The Dale Jr. Download - 558 - Gary Nelson Part 2: Scarred By Driver Deaths Under My Watch

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Dale Earnhardt Jr. continues his conversation with longtime NASCAR crew chief Gary Nelson to discuss his time at Hendrick Motorsports, building SABCO with Felix Sabates, and his move to the officiating side as the Winston Cup Director.Gary details how Rick Hendrick used his car salesman skills to sell him on a job at HMS. Teamed up with Geoff Bodine, the two went on to beat Dale Earnhardt in the Daytona 500. Nelson shares stories of Bodine and legendary Crew Chief Harry Hyde that inspired the plot of Days Of Thunder. In 1988, Gary was taken on by Felix Sabates to help build SABCO. With Kyle Petty as the driver, he shares the moment that changed the entire history of that program. He also shares when he was convinced he’d be fired after a shouting match with Kyle Petty at Dover.They close the show by discussing Nelson’s time as the NASCAR Winston Cup Director. Gary talks about the tragic on-track crashes he witnessed firsthand that stay with him today. After numerous fatal accidents, it was up to him and his team to figure out how to make the sport safer. His multi-layered career and honest storytelling make this interview an instant Download classic.  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.

Hey everybody, it's Dale Jr. back again for another episode of the Dale Jr. Download. All right. And now this is an extra special episode. This is part two of the Gary Nelson interview. It was so long, we had to cut it in two parts. And I know you're ready to hear it. So we're going to get right to it. The following is a production of Dirty Mo Media. Hey everybody, Dale Jr. Dale Jr., Dale Jr., back again for another episode of the Dale Jr. Download, the ally guest guest segment today, Gary Nelson. He's a crew chief, a winning crew chief.

He also was the technical director in NASCAR for almost a decade. All right, so we're going to start part two of the Gary Nelson interview where he goes and begins his job at Hendrick Motorsports as a crew chief. Beyond that, he'll go to Sabco. We'll get into the conversation around his involvement as a NASCAR technical director or head official. You know, when I would, you know, he went from being. a competitor to basically the guy who ran the garage.

Anything that was going to happen in that garage had to go through him. And I come into sport as a driver in the NASCAR Cup series and ran under his guidance for almost a decade, man. Pretty incredible. I can't wait to let you hear this part of the interview, so we're just going to go right to it. You know, while trying to solve all those issues at DiGuard, you get a call from Rick Hendrick.

Yes. All right. What is Rick Walt? We did, I do remember one thing. We did one race with Dick Trickle at Michigan in the R&D car. I worked with Dick. Trickle was an amazing memory of mine. So I get a call from Rick Hendrick and I get a call from Jack Roush, almost at the same time.

Jack was living in Michigan and had a career in doing OEM work. and drag racing and road racing. He had done a lot of, but he hadn't done NASCAR. So he's calling me saying, hey, I'm hearing you're available. I want to start a NASCAR team. I'm going to come to North Carolina and get things going. And I listened to him, and I thought, yeah, I don't know him. He sounds like he's going to make something out of this, but I'm not sure.

And then Rick calls me, and Rick says, hey, I heard you're available. I want to start a second team. I've got one team now. I want to start a second one. And I met with Rick, Linda, and Ricky. And Ricky was just a little guy. And we looked at some property. And Rick said, I want to buy this piece of property.

And I want to build a big shop. I mean, a nice shop. And we were all working in little metal buildings with dirt roads coming to them in those days. And what Rick was telling me was pretty exciting, right? And, you know, Rick may be the best car salesman in the whole country. If you think about it, he's done very well. So he had me sold on how he was going to build an empire.

Jack had similar conversations, but not near as much of a sales. pitch. And so Rick says, I'm hiring Tim Richmond. I've got Jeff Bodine. I'm keeping him, and I want to start a second team. And so I said, yeah, count me in. So I showed up for work. He gave me a desk at City Chevrolet next to his office, at the car dealership, next to his office. And he said, I want to be careful with the rest of this. story because Harry Hyde is such a, you know, a hero and well respected, but he did not want a second team. And I didn't, I didn't understand what I was up against. And he wanted every, so Rick ended up buying the property around Harry's shop. And so I said, Rick, is there, you know,

can I get at the end of the shop and start working? And he said, ah, Harry needs that whole shop. I said, well, Rick, does he have any cars that, you know, when I was over at, Rick took me through the shop. I said, it looked like I had about 10 cars there. Maybe I could get one or two and get started. Yeah. Harry doesn't have any cars that he could spare. And then Tim Richmond went to Harry Hyde's team, and Jeff O'Dine came to my team. So I had a driver, no shop, no cars, and, you know.

a desk outside of Rick Hendricks, right next to Rick Hendricks office, and it was November. Wow. And we had to build a team. A couple months. So I brought back your grandfather. Robert G. Yeah, and he brought Richard Broom and a couple other folks and some resources. We rented a building over there on Highway 29 right behind BSR products.

Butch was building. And he built the building as a warehouse. He got a permit to make it a warehouse. I told Butch, I said, I said, Butch, I need a favor. I need to use your building. And we'll rent it from you. And Butch says, it's only a warehouse.

And it's only, only you got a certificate of occupancy for a warehouse. I said, well, we just need to put a restroom in. So one night, Butch got, I was a septic tank guy and plumbing guy. After he got the permit, we made that into a shop. Yeah. And in the middle of the night, all of a sudden it went from a warehouse to a race shop. And we bought some cars from Billy Hagen from, I think it was Terry Labani's, had been driving. He was going out of business, so we bought four or five cars, brought him in there, started building up cars.

And it's Thanksgiving, December, next year. and you know it's Christmas and we're working Christmas Eve. Christmas Day, New Year's run home. Everybody's Happy New Year back to the shop. We work day and night because from November to February goes fast and we ended up winning the Daytona 500 that year with Jeff. I remember that race because it comes down to the last handful of laps and dad and Jeff are short on fuel, both of them. they both had to slow down to be able to conserve enough fuel to make it to the end. And it was who could make it. Yeah.

Who could do it. And dad had to run down pit road and get a splash and you guys were able to get to the finish line. Yeah. Tough loss for the Earnhardt's, but at the same time, funny story for you, you know, I'm not entirely upset that Jeff Bodine has won this race, even though it was at the expense of dad, because to your point, my grandfather, Robert G. Had done the body work. It's working on that car.

So every Charlotte race, my mother would come into town and stay with granddaddy. And we were very fortunate, my sister and myself, to go over to granddaddies on Fridays and Saturdays during the race weekend and see Mom. And so, you know, I'm all around Granddaddy's shop. and all the people that were coming through there, and you're more than likely in that area and coming through. And his place was a hangout. Definitely. Late at night.

Yeah, grilling steaks all night long. I wish I could talk like Robert. Oh, yeah. His stories were. Yeah. And his old race shop back there full of racing stuff and still probably racing short track cars out of there at that time. And there was a lot of Levi Garrett number five hats.

Yeah, right? And so I get one of the hats. And I come home with that hat on my head, and my dad yanked it off my head, set it on fire, and threw it on the ground. And I was like, all right, I've learned a valuable lesson. Yeah, I've learned a valuable lesson here. Yeah, we got off on a wrong foot with Dale,

and it's partly my fault as well. So we were, I think it was test. seen in January in Daytona. We got Jeff, we got the Levi-Garrett car, and they're there with their car. And we were all, Childress, us, Junior Johnson, were all trying to get more sponsorship from Chevrolet, all of us. And there was this one guy that was the program manager, his name was Terry Lace. And Terry would come to the track and try to assess what everybody's doing and try to go back

to the General Motors and try to figure out who to help the most. Yeah. Right. And so we were all working our own little, each of us work on our side of the street, trying to get more support. Obviously, Rick, a car dealer helped a lot. Yep. But Childress being with Dale Earnhardt helped a lot with their sponsors.

And Junior had his history with all of the people. So it was a daily struggle to try to get. get more support from GM, more wind tunnel time, more whatever we could get. Money, private cars. Yeah. Bodies. Private cars to drive. Whatever it was, we just wanted, we needed support.

And so Terry had to leave early on the second day, and he said, call me and let me know how things are going of the test. So I called Terry at the end of the day, and I said, hey, we just had the fastest time of everybody by a half a second around. Daytona. I was looking at the other cars and they were trying and, you know, your dad and anybody and we were the fastest. And so, okay, good, hang up. The next time I see Dale is, your dad, is when we walk into the track for the 500. It was actually the week before for the Bush clash. And he hands me a quarter. He says, you might need to, here's a lot. Here's

a quarter next time you want to call those Chevy guys tell him I paid for the call so he was pretty upset I guess the word got back somehow to Childress and Childress got upset and Childress told Richard that I was bragging about how we were beating them in the test

and so now fast forward we beat him in the race and he overshot his pits if I remember right he came in so fast I overshot the pits and then I think he tore the transmission out trying to get off pit road right So it was all my fault because we would, yeah, it's got to be somebody's fault, right?

Yeah. So I didn't give, I forgot to tell him that, hey, I'm the one that gave you your first win. Yeah. But anyway, he did not like Jeff at all. No. Not a bit. Yeah. He had names for him, he would call it. He did not like Jeff back then.

And he kind of put me for a few years. I was, I struggled to be as close to him as we had been. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, you know, yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, there were some moments when, I mean, it was tough for me because some of that stuff spilled into the Saturday races, you know, and Jeff's driving Granddad's car. Yeah. So, you know, I've got, I've got dad spinning out Jeff Boudine in my grandfather's car. And, of course, man, my allegiance is with dad. Of course. But I'm not really loving. It's still family.

All of it, right? I didn't know Rick quite as well back then. So certainly, you know, he was, he was the competitor. But, you know, those were some, you know, those were some very, very tough times. I mean, as far as the feuds and dad had been in plenty, that one probably was the ugliest. I think that. Yeah, they made a movie about it. Yeah.

So he was there. Yeah. Were you in the meeting? with Mr. France? So they had what they call it, what they call it, the Winston at Charlotte the week before the 600. And Jeff and Bill Elliott and your dad all were competitive that race.

And we're all trying to win a million dollars or whatever it was, I can't remember. And we thought we had it. And your dad thought differently. and Bill Elliott was probably well as a best car. Yeah, yeah. So we end up tangling with your dad and Bill Elliott tangles with your dad

on that front straightaway and your dad. I think he ends up winning. But either way, our car is all tore to pieces. And it was our only car. It was a car we needed for the 600. And your grandfather was so upset that Jeff had done that to that car because he had to now work day and night to get it ready for Wednesday qualifying a few days later.

So we get to the 600 and we got the car and I'm pretty upset and, you know, that we went through all this work and got nothing out of it. And Bill Elliott was upset and your dad was upset. And so I'm trying to figure out how to say this the right way. You're fine. You're a safe space. Yeah, yeah, just between us, right? So the NASCAR official came to me. I'm the crew chief.

I'm there early. We're getting the car ready. He says, Jeff Bodine is needed in the NASCAR hall or Bill France, Jr. wants to see him. I said, well, he's not here. As soon as he gets here, you tell him Bill France Jr. wants to see him. So I'm watching, and I'm watching. And here comes Jeff in the gate. and I said, Jeff, you've got to go to the hauler right away.

Those officials are serious. They want to talk to you. And he said, yeah, yeah, okay. And he stood there. And I said, no, Jeff, really, I don't think they're going to let us race unless you go in there and talk your way into getting us back in a race. He said, all right, in a minute. And he went down to the restroom at the other end of the garage. And the hauler was at this end of the garage.

and the restrooms at that end, and we're kind of one of the first cars closest to the hauler. An official comes back and says, Bill France Jr. saw him and is wondering why he is not in there talking to him right now. And I said,

he had to go to the bathroom. And so I go to the restroom and I go in there and I said, Jeff, you've got to get over there. He says, in a minute, in a minute. And I think he was just gathering his thoughts. And fun, I said, Jeff, I'm going to come in there and get you.

We're going to race today, and we're going to win this race, but we need you to go get us into the race if they decide to kick us out because of what you did the week before, we don't have a chance. You've got to go in there. So I get them, and we go, so the door closed. I didn't go in the room. And I heard some shouting from one person, and that was Bill Jr. Wow.

And I'd been shouted at by him. He had shot at me in many times earlier, or one time earlier. Jeff comes out and he's kind of sheepish. And I said, Jeff, are we going to be able to race? He says, yeah, we can race. But I got to be in Daytona in a day or two. Yeah. And that was when the real meeting happened.

Yeah, that's what they made the movie of that. Yeah, yeah, Days of Thunder. So there were a lot of. issues through 87, engine failures, struggles. I kind of looked at, you know, Jeff, Jeff came out with a book recently that documented his career. I haven't read it. I haven't heard it. I heard about it. I'll tell you. Very interesting. I think you would have really enjoy it. What was his take on the engine problem? Not, not necessarily. He just, you know, there were just some challenges. The results just, I don't remember him really hammering too hard on anything

individually about the final couple years with Rick. It was just, you know, the results just weren't kind of there. And, you know, me personally, when I look at the stats or anything, I just, you know, I don't really see anything that stands out. Rick's team for many years, even beyond that, just never really got that foundation to where they could do it every single week until right around the early 90s, and particularly obviously when Jeff Gordon comes on board. There was a lot. There seemed to be,

and this is just my assumption, you don't even have to comment, but even like beyond the years when you were there with Schrader and Ricky Rudd and so forth, there was a lot of competition. And that was probably very common with two-car, three-car teams back in the 80s in the early 90s. They're so competitive, so much so that they're detrimental to themselves. So Rick asked me to go after we won Daytona, the first time out, and Tim Richmond had a terrible race. I think he went to the hospital with the broken ribs or something.

and maybe his knee or, I can't remember what, but blew a right front tire, hit the wall. And I think the next race was Rockingham, maybe. And so Rick comes to Rockingham. I think it was Richmond or Rockingham. And I'm leaning on a stack of tires. And I'm looking at them, and my tires off our car were all the same color, gray, kind of a gray look.

And next garage over is Jim Richmond. stack of tires and two of them look almost blue and two of them look almost new at least one of them looked like brand new yeah and so rick comes up and says says to me you need to help harry harry hide and i'm and i said yeah what can i do he said he said something's not right with that car jim says it doesn't drive right and i said well rick here's my tires And there's his tires. And he's not using all four of them. He's using three or maybe two and a half.

Yeah. And that made the movie in a different way that Harry Hyde's character told Rick, my way, his way. Yeah. But that was the actual thing. So I told Rick, I said, Rick, just look. We've been running a lot of laps on these. He's run a lot of laps.

You can just see that they're overheating some and underusing others. And so Rick said, well, just meet with Harry. I'll set up a meeting. And so we go to, I think it was at City Chevrolet. I go in, I take a seat. Harry takes a seat. And Rick says, now, Gary, I need you to tell Harry what, you know, what you can do to help him.

And I started to say, well, you got to use all four tires. I can help you with that. and you got to do, you know, there's a few things that from the old days that just won't work. It used to work, but it won't work now. And Harry started in the conversation telling me what was wrong with our car, which he was probably right, but he obviously didn't listen. So I just got up and walked out. And so Rick at that moment, I think, realized doing them, to getting to. two teams to work together is going to be harder than he thought.

Right. The 25 car and Tim Rich would eventually find success. Do you recall, were you there during all of that, not so much the success that Tim had. I think we can all say that if Tim had lived, he would be a champion. Dad would not be a seven-time champion because there was a very, there was a moment where They were absolute equals. Going for the same one. Oh, yeah.

So I've worked with a, the most important person on a race team is the driver. By far. There's no, there's no, hey, get an average driver in a great car and you'll be good. Now, you've got to have a great driver to have a great team. You can have, you know, one-off wins and those kind of things. But to be a solid team, you have to have a great driver. To be a great driver, you have to race 24 hours a day. Your dad, every conversation I ever had with them, it wasn't, we'd be fishing in the Bahamas,

and it wasn't one cast to the next, he's saying something about racing. 24 hours a day on his mind, how to get better. All the great drivers were that way. They would wander to, you know, what do you get at this restaurant? Okay, what do you think, what do you think about, This or this part of racing, you know, the latest controversy, whatever it was. Always the best drivers 24 hours a day. Every one of them that I have worked with except for Tim Richmond.

Tim Richmond was the only driver that I'd ever seen. There may be more, but I just haven't seen them, that would get out of the car and not think about the car until he got back in it the next week. never thought about it. I'd see him out and he'd just, hey, what's going on? We went to a lot of functions, social things and whatever. He didn't talk about the car ever, not a bit.

Just wanted a party. He did not care. And then if you get in a car, win a pole, win the race. Just, I mean, a natural talent unheard of in my whole career. You ended up in 88 going to a part-time role? Yeah, I don't And you did some commentating work as well Yeah, you've been doing your homework

Well, you know, we've got a good team around here Gardimo Media Obviously, yeah So Goodyear was transitioning to radials Yes In 88, 8788 Yeah And they asked me to help them do testing

Hoosier was also allowed in NASCAR So there was two tire companies and they were fighting hard. And so Rick, Rick was a Goodyear guy for sure, and I was a Goodyear guy. So Goodyear asked Rick if we could do some testing. I said, yeah, we can go test all you want. You know, I'll get a driver and a car, and we'll just go do the testing, but somebody else run Jeff at the racetrack.

And so I'm doing that. And we called it another R&D team, but it was basically we were in business to get could your radios sorted out. Yeah. And so that gave me weekends off. And so ESPN called me and said, hey, would you like to come to the booth and be a commentator at races? Yeah.

And I said, I'll give it a try. Yeah. Right? So it was Ned Jarrett, Bob Jenkins, and myself, the three of us sat side by side in a booth. And Benny Parsons was a pit road reporter. Yeah. I listened to, I think you did Wilkesboro that year, and I listened to that race a little bit. And I really enjoyed it.

I thought that it was, you know, kind of one of the early concepts of the crew chief mind being in the room, you know, being in the conversation during the race. Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. Yeah. But I really didn't take it seriously either. Sure. I just said, yeah, a weekend, yeah, you'll give me a hotel and travel. and pay me a little bit. And so I didn't work at it like those guys.

Dr. Punch and Benny and Ned and Bob Jenkins, they worked it. I mean, it was their livelihood. I was just a guest. So Felix Bobis wants to start a race team. He buys the race team from Rick. Yes. This is the R&D team. It was a tire test team.

Yeah. Is it the same team? I might have the years wrong, but is this the same car that like Greg Sacks would race every once in a while, the 18, Slim Jim or Slim Fast car? I don't think so. You didn't go to the racetrack.

So that might be later, I think, in the 90s. So Felix buys this team or this group of guys. Yeah. Right? He's going to start a race team. Felix is part owner in the Charlotte Hornets. I think he'd also made a little bit of money in video games or Nintendo.

Yeah, Nintendo, yeah. But he didn't know how to get into racing, and Rick Hendrick would assist to help him start Sabco. So the whole operation is R&D team, and Kyle Petty's going to be your driver. To back up just a little bit, Rick calls me and says, hey, my friend Felix wants to start a race team,

can you help him? I said, Rick, whatever you ask, I'll do it. And he said, well, just do that. And so next thing I know, I'm meeting Felix, and he's a new car. and I'm working for him. Yeah. He's writing your, he's writing your checks.

Yeah, all of a sudden, my paycheck's coming with a different name on it. And so we had to build a shop. Yeah. We could find a shop, build it up, hire people, the whole thing. Again, I've done it many times over my career. And so Felix is, he's new to it. He's got a Cuban, you know, a Latin temperament. which is an interesting one.

Great guy, but short fuse. Oh, yeah. And I'd never have worked around somebody like that. His approach was, do it, do it, do it. And then the next day, you're spending too much, you're spending too much. Why are we doing this? So I was a ping pong ball in that. And we got going, we got Kyle.

Oh, yeah. I can remember we had, I think we had three or four shows. Chevy Monte Carlo's that came with me and my little package over to start. And the first week, I'm like, okay, Felix, we don't really have everything we need to run a full season the first year. Let's run a partial season while we build up our team. And he said, yeah, yeah, no problem, no problem. And I said, okay, we're working on these cars, and we'll go to Daytona, then we'll skip

Richmond and Rocketham. and we'll pick up another race at Charlotte, and by the end of the year we'll run all the races as we build this program. And he called me up about a week later, and he says, hey, I just made a deal. I said, what's that? And he said, we're going to run Pontiacs. We don't have any Pontiacs.

So we're back to zero right after we got going, and had to build Pontiacs. And then unfortunately for Kyle, had a lot of collisions in those first couple of years. So we were just... And then in the process,

while that's all going on, Felix says to me, says, and I made a deal, I got us a sponsor, and we're going to run Richmond, Rockingham, and all those... All the races. Yeah. So all of the plans made on Monday, all changed on Tuesday with that team. You may

remember it in that way, which is interesting. interesting, but what I remember about that team was very, very good looking race cars. Yeah. Really nice paint schemes, pretty race cars, easily recognizable. They jumped off the racetrack. The peak antifreeze schemes were beautiful. Yeah.

And to your point, the radial tire is being kind of woven into the fabric of the sport. Right. And at first it was like a couple races here and there, and then it's full time. You mentioned that you played a big role in the development of that tire. Yes, sir. You guys go to Rockingham, for example, and dominated the race. Right.

Like, Kyle Petty has never dominated a race in his life, and he goes out there in that car, and no one could touch you. I remember that day watching that race from the infield thinking, I mean, you had a comfortable half-a-lap lead literally entire day, if not more. Yeah. And I often wondered, you know, what it was that you guys knew about the radio and how to get that tire to perform. My engineer. Yeah.

Paul. Yeah. Same guy. Same guy. I brought him back. Damn. I got him back in there. Oh, Paul.

Good guy. He's passed away. a few years ago, but just an amazing engineer, just common sense guy. He could speak to me in words that I could understand. Most engineers, they got to dumb it down for a guy like myself. But Paul came and said, oh, it's just a tire, right? Everybody's making a big deal of biosplai, radial, whatever. He said, the reason a radial tire is better than a biopor,

bias-plied tire is because they roll easier. That's why they went from bias-plied radials is a belted tire. It's got a belt all the way around the tread. Rolls better than a tire that's made of cords that flex as it's rolling. So he said, if you understand that, you understand that you can't drive in a corner

as hard as you used to, right? Because your tire was partially your braking system. on a bias-plied tire, and it's a lot less of a braking system on a radio. Yeah. If you, so he talked, he and I talked, and we talked to Kyle about this car, you can't charge, you know, the banking at Rockingham, for instance, just lures you in. You drove it that way. Yes.

You would drive in until something happened, and then you would push up in the middle and get turned and drive off. Kyle would roll in when he's going. east-west, if the straightaway's or north-south, he was on the white line, on the throttle, full throttle, on the exit. So to do that, you couldn't have the push in the car, and you had to drive it differently. Yeah. You guys would sort of, you know, I think you won Dover. I don't know, you had a couple of races where you guys just flashed and really had some good strength. Yeah. And it seemed like that you, you know, that knowledge of the radio and the involvement of the

early development of that tire was an advantage to a point, right? And then the field sort of caught up. Your driver's called up. Your dad did not like the radials. No. Because his style was the charge into the corner. Sliding around, sliding the tire of the radio. Just drive in with the right front just squealing.

Couldn't do that with the radio. Now. Everything's going really well until 1981. Kyle breaks his leg, I think, on the back straightaway. I think we were leading in points at the time at Talladega. Talladega, he gets T-boned and breaks his leg. Dale, the funny story these days, working with those guys at NBC, they both tell the story a couple different times over the last seven years of DJ

walking up to the door of Kyle's car and saying, hey man, how's going? And Kyle looking at Dale Jarrett and going, my leg is broken. Yeah. Going to have to get some of them guys to come over here and help me get out of here. Yeah. And that was a big setback for you guys. It's pretty much changed history for that program. had a trajectory that was, I mean, for us, 88 to can't catch our breath and changing from Chevy

to Pontiac, having a minimum crew, trying to get an engine company going in those days. You didn't buy engines. You had to build them yourselves. We tried to build all of that stuff. And then having all the races put on us when we were trying to build through the year, it took us till 91 to get our strength up. And I thought we were on a path to do great things with Kyle and Sabco. And when I think the accident was Ernie Irvin on the back straightaway,

made some kind of move and took out most of the, took all the top runners. And Kyle ends up with a broken leg. And at that point, it just all fell apart. We couldn't ever get it back. I can tell you what happened. in a Dover. What? So Kyle's out, I think he was out 12 weeks.

So we get to the summer race in Dover. And Kyle says, I'm back. I'm ready. I said, Dover is pretty tough. We did 500 laps in those days. In September, it was tough. I said, Kyle, I think you, you know, you might want to sit out another race. Nope, I'm ready.

I'm ready to go. So we get to Dover. And Kyle, Kyle's great. guy. I love him to death. Still think he's one of my best friends. We bless his heart, I guess that's

probably the way you start to start this story. He just wanted to drive. And he was my driver and I believed in him. So I said, okay, let's go. We're out there, you know, we're running maybe top five or something. Kyle calls on the rain and says, I got to get

out. I can't do it anymore. I'm just just, I'm too, I can't do it. Davy Allison was walking behind our pits. And so I said, hey, Davey, can you, Kyle can't finish this race? You just dropped out. Can you help us out? He said, yeah, sure.

So Kyle gets out, Davy gets in. Kyle goes to the care center. And he's getting reports. Davey goes from a lap down to the lead lap. Now he goes from the back of the lead pack to the middle of the lead pack. Next thing you know, he's at the front of the lead. He's leading the race. And Kyle's getting these reports in the care center.

He says, give me another IV or whatever they were doing. And, you know, Dover went on for hours. And so Kyle, we're working to win this race with Davey. And Kyle had started it, and he'd get credit for the win. And Kyle comes back and pulls on my sleeve and says, says, I'm ready, man. I said, yeah, good. We'll see you next week.

No, no, I'm ready. I want to get back in now. I said, Kyle, you just came out of the care center. You got out of the car because it was too much for you. He said, are they fixed me up? I am good. I promise, I am good. We're leading the race.

I call Davy on the radio. The next caution comes out. I called Davey on the radio. I said, Davey, unfortunately, I have to tell you that we're going to change drivers. What do you mean? We're going to win this thing. I said, Dave, we're just going to change drivers. Come on in.

He's cussing and not happy about that. Wow. And Kyle jumps in, goes out there. They're still under yellow, so we lose spots, but we're, you know, there's not a lot of cars in the lead lap. We still have a good chance. They throw the green flag. Kyle goes through turn one, two, hits the wall on a back straight, and it just flattens. It just takes out the whole side of the car.

Oh. Just wrecks it. And I was so upset. I was upset at myself for letting them get back in. Yeah. But then I'm a team guy and he's my teammate. This other guy is a competitor. Davey's a competitor.

So I'm just upset that he even talked me into it. Yeah. I go down to the care center and Kyle's laying on the mattress on the bed in there. And Richard's there. Linda Petty's there and Patty Petty, Kyle's wife, are all standing there by the bed. And I come in and I said, Kyle, are you okay? He says, yeah, man, I'm okay, I'm okay. I started to call him a lot of names.

You let him happen. Yeah, they weren't nice. Yeah. The nicest thing I said was dumb. And Richard and Linda and Patty were all just standing there. Taking a back. Yeah. And I just walked out.

I was just so upset. I walked out and all the way home, I'm thinking I'm fired. That was it. I won't have a job Monday morning when Felix finds out about this that I cussed out Kyle in front of his mother, father, and his wife. And I get home and Felix is on the phone. What in the hell happen? What were you thinking to put Kyle back in a car?

I said, I didn't think to put him back in a car. He told me he wanted to get back in a car. Well, why did you let him? So it turns out it's all my fault. Oh, hell. Yeah. And so I figure I'm fired. Yeah.

Get to the next, but Felix, he doesn't have a backup plan, so I'm okay for a while. Go to the next racetrack, and Richard comes up to me. Richard Petty comes up to me. He said, I appreciate what you did. That kid of mine is a nice way I'm going to put it. needed somebody his whole life to tell him that what you just did. Damn. Yeah.

So Richard was good. Yeah. That must have felt good. Somebody. That, I went from way down here to starting to come back. I'm still not sure about my job. But I felt like somebody at least recognized what had happened. Yeah.

I mean, that would be as far as I know, your final job as a crew chief. Yes. Yeah. did you know at that time that you were never going to be a crew chief again when when when you leave that job are you thinking that I'm done I'm going to do something else what it had true that winter the end of that year um bill france junior had a yacht and a fishing sport fishing boat your dad had one Felix had one, Dick Brooks had one. A lot of guys had, so we would all meet in Marsh Harbor and spend a week or so maybe early December fishing.

You know, we'd go out on these, I mean, we were catching nice sailfish. And it was a nice time. And we'd sit around and have dinner on these boats. And Bill kept saying to Felix, I want to hire Nelson on these trips. And Felix was like, if you want him, you can have him. He was still mad at me. Yeah. Oh, gosh.

So I end up, I said, I'll go interview, and a guy named Bless Richter. I went in and met with him and made a deal to go work for NASCAR. The NASCAR, Winston Cup director. Yeah. You're basically the head official in the garage. Yeah, I went from complaining about officials my whole career and thinking I knew how to do it better. So I walked in pretty arrogant, which if I had it to do over again, I would have had a different approach. But remember, I told you early on that NASCAR needed better officials and they needed better processes.

They knew that as well. Yeah. So my job was, but first of all, I never got, I never paid a fine, never got suspended, never had any. As a crew chief. As a crew chief, never got, I paid a, actually, there was a $100 fine one time because I cut a hole in the roof during the race of Darlington to let some air in because it was too hot. but that was a $100 fine

so yeah I did pay a fine for some minimum for jaywalking essentially not any of the stuff not performance yeah so so they Bill Jr. was impressed that I'd done all of these things that they'd heard about and never his officials never caught me so he hired me and said now

do whatever you need to do. And before he hired me, I said to Bill Jr., I said, because I didn't know how things worked. I was just really a mechanic and a welder. I said, if one of the top teams comes to you and says, they need something special. And you come to me and say, you do something special for so-and-so.

I said, how does that work? He said, that will never happen. Bill France Jr. had more integrity than anybody ever gave him credit for. I didn't know it at the time. I thought there was, that guy gets that race or that guy get, I actually, you know, over time when you don't know, you start wondering. That guy was, he taught me more about how to, how to live. live life correctly. The guy just was, was an amazing guy. He was special. Unbelievable.

His brother, Jim, is same. Same way. But Bill was the dominant guy at that time in NASCAR. They are, they are doing it correctly. And I didn't know that. I just knew I was working with these officials that didn't seem to have a clue of what a car, how a car was, and we could anything we could get by them, we would get by them. That was the deal. That was the deal. and instantly I learned a lot about how the support works. Yeah. You'd work in that position from 92 to 2001. That's a long little spell.

Yeah. And so you're the constant figure in the garage. As a competitor in that garage for many years, we knew that everything went through you. You know, and so, you know, you had a big role in a lot of safety innovation, roof flaps, power steering innovation, the Gen 5 chassis, cow flaps, things like that. You played a big role in the progression and evolution of the race cars. And what is a very popular error, a lot of fans, even today, look back on that particular span of NASCAR.

car. Of course, numbers were incredible viewership, peak numbers for NASCAR in the early 2000s, but fans also loved the actual product and the cars on the racetrack. You know, you've got to be very proud of your crew chiefing career, your accomplishments as a crew chief. What does this particular part of your life? Where does that stack up? So I, my life was trophies. How do you go get another trophy. And it all changed when I went to work for NASCAR. I didn't understand it as much as I started to because, or I began to as I worked for NASCAR. Their thing is a fair race officiated correctly. Everything else will take care of itself, right? If somebody has an advantage with something, if it's legal, the others should be able to get that advantage. That's

why NASCAR different than any other series in the world, the cars are side by side in the garage. So if it's legal, it won't be long before it. Everybody gets it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the brilliance of the France family.

They just realized that if the guy is winning legally, then the other guys will figure it out and the races will be competitive. If the guy's winning illegally, then he needs to have the best officials to find it. And I was the first of that group of somebody that knew the cars looking at the cars. And wow, I learned so much, so fast about when I started to see everybody's cars inside out and talk to everybody and listen to it. How fun was that, I guess, because, you know, as a competitor, I'm in one building looking at my race cars, and I have no, I can only look at the shell of my competitors.

I don't know what, you know, Jeff Gordon or Jimmy Johnson or those guys are doing to the rear ends or the front ends of their cars, but I can't see it, right? Now you're able to basically go and look at any car at any time, to a point in an organized space. what was that like all of a sudden? That was weird. Yeah.

Very weird because I'd spent my life trying to hide what I was doing. Did you have like a sense of guilt at first? Yeah, definitely. Like looking at their cars. And these are my friends. I'd made friends with pretty much all the main people that were in the garage. And I did not want to give them bad news. But what did you do when you had to get to?

Yeah. What did you do? I mean, so when somebody has something wrong in their car, how did you handle the situation? Like this. How did you handle this situation? The only way, the only thing I could come up with was to try my best to convince everybody, don't do something illegal because you will get caught. Yeah.

And Bill France Jr. was pushing so hard for us to make examples of somebody that blatantly broke the roads. Right. And I didn't know enough, if I had it to do over, yeah, people would have got suspended a lot for a lot of things that we find them for, or we told them stop doing. Actually, I don't remember telling somebody to stop doing something unless, you know, if it was between the lines and the rule book, hey, we're writing a new rule to stop that,

so you need to stop it. But that was so weird. I wasn't comfortable in that role at all. I enjoyed things like the rookie meetings. You were a rookie. I enjoyed talking with you, the young guys, about how to make it in this sport. I can tell you a good story about you. Yeah.

Oh, great. Let's go. It involves your dad. All right. And you. Oh, yeah. So in the control tower, in NASCAR, at Bristol, you can see. I remember this.

Yeah. You can see everything from a different, you know, from the ground, you see cars like this. But from above, you see them. more you can move so Dale goes you're you're behind your dad maybe one or two cars Dale goes into the turn and hits Elliott Sadler saddler spins and you have nowhere to go and you hit him yeah but you're not damaged your car's not that bad but it is ruined your day pretty much and I'm watching and your dad's I think he's lapping you yep and you just turn at the start finish line right into his door and then

went on. It went on. And so the next race was Texas. And the rookie meetings, you're going to be in a rookie meeting. And I knew I was going to talk to you about that. And I said, Dale, did you hit him on purpose in the door at Bristol? He says, damn right, I hit him. He pissed me off. Right? I said, Dale, that's your dad out of the car, in the car. You're a rookie. And he's a, and he's a, I think you were the six-time champion or seven-time champion. A rookie does not run into a six- or seven-time champion just because he pissed you off. You have to respect what he's accomplished, him and anybody else on the track. And you know what happened that weekend?

Well, he ended up winning a race. You won your first race. And you know what your dad said to me? Same thing Richard Petty said about Kyle. he said somebody needed to straighten that some of a bitch out

and I'm glad you did it yeah so he he did his arm around the neck where about breaks I think my neck still sore

from that day but yeah I don't know how I end up in the role of talking to these young guys like yourself

at that time but I'm proud of those things but mostly in NASCAR, I'm proud of the safety side to what we did. I remember, you know, I remember when you were, and I'm speaking in kind of layman's terms because this is how I kind of viewed the sport, but I remember when you became like the head official, I liked it, you know, because I knew that you knew what you were looking for. I knew that you would, when you saw something, you'd know what it was.

Right. And as a competitor, you want the garage to be policed. and I knew that you would do a great job at that. But to your point, over the years, your focus and NASCAR's focus became more about safety and a quicker, more rapid evolution towards safety. And I did, you know, we started having these meetings in Daytona for the drivers during testing. You know, and you were always involved in. Always there. And which were new and informative.

and drove home the seriousness that we needed to have for our own safety and what our cars look like. So I brought a list. Yeah. It's not a good list. Yeah. It's 10 drivers that lost their life driving NASCAR cars from 1991 to 2001. Yeah. Grand Ad Cox, J.D. McDuffie, John Nimichick, Rodney Orr, Neil Bonnet, Clifford Allison, Adam Petty,

Kenny Irwin, Tony Roper, Dale Earnhardt. So 91 to 2001, I'm the, it's my watch. Yeah. Right. I knew them all, friends with them all, had conversations with them about, don't do it that way anymore, you know, try to steer their careers. Rodney Orr, for instance, it was 10 minutes. minutes after I had a conversation with him that he died in practice at Daytona.

Neil Bonner, a great friend, Clifford Allison, probably talked to him an hour before it. And then I went to the car, almost most of these, I was at the car, at the accident scene. That leaves scars that don't go away. So what we did in those days, and it's on me because we built the cars within our community, we raced the cars within our community, we wrecked the cars, and we built them better,

all within the NASCAR community. I thought there was nobody outside that knew more about this sport than us. When we got to Adam Petty's crash at Loudoun, we started talking, and I said, okay, well, let me get my group together. We had people in the industry, Mike Loughlin, Steve Meal,

logical thinking people that I had that I knew would be straight shooters. And we'd go look at the wrecked car. You came to the NASCAR Center and saw your dad's car, right? So we would bring people in. But when you came, you brought Steve Mill. Or I'd asked Steve to come, and I think you asked for him. you asked him if you could come along. So going through all that, knowing that I was a director.

It was people, not only my friends, but I was in charge of the rulebook as well. I had an engineer working for me named Steve Peterson. Oh, yeah. And Steve was a great guy. He's the one that pulled me aside and said, we need outside help. and so that's those meetings you're talking about we brought in john melvin from he was a GM engineer but he was really a safety engineer and and uh john starts talking about restraint systems and and hans devices and seats and most of these names i read off were basal skull fractures that's where your body

stops and your head goes forward and it breaks the base of your skull. I learned a lot of things I didn't really want to learn in that period of time, but in the end, going outside of our community for help, that was the biggest step that I think has brought us to where we are today. So when your dad's accident happened at Daytona, we were on our way with John Melvin on restraints, and we were on our way with Dean's, we brought in Dean Sicking. We got a hold of him through Tony George at Indianapolis. They were trying to do a soft wall project.

And they had hired the University of Maraska to do a study on it. We joined that study. So we had the restraint system started with John, and we had started on the soft wall study. And then your dad's accident happened, and we had to investigate that one along with the other ones, but we had the most data on your dad's accident. And we would start in a regular basis within the NASCAR group and also those three guys, John Melvin, Dean Sicking and Jim Ratton, engineer, all of them, biomechanical engineers.

All, you know, bio means he understands the human body, a mechanical means he understands the mechanical side of them, all PhDs, great guys, and we're up in, we're having a meeting to look at what, I mean, the outcry after your dad's, accident after Tony Roper, Cranny Irwin, and Adam Petty also all in a short time frame, was I got letters like crazy being the director of everybody's idea under the sun of how to fix it, how to fix the problem. I bet you 90% of them were about the bumpers on the car, maybe more than 90. So I'm faced with

we have a limited time. We're racing every week and we don't have a huge budget but we got to fix, we got to do something to make this sport safer. And so we took, we were investigating things and

learning these guys from the outside with their way of investigating things. They open our eyes into what to actually look for and see things that we hadn't seen, the seatbelt broke in your dad's car. And we learned that when the fabric is stretched too far, it actually melts in little. Each thread has a little melted spot, which tells us it was a tear, not just stretched to death. So I asked the guys, I said,

I've got this list of hundreds of things that people are suggesting. I got to get to most gain the quickest. What do I work on? What does NASCAR work on first to make this sports safer? And the three of them, one's a barrier guy, one's a seatbelt guy, and Jim Radden was an Air Force surgeon that was also in charge of ejection seats on fighter jets. So the things the Air Force had gone through trying to make a pilot safe as he's ejecting were very similar to what we were going through. So they said, the three of them said, we're going to go away for dinner.

We'll meet you tomorrow. We'll give you our thoughts. They came back the next day and they said, let's look at it like a pie, safety pie. the biggest part of safety is going to be 65% of your work should be on restraint systems. You should restrain the driver in the car. Your dad always thought he wanted stretch in his belts. He wanted to move around. He had this system that he and I had talked about it quite a bit,

especially when you started driving. He called me over and started telling me ideas because he was more worried about you than himself. And but his logic was that the belt should stretch and he should move around and he should he shouldn't be held tight, which is opposite of what these engineers are telling it. 65% is the hold of safety is to hold the driver tightly in the car. Yes. The seat's got much better. The belts got much better.

We did studies and found there's a company called SFI. at the time they were giving, if you sent a set of seatbelts to SFI, you would send a set of strength numbers. They would test the belts you sent them to the number you sent them and say, yeah, they passed. Here's your sticker, SFI approved. They asked me what they could do different. And I said, number one, you go buy it from the parts store like a racer buys it.

number two you test it to the standards will give you to make sure it passes that standard and number three you cause them to you have periodic retesting to make sure they don't slip on their quality yeah when we did that sFI changed their their way of doing business and that's exactly what so we did the study we gave them all the information all the All of that became SFI, which is now the leader. The standard. Yeah. You know when you buy something that says SFI, it's correct.

In those days, not so much. Yeah. So we went, 65% was restraints. 25% was the wall. What you hit should give a little bit, should move a little bit. And you'll lower the G-force, the driver feels, by 25% if what he hits. moves. And that left 10% for the whole rest of the car. That includes fire, intrusion, bumpers, everything is only 10% of all of those letters I had from all of the so-called experts

went to the side and we went right to work on the first two the most. And so we developed the safer wall. I think we crashed, I think it was 20 some cars without a driver. into a wall at a hundred and some miles an hour. I think it was a hundred and twenty or thirty. We, the worst crash of all the drivers was Adam Petty's.

The hardest, when we studied the information, so that was the crash data we used to simulate, the angle and the hit. And eventually we found a safer wall, as Dean Sicking and his group

found a safer wall, and we've got to, it up on all the tracks now. The way, if you think about the safer wall, you don't want a soft wall. It's like a catcher's mitt. It'll catch the car and actually be worse. Our first tests were that way.

So if you're going 200 miles an hour down the straightaway at Pocono, and you move over and you touch the wall, did you hit the wall at 200 miles an hour? your speed into the wall might have been two miles an hour. Right. So you really, the wall and the car, the difference is how hard you hit the wall,

two miles an hour, right? But you're traveling 200. A NASCAR car very seldom has a T crash into anything, maybe another car, but the car moves when you hit it. So there's not a solid hit 90 degrees in NASCAR. They're all some amount of speed down the track and some amount of speed into the wall. And so some of the, I don't remember the numbers, it's, you know, 20 some years ago,

but most of the accidents we looked at, the speed into the wall wasn't all that great. The speed down the track was almost always greater. So the wall itself has a steel cover that pushes in and doesn't catch the car. It kind of redirects the car to go on down the track. rather than stop suddenly. Now, if you watch the race of Chicago, those guys went into the tire wall, that was a 90-degree hit.

The tires are great for that. Tires aren't great for a glancing blow. So guys would hit the tire wall and bounce out and drive off. But that's 90 degrees. That speed into the wall was the speed of the car pretty much in those crashes. So it's hard.

The things I learned over that time frame was amazing, but since we've implemented all of the ideas of the restraint system, the wall, and then slowly into the car, I'm glad this is wood because we've gone 22. It was Dale's crash was February 18th, 2001. Now it's July 9th of 2024. So hope we keep it up. Things are much safer. for all of that.

You know, I'm glad we talked about this part of your life because, you know, it's allowed everybody to realize just how important that part of your life is to you. We think about you, I think often as a competitor and a crew chief and as you continued working in EMSA for years on different projects and being very successful. successful there. We often need reminders of your role as, you know, in the NASCAR organization and the, in the, in the work you did there. You know, I'd love to, we've got a lot more that we want to talk to you about. I'm going to have to get you to come back and visit us again. Probably time to go get a beer, huh? I hope you've enjoyed it. You know, I set it at the top of the show.

you know I've always had a lot of respect for you just because of what you've accomplished to be able to be successful as a competitor and a crew chief and a mechanic to shift into the organization of NASCAR and be a leader there and help the sport grow and improve you know you're right in that list of of people that really truly left a very very, very positive mark on the sport. I know that, you know, you're humble and, you know, won't take a ton of credit. But I just appreciate giving us some time coming here. I told you you'd have some fun. I had a blast talking about all of the great memories. I eat that stuff up. I love the 70s and the 80s. I love hearing the stories about how you guys accomplished all the

things you did and some of the challenges that you had to go through, it'll never be that way again. And the only way we're ever going to know about it is from stories like you guys can tell. I'm very appreciative of what you're doing, but you're kind of retired from driving and competitive, being competitive. So it's really easy for somebody like yourself with the history you have and the curiosity that you have to look back. In my case, I'm still trying to win trophies on a daily basis. I'm working every day to try to get the next trophy. I just got back from Le Mans, France, and had a terrible race there, but worked just as hard

as if we had won to race. So it's harder for me to sit down like this and talk to you about what's behind when I'm still thinking about what's forward. Yeah, I want that trophy, whatever the next. next one is. Yeah. Well, hey, we want to come, we want you to come back. I will. I hope you will, because we have literally a whole, another half of your life to talk about. You, you know, I just, you know, people can, it's easy to learn exactly what you've been able to accomplish since your time at NASCAR. It's almost like you're, you know, you've had a whole entirely another life.

if I have one thing that I think I'm good at is getting good people around me because I'm two days of high school in my whole life and before that I never I don't remember my whole life ever doing homework so I'm not the brightest guy I just like to surround myself with good people yeah well we appreciate it Gary thanks for thanks for being you thanks for coming and giving us some time this is going to be an exceptional treat for our listeners, and I know they're going to enjoy this one, so we appreciate you. Thank you very much.

I enjoyed it very much. Gary Nelson on the Dale Jr. Download. All right, everybody, that was the Gary Nelson interview, and hopefully you've listened to both parts. Just incredible. And again, we didn't even get to any of the EPSA career, which has been a very storied career for Gary, and all of the other things that he's involved in. we will absolutely get him to come back so don't worry about that but just so thankful he came in here

apprehensive but was you know transparent and thoughtful and emotional even you know you could tell how much that he still he carries a bit of responsibility for some of the tragedies and loss that we had during his time at NASCAR and he need but at the same time he he recognizes the hard work they did to get to where we are, you know, we're saved a lot of lives with some of the innovation. Just really incredible. I'm so thankful that he came and,

and sort of opened up to us the way he did. And he left the room with a smile on his face, happy and glad that he did it. That was really my biggest goal, because I knew that it was so hard to get him to come in here, and I was like, man, my goal is to make sure he comes in here and has a blast. and so he'll be eager to come back and we'll get to talking about the rest of his life and career at some point later this year hopefully so very thankful for that good job Gary Nelson we appreciate

you I hope the listeners enjoyed this one I certainly enjoyed sitting here talking to him we'll see you next week check out dirty mo media on Twitter Facebook TikTok and Instagram