A TEENAGER AGAIN

THE READER'S FILE

ON THE WAGON

Q. DC, can you try to get some info on the Childress Howard/Crawford status? We need them back! - Former Gentleman Jack Drinker.

Dear Gen. Jack, Retired,

Thanks for asking!

After a number of conversations with various involved parties, the bottom line is that Richard Childress Racing's NASCAR-side loss of Brown-Forman Corporation's Jack Daniels brand brought with it a corresponding loss of the Gentleman Jack brand on the Rolex Series side - though one isn't certain if one program's loss was directly connected with the other because Brown-Forman omitted telling anyone of the latter, at least publicly so.

Still living large (as, say, compared to the average earthquake survivor) despite Brown-Forman's loss, Mr. Childress shouldn't be faulted for having years ago mastered race team ownership's First Principle: "Have someone else pay the bills."

Sadly, it's a lesson Max and Jan Crawford somehow must have largely missed in Racing 101, or entirely disregarded it, bless their pea-picking hearts. However, such is understandable because sportscar racing types like the Crawford family generally tend toward the "romantic" side of racing. Indeed, Max supposedly still wears goggles and a flowing wool scarf when he drives his '63 Austin Healey 3000 MK2 - only with the top down - which he reportedly years ago acquired in an even-up trade for a McLaren F1 supercar.

"I like my hair to flow in the breeze and you just can't do that in the McLaren, however fast, because of the #$@*&+$*%! center-positioned driver's seat," Max Crawford didn't really say because, even though a sportscar racing enthusiast, he likely didn't have the "mad" money to splurge on a McLaren - though I'll bet a dime to a quarter he'd love to have one (actually, wouldn't everyone?)(but if everybody had one, there wouldn't be a love song … or something like that).

The above embellishments actually being slightly off the real-world mark, one thing remains true: the Crawfords ardently love sportscar racing but were facing some hard choices when word in mid-summer 2009 started filtering through the oak barrel staves that Louisville, Kentucky's Brown-Forman, one of the largest American-owned companies in the wine and spirits business, was "reconsidering its connections with automobile racing."

Hope nonetheless sprang eternal that Jack Daniel's sister liquor (nope, not gonna even touch it) silver-on-black paint scheme would still cover the Rick Howard and Richard Childress' Crawford DP (it did look cool) in 2010. Hope started fading fast by the season's next-to-last race at Salt Lake City when a Crawford family member said that lead driver Andy Wallace (near left) – spouse of engineer Katherine Wallace (middle left), son-in-law of Crawford Composites principals Max and Jan Crawford - was told "the family didn't wish to stand in his way should he desire to drive elsewhere."

When talking about a driver with Wallace's résumé, it isn't difficult to imagine a loving family was merely signaling its willingness to allow a race-proven, race-winning and championship driver the opportunity to again stretch winning legs with a team of similar immediate capability - in response to which Wallace said something very British, very loyal and stayed put so as to help develop a Crawford DP that actually started to show potential.

During the 2009 season the second-generation Crawford DP08 improved quantitatively over its first 2008 on-track foray in the Sahlen's Six Hours Of The Glen at Watkins Glen International, where it wore the No. 23 of Ruby Tuesday, was fielded by Alex Job Racing but, as if to serve notice on troubles to come, was unceremoniously DQ'd from its first-ever qualification run (whereupon Alex Job took on the appearance of a whirring, whirling, spark-spewing, whistling and popping fireworks display - only Job did it nonstop for, like, days. One now knows officials are issued fuse stocks and the means by which to alight all - sometimes simultaneously).

The DP08's inability at the time to plant the front end and stick to the road when not turning was its initial Achilles Heel and, combined with timing (such being "everything"), AJR was at a point where its sponsor, already besieged with bad economic news, was looking for a lot of good news to justify a contract renewal.

"Good news" is most often equated only with "win" - especially by sponsors - but something rarely seen in a brand-spanking-new prototype racer and especially one coming from a quintessential "mom and pop" operation. While racing folks can be "good people" like the Crawfords, a David-and-Goliath comparison is grossly insufficient when describing the monetary disparity between "a little guy" and a multi-billion-dollar automobile manufacturer whose $1 million testing program leaves at least another $999 million to blow elsewhere.

After little under a year's development, in late 1964 Ford's GT40 program had yet to accomplish that sought through an evolution of Englishman Eric Broadley's original 1963 Lola Mk 6. Ford then handed the project's reins to Carroll Shelby, for the most part shipping the program lock, stock and barrel across the Atlantic Ocean (and the Continental U.S.) to Shelby American. One of two entries driven by a now-legendary driving pair named Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby, the Ford GT40 on Feb. 25, 1965, would win its first classic endurance race (12:27:09; 1,243.37 miles) by five laps at Daytona International Speedway.

Meanwhile, Harley Cunningham's private-entry Lotus-Ford Cortina driven by Buck Baker (yep, that Baker family) and Bob Tullius (yep, that Tullius family) finished 31st as one of eight cars competing in the same class as the Ford GT40s.

By the 1966 LeMans, the Ford GT40 program would itself become legendary with a 1-2-3 finish - with still more races to win in GT40 iterations and derivations - but nonetheless is illustrative of a factory's power of wealth, from a program's beginning to its end. “Harley Cunningham” left very few subsequent racing clues.

The Little Guy "manufacturer" often can only additionally lean on a sportscar Patron Saint of the Rob Dyson Order, who quite possibly is the single greatest reason behind the World Sports Car concept getting off the ground. Dyson personally commissioned the kick-butt Riley & Scott MkIII in 1994 and with which Dyson Racing later (1997, 1999) would leave its considerable mark on the Rolex 24 At Daytona. In another instance, Bill Riley once said, "On the Thursday before the Monday we were set to close the doors for good" Chip Ganassi delivered a check which kept the doors open and enabled the building of the first two Daytona Prototypes (No. 001; for the last couple of seasons racing and winning at AIM Autosport).

The Bill Riley or Max Crawford shops would otherwise close its doors; GM and Chrysler get loans from you, me and the rest of the U.S. taxpayer base.

  All but out of time with its new Crawford DP08 by mid-summer 2008, AJR traded it for a Riley (right, and well, kinda, sorta inasmuch as Job actually leased the Riley). Talented drivers Bill Auberlen (right, below) and Joey Hand (left) did their best, going on to score two top-5 and four top-10 finishes in the season's final four races, but the hour-glass sand vanished as did Ruby Tuesday from AJR.

Likewise, when the sand ran out on Jack Daniel’s NASCAR program it likewise affected the Gentleman Jack even though neither Childress or Crawford really had much to do with the sponsorship's demise - Brown-Forman evidently changing a course undertaken only years before when somebody said something about a NASCAR Sprint Cup race happening at a track at which apparently it was never penciled-in on any of NASCAR's corporate calendars.

Well then, what's happening in 2010 for the Crawford DP08?

Let's put it this way: to get a decent-length post it was necessary to first do some space-filling (above).

Still, by now it's probably become obvious the Jan. 30-31 Rolex 24 At Daytona won't include a Crawford DP08 (though a late DP03 entry-or-two is likely) none of the parties with whom I spoke off the record would definitively state where or the extent to which the car would compete in 2010, but nonetheless stated "it will race at a few tracks." This writer's sense is that it'll run at VIR in April, if nothing else but for that track's proximity to the car's North Carolina base.

Committed to Crawford Composite's continued development of and involvement in the Rolex Sports Car Series - if not in the ownership of the Childress-Howard DP08 - Jan Crawford last week carefully stated, "We are going to do all that's required of us in continuing the development of the Daytona Prototype concept and to continue our partnership with Grand-Am even during these difficult times because it's a concept and organization in which we deeply believe. Max and I already are hard at work on 2011."

TRANSPARENT LAUGH

Q. I've been reading quite a few of your columns over the last hour or so and the teenage girl-style bitchiness about ALMS is very amusing. I hope you've written this in an intentionally amusing manner and don't genuinely believe what you write, though I've a feeling you were probably foaming at the mouth at the time. - Laughable.

Dear Laugh,

Finally catching up on the reading are you, Rob, after the Obama campaign? Still, thanks for reading!

Funny, but your comment sounds eerily repetitious of what Grand-Am's Mark Raffauf said to me last fall, save substitution of "Rolex Series" for "ALMS." However, Raffauf wouldn't put me and "teenage" in the same sentence because he knows I'm older than Job. Furthermore, Raffauf has the temerity to go eye-to-eye with whomever, wherever, so I absolutely, positively and personally know when he's got a beef with me. Still, and though we've at times strenuously disagreed, it's Raffauf's sense for straight talk, often in monosyllabic but appropriately timed grunts, which underlies my considerable respect for him - even though he's wrong most of the time. However, the most significant non-Raffauf coup de grâce arising above is that he wouldn't use "amusing" - a concept so removed from his grasp that even a "happy pill" stands no chance in prompting even so much as a grin from within today's best Fu Manchu.

GRAND-AM COMPETITION BULLETIN WATCH

Yep, veritably days before the Jan. 30-31 Rolex 24 At Daytona, out rolls Grand-Am's first 2010 Competitor Bulletin. You know what "they" say (don't ask me; everyone says "they say," so everyone must know "who says," right?): “Once the seal's been broken the floodgates open!”

SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

Still pretty funky.

(Um, Kevin, I’ll be needing some more Adobe Road 2005 Heritage. You were right, it’s very good and you have good reason to be proud of it. However, my better half has really enjoyed the Adobe Road 2006 Pinot Noir – it’s in one of the coolest bottles I’ve ever seen. Oh, and whatever else “Adobe Road” you’re inclined to shoot my way. Damn good stuff, it is. P.S. DO NOT give any to Raffauf; he’s just not been terribly amusing of late. C ya Bud!)

Later,

DC