to go back and he in and out, in and out and in and out. And this goes on and on and and we keep doing more. He wants more. Another, another change, another

change. We not only end up cutting the seat rail out, we cut a square piece out of the floor. Oh my gosh. And moved the floor down about it in. Yeah, oh my gosh. That's what I was, almost what I was saying. Yeah, because he wanted to be low. He, you know, he just wanted to look a certain way. And I'm I know enough that he's a good driver. I know he's not being an idiot. Do you know that? Because he hadn't established himself as... Well, if Humpey says he can drive that car, I'm okay.

But he crashed, he only had two or three starts up into that point. So you're just going on Humpey's word. You're not... You don't really know. I ain't parking my cars. Right. You've got that car. I got a chance to, you know...

Okay. Fair enough. I'm just as enthused as your dad is, I'll tell you. I'm just as pumped. Yeah. We're going to go racing in the morning. Yeah. Did it strike you as often?

that he's wanting to make all these changes to your car having not been like i mean it's not like it's benny parsons or kale or somebody coming in with all this influence i mean he's telling you to cut up your your car it wasn't he knew what he wanted and i didn't feel the need to question i mean i understood sort of the need and and i've shared with him later on just when he when we finally got to seat where he wanted he says you don't know why we're doing on this do you and i said well it's like you know what do they say that if mama ain't happy nobody's happy and i can imagine if a driver's not But he ain't going to leg that thing. Yeah.

You got to do what you got to do. You want the guy to give you what you're looking for. So, y'all finally get the seat tuned up. As I understand it, he had you maybe even sit in the car and showed you why. He did. He did. He did. He said, you don't know what we're doing, do you?

And I gave him that answer. He says, well, get in the car. And so I get in the car. And he said, if you barrel that car down into the first turn at Charlotte, where's that car in front of you? I've never driven one of these cars. So I just point out the front window with the wall. And he said, he can't went like that. And he said, well, where's the car in front of him?

And I looked at him like he was crazy. I just out in front of him. And he said, no. He said, that car's up here in the corner of this A post. And the light just went off. He knew. That was the first and the most impressive thing I remember about your dad was it, we did all this crap.

Two o'clock in the morning. He could have settled for something different. He could have asked my opinion. We could have quit early. but we did it here. And as soon as I saw that, I was impressed. That's interesting. That takes testicles, in my opinion, to come down and do that to that car.

But he knew what he wanted. He knew what he wanted. Yeah, when you go down in the corner, you're looking around the bank and that's exactly right. That's right. He's working the angles. Wow. He didn't really just want to take the hammer and everything to all these cars. He can see further around the curve.

For sure. So how did, when y'all got finished, did you paint any of the stuff? Spray-hand. Gray, it's just gray. Yeah. All right. So you go to the racetrack the next morning. Did he meet you at the shop or meet you to track?

No, he brought you to the racetrack again in the morning. Bull crap. And I remember. You haven't even left the truck yet. I don't even remember that. I got to be pretty tired for this point. I mean, gosh, almighty. Is he wearing the same clothes?

Probably. I don't know that. Yeah. So he showed up, he met you at the track. But he brought you, and what I remember, I think I shared with you in an earlier conversation that Kelly came up and you were both happy to see each other. And I don't know why you left, but you walked up and got a hold of her hand and you all walked off someplace, you know, going to get a sandwich or something. And your dad was here. Wow.

So I'm assuming, and this is 78, dad and mom are splitting up or something. split up and maybe for that particular day or two or whatever dad had me and then he goes to the track mom's there with Kelly I see Kelly that would fit exactly what I remember and I'm all happy so dad and you were at the track on Wednesday first time on the racetrack he goes out and drives a car right is he any conversation before he gets in he just hops in and goes nothing to say you know yeah the first time for everybody just go spin it see what do you recall from those few days of practice and all that. Go pretty smooth?

Yes, yeah. Between he and I was smooth, it was a Budmore car set up for Charlotte, had the right gear, the right heads. I mean, there was no, he and I had no excuses. You know, we had the right piece to work with. I remember that we went pretty well. At the tail end of the deal,

we ended up, somebody bought us another set of tires. I know a little puzzled about that, because I guess I'd like to tell you the story about how we got sponsored on that car and how Humpty was working with us. We were working on the car with your dad. We weren't really having any problem. We put in a bite in the car, changing the wedge, neutralizing the sway bar or something. We weren't thrashing in any way.

And we weren't kicking anybody's butt, but we just were wanting to go fast enough to get in. And Humpey said, when you get here in the morning, come up and see me, and I'll give you some money. I got some money for you. So I go up to his office and he gives me $3,500. And I'm thinking, you know, $1978, $3,500 is a pretty darn good bite. So we're down there working on the car and I think the sign painter's finishing up something. And this other man walks up and said, I'm the owner of that tractor company.

He said, I got some money for you. So he gave me an envelope. I opened it up and there's $3,500 in it. I said, man, this is getting better all along until it just said it dawned on me. This is the money. Humpy fronted me this money. money is actually Humphys. So I just, I put it in my pocket. So we go ahead and we're racing and we ran pretty good. I don't remember the name of the gentleman that was Humpy's grounds manager.

Is it Javi? Sipson? Anyhow. I know and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, apologize because he bought us a set of tires. Oh, wow. Yeah, and I'm trying to just. Must have been a pal of daddies or something. Well, he worked for your, no, well, he was. He, he was a fan of your dads, but he worked for, but he worked for Humpy. And he was in charge of the grounds. We needed them set of tires. I'm trying to think out now why if I had $3,500, I didn't have enough money for more tires. Well, you had to get, I bought wheels. Wheels, air, tanks, you bought everything. You had to buy everything. I did. I did. I had to buy most of the pit equipment, but I had to get a new gun, new regulators and wheels. I had to buy 10 wheels. I remember in your book, I read, you had it itemized out and everything,

how you spent everything and how you, you know, you made it stretch every dollar. Yeah, that went pretty well. And the race went well, and I'll tell you this, we're in the middle of the race, and I still think we're on the lead lap. We're running pretty good. We ain't kicking nobody's butt. Sure. Nothing's spinning out.

We're not screwing up. We're giving him decent stops, and things are going pretty well. Somebody's come in, and somebody's slower than us is in front of him, and he's mirror driving him. And it's obvious. I mean, it's just obvious. And your dad called on the phone, on the radio, and we're really proud. Some of that money was spent getting the radio Put in your dad's helmet

So you like to hear from it? Yeah, just to hear the radio. Yeah, well, I'm just proud as I can be. I got a radio, you know, I can talk to my driver. But he comes by, he comes under the flag stand here, and he says, you care if I spin this guy out? And I said, I don't care if you spin him out, but can you do it without hurting our car?

Well, clearly he thought he could, but I wanted to make sure, I guess. He says, I'm going to give him three laps, but three means a lot to stuff that I've started. associated with your dad. He says, I'm going to give him three laps. And he comes by and he works him down. This guy goes down. He comes back around. He comes down. He comes down. He comes down. He's coming to the flag stand off a turn four. That's kind of a scary place. He's my, he's called me, he's turned one hand loose to work on. He says, I'm going to do it now. He walked down. That guy worked down. Your dad went a little bit lower normal and walked across the back of his spoiler and lifted a butt of his car up,

you know, and he just scooted it like that. And your dad just went underneath him just like that. I was impressed. I mean, I'm not a talent, I'm not a driver talent. That's talent. Judge. But, you know, you got to know it. Yeah, I'm impressed. That's pretty cool. And he told me he's going to do it. He told me where he's going to do it. He called a shot. And he told him he won. That's right. He called his shot. That's exactly right.

So the race ends. Everything's in one piece. Car's in one piece. Got a decent finish. What's the conversation like when Dad gets out of the car? We said, we were talking to the sponsor and we said to him, you're going can we do more and your dad said i'm in and i said i am too and so the guy committed to four more races right there on the spot right there just at charlotte yeah just right after the race yeah he wow his car went the whole deal and nothing got smashed and nobody ticked him off or swore at him wow okay i mean i just didn't think nothing about it that's i

didn't know any other way of getting money i just said can we do more and he said yeah and your dad said he was in. So the schedule was Daytona, Talladega, what y'all ended up doing was Daytona Talladega-Darlington. My question is, did you already know what those races would be when all of a sudden you got this deal? I don't remember, I don't remember itemizing it, but I just knew we weren't going to go to any short tracks, and we weren't going to go to California, so it just worked out, you know, $3,500 a race, you know, just makes sense. I don't remember setting it out as a schedule. And I think we probably went one race at a time. But then Humby comes down and won't know how we're doing.

And I've got that money in my pocket at $3,500. And I give him that envelope with that $3,500 in, I said, this here, this is yours. I should have given it to you before now. And he looked over at my truck and my trailer and that car. Have you seen a picture? Yeah, I've seen it. That's my favorite picture, my time with your dad, that's coming home with that car. And the stolen trailer in an old 64 pickup truck, six-cylinder pickup truck.

dragging the ground. And Humpey looked over and he saw that. And he gave me that money back. He says, here he'll buy you a truck. Kid, you tell the story about the stolen trailer real quick. I mean, I know there's a tonne that we want to get to, but I mean, you just said, you know, you go win this, or you go do this race and with a stolen trailer, people are going to want to know what you're talking about. Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said that. No, you should have.

You should just add a little context to it. This is a sudden occurrence. This is what happens in three or four days, you know. literally three or four days. And then all of a sudden it dawns on me, how am I going to get this car to the racetrack? And I've been, there was a gentleman named Leon Boomer Shined

from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. What a name. He had bought a car from Darrell Walter, but I was skinning the car. I was putting a new body on it. And I'm thinking to myself, how can I get a trailer? I'm kind of asking around.

I called Leon. He said, he said, no. You can't borrow that trailer. And I don't know why. I guess maybe he borrowed it or something. To this day, I have no idea why he didn't want me to borrow his trailer just to go to Charlotte. Well, I had to do something, and I just figured I could get to Charlottling back for he could get here from Oklahoma.

So you borrowed it yourself. You borrowed it without permission. How did you get the car to Talladega, Dayton and all the both places? Oh, we got that extra $3,500 from Humpy. We're in Tall Cotton. In the book, I show there's a – we went to High Point and bought one of Huggins' tire trucks. Okay. and brought it home, a friend of mine in Pennsylvania,

Greg Heller did some painting and made it look like a race truck from the tire truck. And then I bought a used reed trailer. That was hot stuff. Do you know what to read trailer? It's just back in them days, you know, if you had a trailer, Petty and Junior and all them guys had a reed trailers. It's a heavy-duty, all-diamond plate. Oh, wow. Just a man's trailer.

And I found a used one of them. So we went to Daytona with a Huggins tire. truck all her crap just sewn in the back of a big empty box and where I had a reed trail. And I read trailer. No kidding. So I know dad had been to Daytona before in his sportsman car, so that wasn't a big, you know, that wasn't probably too big of a shock to him to go down there. Maybe it was for him to go down there and racing the Cup Series.

I know he had had a couple cup races under his belt, but was driving your car was the first good car that he had been able to be a part. of in the Cup series. Did he ever say or comment or talk about like how this, did he feel like this was his big break or that, man, thank you, Will, for giving me this opportunity? Both of us just was wanting to race. We just, let's go. Let's see how fast we can go.

Let's see how far we can go. How did, I mean, things go smoothly at Talladega and Daytona and the rest of those races? Daytona, the second story in that book about your dad, or the third story, I think, is about Daytona. And if you're asking my opinion, what I may have contributed to your dad's future, was that race the Firecracker 400 in Daytona? Why is that? We were just fast.

We just, from an independent team, you know, maybe we were 10th fastest overall, but it was right. The car was feeling good. He liked the car, and we were running good. I, somebody told me we might have been three laps down. I don't think so. I think we were a lap down. We really gave him a lousy pit stop towards the end of the duration.

We were a lap down. But the guys that were leading the race, there were four of them, they took five or six laps to get around your dad. And he wasn't holding them up. You know, he wasn't, there's no rudeness involved. They had to pass him. He was holding his own. They were just faster, but he was doing a great job.

When the caution comes out, I guess in here 20 laps to go. So I know them guys are going to get four tires. There's enough racing left. They're going to want, you know, want to have everything. We came in just gave him one tire and just enough gas to finish the race, or two tires, I mean enough gas to finish race. And he gets out ahead of them. And now he worked them boys hard to get around him.

He just looked big time professionally. He was racing with the big boys. He was giving them everything they could take. And I'm just of the opinion that the entire race he was like that. But there at the end, then guys would, I would have to say, better equipment and better experience at the speedways, he was just giving them everything they could chew on. You call the chapter Dale's Big Break.

I mean, that's what you... That's my opinion. That was one race that we... You think... Some days you're just on, and we were just on that day. So is it fair to say that you think this is where maybe the day where people realize Dale Earnhardt could race like his dad? I do.

without whatever his reputation probably was up until that point like he actually had the moxie to do this for a living, right? And did y'all finish seventh if my records are right here? Yeah, we finished pretty good. So you're talking about his first top ten ever in cup, of course. Your dad never scratched my car. And you run four races? Harry Gant tapped the wall.

My dad's a tall scrawny guy, electrical engineer. The first time he ever seen anything I did, he came to the Charlotte race. He came into pits after that. He was wanting to kick Harry Gantz, but for crashing his boys' race car. I said, Dad, that's Harry Gant. You leave him alone.

So did Dad ride to the race with you? No. No. He'd meet you down there? Yeah, every time. Interesting. So was there any parting conversation or a moment when Dad said? No, we knew we were going to go to five races.

At some point, we knew there were going to be five. I know that first time we didn't commit to the exact five of the exact races, but we thought there were going to be five. And it was after Darlington. Boy, we stunk it up at Darlington. We lost a gear and lousy pit stops. We didn't do him any good at Darlington. He calls me and he said, hey, he said, I got to ask you a favor.

He said, Rod Osterlin wants me to drive his car next year. And he said they'd like me to drive one race this year without ruining his ability. to run rookie the year next year. And you can't say no. I mean, it's clearly Osterlin had more to offer him than I did. I had nothing in a way of sponsorship. I only had one car. So I said, yeah, I don't have a problem doing that.

So this was for the second Charlotte race. I don't remember who, but somebody, I think Baxter Price, qualified the car, but your dad got in at the first caution and finished that race for me, and I admired him for that. He said he'd drive five and he did his best to drive five races. I admire your dad's integrity. I'm missing something. So he finished the race, but he didn't start the race for you?

That's correct. So if he starts to race, he ruins his rookie eligibility for 1979 and can't race for the rookie a year, which is this big point of contention. I guess if you run more than four races, I suppose. You can run five. He'd run five. He'd run four. It's Charlotte.

He couldn't run the fifth of that would have made him ineligible. But I've got him running in Atlanta for Austerlund that year in 1970. That would have been the one. Yeah. So Austerlin, my Austerlund calls and says, we're hiring you for 79, but we want you to run Atlanta in our car. So he goes to Will and says, Will, I can't run your car. I can't start your car at Charlotte because that'll put me over the five. Yeah.

Because I want, because Austerlund wants me in Atlanta. He says, no problem. Baxter starts the car. Got it. And he jumped in and finished it at Charlotte and then ran his Atlanta race. But I admired that because he could have just sat it out. He could have. That's pretty cool. That is cool. So it was an amicable thing, although probably disappointing for you. Disappoint to me, yeah, big time, especially now.

It turned out he knew something. Turns out he was all right, wasn't he? Yeah, you could look at it like that, I guess, or you could look at it like you were a big catalyst without you. like that. I think that's the way people do view it is without you that does you know his opportunity doesn't come. Humpy was kind enough to say that to me so that's a big deal. Thank you. There you go. I mean, yeah. Thank you. No, I mean, that's the that's the reality of the situation I think is, is that's why that car sits on this table is because that car and that, you know, you and that car and that opportunity wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't have gave him the chance to showcase himself

and what he did and be able to go to rods and get hired there. You know, what he was doing in his sportsman car was good stuff, but I don't think it would have got him that full-time ride to see him compete in the Cup Series in that car, your car, and not scratch your car, go out there and run in the top ten and do well is the... Things went really smooth. He was going on pit stops. After that, after dad goes to rods,

what is your relationship with my father like going forward to his death? Like your, y'all, does he call you from time to time? No, no. We weren't close. We didn't turn out to be buddies or anything like that. I mean, I would have liked that, but he, I'll tell you what, some of the other things he did do. And some of the races after that, I'd have some folks that clearly were not as talented

as your dad, you know, that would drive for me three or four races a year or one here and one there. And every once in a mile, we'd look like we'd be in trouble. And back when, in that period of time, if you qualified 10th or more, you'd get some free tires. And if you qualified eighth, you got four or something. If you qualified, in the first two, you'd get eight tires or something. You know, you got free tires. And on three occasions, he gave me two tires.

Yeah. When I needed two tires. And I know he did that to Dave Marcus, too. Yeah. He was very, I'm aware of a large number of things your dad did that were kind-hearted gestures that he, you know, I don't think he was interested in people knowing about kind-hearted gestures. Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. That's just my opinion there.

Yeah. So, um, let's talk about one of my favorite movies of all time, especially in motorsports. I think the best, well, second to Last American Hero, of course, with Junior Johnson. but stroke race you played a significant role in preparing the cars and putting things together to be able to, you know,

for them to be able to have the resources they needed to be able to make the movie. I guess there was a T-bird that got wrecked and you can tell us about that. But I mean, where, how does that even start? How does that conversation even start up? Somebody, you know, I know you got your shop.

You're doing anything and everything, you know, You're jack-of-all-trade. You can do it all, right? A guy needs a body on a car, whatever. So how did you get connected with the movie industry to be able to provide all the cars for this movie? Well, I was doing some work with Elliot Forbes-Robinson in 82, and it was a car that I had built from a donor car. I updated a car.

And we qualified for the race. If you check it, it looks like we didn't. but we qualified for the race, but in the last practice, after the last practice, but before the race, we stuffed that thing in a second turn and scuffed up the right side really bad. And somebody came up to me, and the people at the six-pack movie were getting ready to do their filming the following week there in Atlanta. They say, we need a car for a crash scene. And they hired me to stay over with jury rigged that car where it would run enough.

They put automatic transmission fluid in a little can, the stunt guy squirted the transmission fluid into the fuel line made the car smoke really, really bad, or into the carburetor made it smoke for bad, then he run it up against the wall. It's already been crashed, and they just were doing it. But they never, they cut it out of the movie. I don't think it made it. I don't think it made it. They paid me.

Yeah. You know, I didn't care. But from that, I get home, and the people from Universal Studio were calling other people that had been in that movie and just say, we're going to have this movie. Could we get you to be interested? Well, in the Kenny Rogers movie, they put. paid us by the day. You knew how much money you were getting. But the gentleman with Universal Studios called said, no, we're not going to do that. He says, well, here's how you're going to get

paid. If you, we're going to give you a piece of paper that guarantees somebody 30 seconds exposure in a Burt Reynolds movie. And you can take that contract and sell it for whatever, you know, whatever you can get out of it. And that's why nobody else was interested. That's, you know, that's, That's not very good. Yeah, well, it requires some ingenuity, apparently, or some work. But I said, well, have you got anybody so far? And they had 7-Eleven. And in the movie, it's called a four-star whiskey.

I don't know. I don't drink, so I don't know if there is a four-star whiskey. I mean, I don't know. I don't think there is. I thought that was made up. Yeah, I do, too. But anyway, she says, we got some money for the four-star whiskey car. We got some money for, from 7-Eleven.

He says you got 30,000 to $30,000. start with. But I had to have cars. I mean, I had to put cars in them movies. So I'd built, I built a lot of cars. I had probably four cars of mine. Only two were really good race cars. But we fixed them all up, so I got money for all four of those cars. And then I leased back some cars from people that I built cars for and painted them up like the movie cars. And then they, so they'd give me the money. So my money came from other people, not from Universal Studios. But then they hired me to keep track of the, keep to do the maintenance work on the cars and that sort of stuff.

If you look in that movie, there's a scrawny guy in a green hat you see every once in a moment. They didn't pay him to say nothing. Oh, man. You didn't have any lines, but you'll forever in movie lore because that's one of the great stories. All the pit equipment was mine. The proto tool people gave me 10 toolbox tops.

And two complete tops and bottoms. those two top and bottom sets were completely full of tools. Oh, how? That's cool. And so the deal was that's what got exposed in the movie. So if you see anything in a movie that lids up on the toolboxes and there's a decal that says proto. So what scene can we see you in?

Oh, the very first scene, when he comes in, he stands up, he gets up on that stand and there's people in front of him when he walks up to be announced or something. I'm in a Union 76 driver's hat and a suit and a white hat with a green front or something. Okay. But the, and others. I mean, in that bar scene. I found that really hard. The bar fight? I was in there, but I wasn't in the fight. They must have known about me. The guy's got a hammer hitting somewhere. Don't get him. Yeah, don't muck with that. But that was a hard part for me because you had to act like you were talking to somebody without saying nothing.

Yeah. It's just like, I found that hard. But the best part for me was there was a scene where they, Johnny Hayes, from you. U.S. tobacco was supposed to blow an air hose up Lonnie Anderson's dress. Yes. She's up on pit wall. On pit road, yeah. Trying to watch her husband be introduced in the infield. And I'm standing right there.

Our knees are about that far apart. She's standing on it, and my knees, I got one leg up on the, and all that pit equipment was mine, and I was, as part of screwing around there, I got to hook up with a guy that was doing the bee crew or something. But if they're shooting over here, you're over here, getting ready to shoot. So I'd be helping him do stuff. and we set up the pit equipment for that scene the night before this one particular day and they never got to it so he come in the next morning she gets up there and johnny hayes goes to blow that air up her dress and it just it was the humidity the moisture was in that hose and being out on it it it just wet her from you know ankle to belly button she just was oh my and it just and part of the scene is you're supposed to be able to see her underwear so that that's screwed things up for a little bit

So she couldn't go back and just dry off and change underwear. She had to go back and get that underwear squared away and come back out. And they did. We'd been doing this for three or four weeks by now. She's walking back up pit road there. I see a penny on the ground, so I pick that penny up. And she says, hey, well, what are you doing? He says, I'm picking up this penny.

She said, why'd you pick it up? I said, you find a penny with a heads up. That's good luck. She takes it. Let me have that penny. she took that penny and stuck it down in this side of her brazier changed pennies and stuck that penny down inside of her and said there's some good luck

and the people on both sides of the camera you know just they just fell out laughing that's funny that had made the producer cut or something if it would have been the you know the boat part of the DVD I still have it penny do you I was going to ask that do you still have it well Mike I gave it to my nephew but I know right where it's that Yeah, the 42D. That's a story.

Did you ever meet Bert? Yeah, yeah. We had a lot of fun. No, we weren't friends or buddies or buddies. Yeah, we hung out. I fixed something on his tour bus, and his guy let us come in. We were shooting pool. Before that movie started, Bert Reynolds gave me one of his jackets, the movie jacket,

because they changed the name of the movie. And the name on the back of the jacket he gave me was the original name. So it wasn't anything he could use. Yeah, what was the name of? Stroker race was the name of the movie, but the book was called Stand on it. Yes, the book was named.

I got a book. Stand on it. Yeah, I got the book in my bus. Stand on it. And if you look at, during the movie, the thing that impressed me or that enthused me was he always wore elevator tennis shoes. Give him an inch.

And if you act, he doesn't, I don't want to say that. not an expert, but he was the same sitting here talking as he was acting. I mean, he just, he just talked. He didn't like get into character or something. I don't know. He was Bert Reynolds all the time. He was funny. And you know, that's pretty cool. If you watch those movies, at the end of them, they show, you know, funny stuff that happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And most of that stuff happened was after they'd shoot that film, that day, the film would go to California. It'd come back the next day, and after the filming, they'd go in there and, and, you'd go in there,

look at what they shot the day before. And those people just crack you up. You just belly hurt from laughing at the... He was just funny. He was just funny all the time. How many months was it all worked on that movie? I think maybe six or seven weeks. It wasn't a...

Oh, it was quick. It wasn't a... It just seems like it would have been so much fun. A lot of work, I'm sure, but still... It was. In the movie, I don't... Here's some things about your dad. We first go down there,

and then in that movie, the car that looks like the chicken pit car is actually two cars. And the car that the bad guy drive is actually two cars. His two cars for the bad guy were my two real race cars in 82 weeks. Those other two were the two of only five prototype cars made for those 83 Thunderbirds. And so they bring me these two cars. And the guy calls as you're getting two of these two new Thunderbirds.

And the guys in a truck called on the way and said, when we get there, we're going to be there about 10 o'clock at night, we need to have a fire out in your front yard with four-foot flames on it. I don't know, and in hindsight, maybe they just wanted to, they were going to cook hot dogs or something. They just wanted this flame outside the yard. Well, they come in these two cars, this big truck come down our driveway, and the cars are in gunny sacks, and they unzip them and fold stuff up, put it back in the truck, and they says, you put them cars in the shop, he says, run all your people home, and I saw you kept this kind of my shop guy and me, and they made us strip everything that would burn out of them two cars and put it in that fire.

Just burn it up. They were prototypes. They didn't want somebody. They didn't want me selling it to somebody or taking advantage of it or something. So we burn all that up. So next thing in the morning, here comes this guy from the Ford Motor Company. Just eat my lunch. You ain't supposed to be having them cars.

Nobody told me they were gone there missing. Don't you touch them cars. I said, I said, I'm going to have to dig a couple barrels full out of the burn. pile outside. I said, we burnt that stuff last night. And I heard that old phone slam down. He's mad. He is mad as he can be. He's an advertising guy and some marketing guy gave us the cars or something. Not me. I said, you're going to have to talk to Universal Studios. I didn't do nothing with him. He's mad or not. And he said, well, this afternoon, there's going to be a guy come down there, and you're going to have to pick him up at the airport terminal and go over to the

freight terminal and get a box. So we do that in that truck, and that we'll pick up truck. this guy comes down and raises the hood of them cars gets up in there loosens a coat takes off his coat loosens his tie and puts a shop coat coat on crawls up in there and he took off his electronic fuel injection and put carburetors on them did anybody want to see those injector systems

sequential feel injection on those cars and he gets all his stuff back up putting that box and we send him home and calls the next day this guy still just mad as he can be but we fix up these two cars because when they're filming we did things four laps at a time and one four-lapse segment

the camera would be on the bad guy's car and the next time four laps of camera would be on the good guy's car and the second, the third time they'd film from the camera truck they had a camera truck that go 150 miles an hour big old truck

them camera guys tied a belt to a rope on them handrails on the back of them trucks I was afraid somebody to run over them if you ever look if you're watching that movie and you're looking in the windshield at Burt Reynolds, that camera truck is towing that race car because the car won't go as fast as a camera truck. They had a old stock four-cylinder motors in, and they didn't.

The cars did, the race cars, yeah. The Burt Reynolds, the Thunderbirds, yeah. Oh, I was going to ask, what prototypes were these? There's 83 Thunderbirds. Real street cars. Yeah. And you bodyed out, you put, you put quarters, roll cages, quarter,

Got it. And it made it look like a race car. But they were ruined. I mean, you couldn't fix them back. No. Nothing. That's what I said. Yeah, so what happens is we get, we get down there, Talladega, and this guy comes up looking for me.

He says, you know, where's that Will Cronkwright guy? I took off over the trucks and made him find this for a little bit. So the stunt guy, about noon, the stunt guy spins one of the new prototype cars. and chunks up the left front suspension. It's all new car. There's no, you can't go to a hardware store or a car dealership and buy any parts. But he came up and he again,

his neck's all red and knotted up. And he said, you better have that car fixed when we get back from lunch. And Hall and Needham and him. Halen. Bert was standing there. And Bert just, you know, shrugged his shoulders like that. When that guy walked off, I looked over his shoulders

and he had driven the third one of those prototype cars to Talladega. So I figured out how I was going to fix my car. I went out in the parking lot and jacked his car up, took all the stuff out from underneath the left front of his car, and put it on my race car. So you know how happy he was when he came back too. That was a third car that I'd screwed up for him.

Yeah. But Bert said, you told him he could do it anyway. He had to. Wow. I don't know how he got that car home. Yeah. He couldn't drive it. Wow.

That's a, you know, we've had some really, we've been had the privilege of hearing some really good vantage points about that movie because, I mean, hearing these stories reminds me that David Hobbs sat in here. And who else was it that was telling us? Was it Harry Gant maybe? He was in it. He was in it. Yeah.

Man, we've heard some awesome stories, but I've got to tell you, I don't think any of them has one as good as you do in that penny. You've got the, you're leading the race on that one because that's pretty good. She was, both of those people were really nice folks. They weren't pretentious in any way at all. Well, I started to tell you, was doing that film when I was driving one of those cars, one of the cars that I'd made for somebody, the stunt guys were having problems driving my two race cars. And your dad was down there with Bud Moore doing tests.

I'm not quite sure how this was both going on, but, you know, owners don't want drivers to drive somebody else's car, I understand it. But I went down to Bud and I said, you know, these guys are complaining about my car I said, would you let Dale drive it to see if I'm okay? I mean, you go through all the stuff I've been doing it for 10 or 12 years. I kind of thought I was in it was Talladega.

And he said, yeah. So your dad come out and he came in and he said, there's nothing wrong with this car. He said, what are they talking about? And I said, they're having a little trouble going into three. And he says, are them stunt guys? There's one of them, a tall one, the other one, a short blonde, and he said, yeah. And he said, well, wait just a little bit. And as them guys crawled up, walked up on us, they got close to us. He leaned in front of me a little bit out of the car,

and he says, there's nothing wrong with these cars. He says, if you've got guys that can't drive these cars, I'll give you my mom's phone number. She can drive these cars. So them guys, and what I think, and I'm, I guess, the last confier input here, what I think I remember him telling them was you don't just jump out of the gas when you go in and say, just make a trail break a little bit and feather out or something. But they got that fixed, but I thought it was your dad, your dad's helping. And then one of them guys said, that tall guy said, does it? true you can see air. Oh no, it was in another conversation.

They were there. And I said, I'm having trouble with Dale. I'm cars just jumping all over. I'm, I'm scared myself, I guess. I'm maybe going. You're driving. Yeah, maybe I'm going 180 or something. When the cars are going under 90, I didn't even go in 170 maybe. And the car is just jumping around and I'm just scared. So I come in, put more tape on the top of the wheel, adjusted my belts and stuck my elbows.

And when I did the same thing, I said, Dale, man, you got to help me. I said, I'm, you know what my, you know, my car is. this car is set up like those other cars, you know, my background, what's wrong? He said, no, it just does that. He just says, the cars just dart and just jump around. I mean, you're confirming that, right? And I know that's right.

And he was telling me about the cars react different if you run up against guardrail than if you run against concrete or if you come across the gate, it'll upset you. And that was when that guy says, is it true that you can see error? And your dad turns to me and he says, well, you know what, Darlington?

I guess it was then on the front side, stretch where that grandstand drops off a little bit and continues on down the track. I said, yeah, he says, well, I can tell you when a fat lady in the third row gets up and goes after popcorn. That's pretty funny. So you got this book. I was a NASCAR Redneck. Where can people buy this?

There's a website, NASCARredneck.com. Okay. Will Kronkwright. He talks about his work with Donnie Allison, Ricky Rudd. Dad? What are you doing now? Not much. I'm retired, retired. I got into Model A restoration and then in the metal shaping. That's kind of how the book came about. Like we're talking here, when I'd go to these metal shaping events, people would gravitate after supper to get me in a corner and get me to tell racing stories.

And when I do that, they'd invariably say, you need to write a book. I don't think I can write a book, but I can write stories, so I started writing my stories. And then when the COVID thing came, I just was sort of stuck in the house more normal. And when I lost my family, I left the rest of my family in Michigan. They didn't hear from me for 14 years. They just thought I deserted them or they didn't know what I was doing. So I just wanted to write the book to let them know kind of what my life was about. I hadn't deserted them.

I had other stuff to do. I was every one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about that we didn't get to was how y'all would in the 70s when y'all were running these cup races all over the country when you all have to take a engine trouble you'd take the motorback to the hotel room and pull it apart in the floor of the hotel and rebuild it I know there's a story in your book about doing that it happened it happened to everybody cleaning parts in the bathtub and stuff like that I've been thrown out of it I remember being thrown out of it I remember being thrown out of two motels because we were cleaning motor parts in the bathtub. That's hilarious. I mean, some of the things that y'all did by necessity. I'm disenthused about hearing about pit crew people that fly in and change a tire and get money and fly home.

No, it's a different world. Yeah. I used to build the car, set the car up, put it in the truck, drive it to the racetrack, race it, change the tire, put it in a truck, drive home, start over again. Yeah. So you hear about pit road speed. Oh, boy. Yeah.

My body hurts a lot from that. I've got a big brace on my left knee right now that actually started with Joe Frizone in 1973. Yeah. He didn't take a sledgehammer to that, did he? No, but I whacked him good with an impact wrench. Boy, y'all in your tools, boy. I'm telling you.

Y'all do some damage. Did he have it coming? Well, yeah, he hit me on pit road. I jumped out in front of him and he hit me, and he hit me in the right leg, but by standing on my left leg, and it, that might have been the worst. I thought it dislocated my whole leg. I mean, I just, because I fell down, but where I fell down was right pretty close to the front of the car. Well, I took that air hose and flung it in the window and hit him in the helmet.

And then, you know, drug it back out and changed the tire. But after I changed the tire, I couldn't stand up. So I threw the air hose out and he, left and they picked me up and brought me over the wall. It looked to me like my left leg was just broken. And somebody came up and I hesitate to tell you this a little bit because I don't know exactly who this was, but somebody came up and said, let me look at that thing. He looked at and felt it and, you know, it hurt. But he said, I'll be right back. He had a uniform on it. It wasn't a race uniform, but he didn't bring nobody back with him. They laid me on the ground,

had somebody put pressure on the tops of both my knees. He had two two by fours about that long. I got put one of them two by fours between my two legs, took that other two by four on the outside of my left leg and hit it with a hammer and knocked my kneecap back in place. It wasn't my whole leg, it just was a kneecap, but you couldn't walk on it. And I sort of let it go, you know, it kind of got bad from there. Oh, but damn.

Dang, animals. Some crazy stories. Well, it's been a lot of fun, man. Old people. It's been a lot of fun. He's just old people. Yeah. I appreciate you coming today. I can't tell you, boys, how much fun I've had.

I enjoy watching you on TV. Yeah, we enjoy doing it. There's a lot of guys in our sport that have these, you know, these sort of wild, interwoven sort of histories, and you've been, you know, you're kind of one of the old guard, and you've seen a lot, man, a lot. done a lot worked with a lot of different people you've got some great stories it's all right here in this book if you want to learn more about will and and uh here's some of the stories that we didn't get to on this

podcast you'll want to definitely pick that up i was a nascar redneck and um you'll be a pretty you'll you'll enjoy it mike you read it this past week not only did i read it but like i could i was enamored by it just from page one he has a disclaimer in the book i mean it's i'm going to summarize it just because i think if I read this, people will be like, okay, that's a book I must read. I make no apologies for the content. You know, I cannot alter my life's experiences to fit everyone else's narratives or expectations. Some of my memories are shrouded in depth and darkness, others in mysterious complexity, so I make no attempt at absolute accuracy, nor do I try to be politically correct. And you go on, I'm telling you, I'm hooked right there. You talk about Humpty Wheeler's hooks?

I mean, I got to turn it to page two after that. So anybody that puts a disclaimer in the front of their book and it goes on. I tell you what, you just, you put it all out on the table in this book. You got your stories. You don't make no apologies. It's not going to be for everybody sometimes, but this is how you lived it, and this is what you remember. And I got to appreciate that about anybody that does that. Oh, well, thank you. And it's a great, it's a good racing book. I appreciate that you took the time to read it, both of you. Well, we appreciate you, man. Thanks for coming in today and getting over here. And I guess you're head back to South Carolina. Yes, sir. You're going to stop at the Waffle House. All right.

Well, have a great day. People are going to really appreciate hearing your story, and thanks again. Thanks for everything you did for my dad. And thanks for sharing what memories you have of me being a part of any of that, because that's really special for me because those are memories I don't have anymore. But we appreciate you. I appreciate you guys. Thank you. Yes, sir. Will Cronkite on the Dell Jr. Download. All right. are alive. All right, folks, here we go.

Leah has all the great questions that you guys have sent to Xfinity Racing on Twitter. So let's get started, Leah. Our first one coming from Michael Shannon Krause. What was your best off-week adventure? Do you have any adventures? Yeah, driving home. We went on vacation and had about a three-and-a-half-hour drive with my daughter, Ila and Gus.

And we drove home last night. We had two bathroom breaks in the trip, which is always. eventful but it went well and i got home in time just in time to get ala right out of the uh out of the car and into bed it sounds like the most simple thing in the world uh you know dad driving his daughter home but man when you get when you do that mike do you not like feel like you've just accomplished like you've won the bronze in an Olympic event i'd go bigger better than that bigger than yeah yeah i wasn't going to go gold but um it's accomplishment yeah yeah i love you I love doing dad things.

Like picking her up from school, taking her to school. I mean, I know that things people do every single day, but, man, it feels good. You're like, yeah, success. I don't know. And the fact that she even wanted to go, so she was, she could have stayed with Amy where Amy's got a couple more days on vacation. So, but she's like, no, I want to go home with you. So pretty cool.

Next question from Blake McCandless. Is there a difference in your preparation for Watkins Glen as a broadcaster? since you will be doing radio style instead of being in the booth. Great question, Blake. Blake is an aspiring pit reporter. I know Matthew, his brother Bob, does some TV work, so maybe they could bring Blake in for a little bit of practice, get him some rips at some of these short tracks.

But I think the only thing that I could do that might help me is just to listen to last year's race, maybe listen to a little bit of MRN radio, some, you know, some content from the last several, months. Listen for the energy. It's going to be a little bit different doing it radio style. The energy is a lot higher. And listen to a lot of the ways that the guys hand it off to each other. So imagine radio style as like passing a baton around the racetrack to each announcer. And so it's pretty easy to understand when it's your turn to start talking. And then you've got

the hard part is trying to find a place to stop talking that sounds natural and hand it off to the next guy and not say the same thing over and over again, not repeat yourself over and over again when you're tossing it. So I'll be picking it up from bags and giving it to Jeff Burton. And so trying to be creative and do that differently every time is probably the biggest challenge. It probably doing me a service to listen to a little bit of the last couple of years there to Glenn and just listen to a couple of things we did and what I liked about it and didn't like about it. And that'd be a good way to get ready. It's going to be weird because I don't think we've ever done radio style.

Maybe we have, but it feels like we haven't done it without practice or some sort of, you know, I'm not sure I'm doing the Xfinity race. I think Parker Klingerman might be doing the Xfinity race to jump up in that perch and just green flag, fire off, here you go. I don't know, I like to do radio style, you like to get a little bit of practice. So maybe I could sit in there, sit at the house watching it on TV and practice in my own living room. Next question from Eric Curry. Given that you started to like road course racing late in your career, which one was your favorite to run and which track that you never ran you wish you had the chance to? I enjoyed the Glenn quite a bit because you had a turn straight away, turn straight away.

I mean, it was a lot more, it was a lot easier than Sonoma. Sonoma, you just turn after turn after turn. and at road courses, especially like Sonoma, that have so many turns one after the other, if you mess up the first one, it kind of messes up all the rest. You never, you know, once you kind of get off line in one corner, it hurts the entrance to the next.

All that just kind of starts dominoing into a series of corners that are just really bad. And you can, you know, if you have a bad corner on one side of the track, it's going to hurt the whole lap. So that was always frustrating. at Sonoma because I never really thought of stock cars as road racing vehicles. You know, they don't go left and right. They don't change direction really well.

Now they've gotten a lot better over the years as technology has changed, and certainly this new car is going to run the road courses a whole lot better. But the glen was just always kind of fun because you had a simple, you know, you attacked each corner individually. And if you screwed up that corner, you had a chance of getting on the next straightaway to sort it, you know, to regroup and start new. But I never really had road courses that I thought, man, I really wish we could run there or wish I could run there.

I never was a massive fan of running road courses and stock cars, so I kind of, I can't say there's one that I wish I'd have had a chance to race on. But I did drive around Mount Panorama in Australia. and to me that is probably the most impressive road course that I can think of. I think it'd be interesting to watch a cup race there, see our cup cars compete on that track, and I just have a tremendous amount of respect for the difficulty of that place and how dangerous it is and how brave the drivers are to go around it. Next question from Brian Adams.

What immediate impact do you think Brad Kozlowski's new influence over at Rauschenway will have? You know, I think it'll do some great things. Brad's going to the Roush. They've struggled to compete with where Brad is currently at Penske. I think that kind of continues. So when Brad goes to Roush, you know, things just aren't going to turn around immediately. I could be wrong, and I hope that I am wrong. I hope that they get everything out of that deal they won't right away.

But I think it'll be a process to improve cars and, you know, get things better and get that organization where they used to be. But I think Brad can do it. I think Brad can get them there, but I don't know if it happens right away. So I would not be surprised to see the performance stay relatively where it is now with a few glimpses of the future mixed in, right? You're going to have those moments where you're going to see Brad overachieve in those cars in the first year.

And then that's kind of what the potential is for them in the future. I expect it to kind of go that way. But I think Brad, you know, knowing his knowledge and approach and what he's trying to do and where he is in his life, this is a great opportunity for him, a great new challenge that he's excited about and thrilled to dive right into. And I think it'll be good for Roush.

A lot of the older owners in this sport don't have a plan B or don't have a succession plan, right? Think about it. You know, what's going to happen to several of these teams when the owners age out and retire or, you know, we got new young owners coming into the sport, which is great, like Denny and so forth. But so at Roush, what was the follow-up plan once Jack can't do this anymore? Can't physically be there and, you know, be involved. So I think having a guy, a face like Brackzolowski's a great eye.

idea for an organization like Rausch to continue their legacy. So that'll be pretty interesting to see, you know, what happens over the next decade for him and that team. Next question from Cole Curry. Do teams own the rights to particular numbers or how does that whole thing work? Yeah, the owners own the numbers. So the owners, the drivers don't own the numbers. If a driver leaves a team, the numbers belongs to the car owner so it stays there. Now, there's been times when you can buy, you know, just like you hear about these guys in football or baseball where they might go to the teammate and buy the number. So that's happened before. Dad bought the number eight from the Stavola brothers in 2000 or 1999 so that I could use it

in the Cup series and I think paid about 100 grand, 150 grand or something like that for it. And when we wanted to do the 88, Robert Yates had that number and we basically, I was going to the 28 wasn't being used and so we went to Robert Yates and said hey we're going to we'd like to have the 88 if you don't want to you know turn it over we're going to use the 28 instead and we wanted you to know because the 28 was so synonymous with Robert Yates and Davey Allison and so the Yates guys came back to us and said well we'd rather y'all not use the 28 and we've talked to haveline too and I didn't even know Haville still had any emotions about it, but they didn't want it used either in the Cup series. So even after all these years, they didn't want the 28 back out there. So they gave us the 88.

And that's what we went with. In case we could not get the 88 or the 28, for whatever reason, we were thinking 81. That was an option because I ran the 81 in the Xfinity series a couple times. Anyways, we had some different mockups going on. All right. One more question from Brian Ramey.

What was the deal with your skeleton driving gloves? Were they a sponsor? Was that just your preference? I was watching motocross, and I think one of the riders was wearing those gloves. And I just thought, man, that's cool. He stands out. Now I'm instantly curious as to who this guy is and want to watch and see how he does in this race. And I thought those gloves had that big of an impact.

I think I'll start wearing on myself. So, you know, every, I never did the helmet thing. Like, that's not true. I started out doing, you know, sending my helmets off and getting all these crazy paints and designs on them. So I'm doing that. I was at a racetrack and I was sitting next to another driver that I won't name. And he sets his helmet on the pit wall and a fan walked up and bumped it off pit wall and

it fell to the ground and the driver was ticked off and said something to the fan and in that moment I thought man I don't want to ever care that much about my helmet so much so that I'm not wanting to get scratched or worried about it getting knocked off the you know dropped in the car or banged up or right I'm just not even going to do that and so that's why I went to the black helmet and I did let Nick paint a little skeleton on you know something funny on the back but otherwise I didn't go all out We had pretty much the same thing every year. I'd tell Nick Pasteur to paint whatever he wants on the back. I don't care.

But otherwise, the helmets are pretty plain. So I went with the gloves to do my thing instead of the paint scheme on my helmet. That was more fun for me. All right. That's it, really. Plus, the other thing, too, sorry. You're okay. Plus, when you're watching a guy race, right, and you're looking, when you're watching a car,

go around the track or watching on TV, always was really fun when a driver wore white gloves because you could see his hands moving. And now with most of the drivers wearing a dark colored gloves, it's harder to see their hands and what their hands are doing. Obviously, we can go with the in-car camera and see, but if you're watching them come around the track from outside the car, and I didn't know if those skeleton gloves help you kind of see what my hands were doing.

Yeah, I thought that was kind of... It did. Yeah, I thought so, too. All right, well, those are some great questions, Leah. Good job. Hey, good job to the fans. I just read them. Well, that one went a little bit longer than normal.

I like that. We got a couple extra questions in there, I suppose. Did we? Yeah, dude. I mean, that's what you like, right? You wish you could go all day with this thing. I think it'd be fun to do a whole show. Maybe that's something that we could do during our winter break.

Oh, yeah. It's doing a just-ask junior. Catch up with everybody. Yeah. They go by fast, though. You know, they do go by fast, just like X-Finity X-X-Fi. X-E's more than fast, though, Mike. It's reliable and powerful.

And that means everybody gets to do more of what they love. love with that faster internet. Preach it! Dale! You and your crew can stay connected with Wi-Fi coverage that delivers the speed

that all of your devices need. Remember everyone, keep the questions coming to Preacher Dale by sending them to at Xfinity Racing on Twitter. The funny thing is, is Mike's the real preacher.

Yeah, he is. Actually, I'm ordained, too, so technically. Oh. Anybody can get ordained these days, apparently. Well, before... Hey, you're ordained and you're ordained.

Before we put a bow. on this let's give a big thank you to infinity they do a lot for the sport they do a lot for this podcast proud premier partner of NASCAR that's a lot of peas pease pretty proud premier premier yeah last call all right last call episode 351 isn't that a Ford what is it 3501 should we have skipped this episode then no isn't it yeah 351 it was uh Ford's uh did they do that just because the Chevy had the 350 maybe they wanted to He won better. But no.

Let's give a shout out to Josh Berry. The late model program for junior murder sports are winners. Over the last couple of weeks, he won the Hampton Heat, which is an event at Langley Speedway. And then this past weekend, he went to Hickory and won the cars tour throwback race, which is two big, two big wins. Everybody took a break except Josh, he kept on kicking ass. He did the race. Yeah.

I mean, I watched that Hickory race. I didn't get a chance to watch the Langley deal because we were doing something with the Olympics, but the Hickory race was amazing. Was it? Yeah. Oh, I mean, I've never seen a bad race at Hickory. I don't know what it is about that place. Even when somebody can win by straightaway, just watching a race at Hickory just feels right.

Did I see this right that I racing is going to add Hickory to the portfolio? And that was one of the first tracks that I signed. Oh, yeah. It's a little something special then for it. I've been working on that contract for a long time. time and it took a lot of phone calls and I think it's going to be a good benefit to the racetrack. Listen to this. And I've had a time.

So I'm trying to get Bob Dillner, Matthew's brother, to sign up with Winchester for Rye Racing. And he, you know, it's a conversation. It's like, hey, Bobby, you signed a contract yet. No, it's on the desk. I'm going in the office tomorrow. I'm going to do it tomorrow. And it's like every day. I'm like, hey, did you get that done?

He's like, no, I forgot. And so I brought Matthew into the conversation. I didn't know if Matthew had any leverage. I've got some pictures that could be leverage if you want. Well, that's what we need. So anyhow, to my point with Bob to sign, to be eager to sign, I said, I got a text message after. So after I announced the Hickory release,

I got a text message from a guy who is so, excited about this Hickory release from Racing because he, when he heard it was getting scanned, went to the track and bought a billboard. Oh. Yeah. Okay. So think about that if you're the track owner. Yeah.

Right. Trying to sell billboards. Have you had anybody come to you to buy a billboard? Well, he, but probably not. Yeah. You're probably out there. You're probably out there shopping your billboards. Maybe.

How much would you like to spend to be on this billboard? Right. Well, he had guys coming to him, coming to Hickory, to buy billboards. because it's getting scanned to live in the virtual world. And so I told Bob that. I said, hey, man, if you're having trouble signing it, selling your billboards, have no fear. Yeah. Get this thing, get this, you know, we'll get you on the calendar to get scanned,

and those billboards go flat after. And his response was, well, I'll get to it tomorrow. I'm going to get to it tomorrow. All right. We'll break out those pictures. Doorbopper clear. After a few weeks of getting massages and going to the beauty parlor and getting their nails done and all those good things.

All those things that spotters do. Yeah. The door bumper clear spotters are coming back to the room. They're coming back to this table to do the podcast. Finally, you know, our podcast doesn't take multiple weeks off. We work really hard to keep the podcasts coming. Even during times when we're, you know, maybe on vacation, we still got some content for you.

But the door bumper clear guys, they just took off. Like the entire month. Yeah. I mean, really? No like it. Well, what kind of life is that? It's bad enough that they just kind of show up whenever they want for the regular schedule, right?

TJ's here one week, not the next, and it's like there's no real genuine excuse. Continuity. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they'll learn. We're just glad to coming back. But now, you know, they're kind of getting bumped down the ladder a little bit

with this new podcast you got. Glorious White Knuckle yada yada, yada, into being a baby-to-de-thing, a racing podcast. Come on, you got to know it. Glorious, glorious white-knuckle, hard-nosed. Oh, my God, I'm going to get this wrong. You are getting it wrong. Turned over and half spun out.

God-fearing. half turned over and spun out. Racist stories podcast. Nailed it. I heard it's going well. It is going. Of course it's going well. It's freaking cool.

This last episode that we put out, everybody listened. If you've not gone to it, listen to this episode, because it's got Buddy Parrott on it, and he's telling the story of the 1990 Daytona 500, was it 1990, where Derek Cope? What an amazing vantage point that we hear and talking about the potential for a fight. and he's got, I'm going to take chocolate because he's the biggest and the ugliest.

They had a plan on. Oh, my gosh. It's so good. So good. Love that one. All right. Well, we'll have to tune in and listen to that one. All right, thanks to Will Croncright for coming in. And I've been wanting him to get on the show for a really long time. We've had his car here on the table for over a year. I've read his book. And now you guys know his story. Have a great week. This bit of badassery was bad assery. It was made by

Dirty Moe Media. Dirty Moe!