(An Ol’ DC Note: you might want to grab a beer or two, a sandwich and other such provisions because the following is not a short-attention-span story.)
“Mud, blood and beer” (thanks to Shel Silverstein’s A Boy Named Sue and not a similarly named neo musical group) is how this observer tends to characterize Gary Nelson and his “stock car generation’s” contemporaries.
Nelson, team manager at Action Express Racing for the time being, is kinda toward the junior end of his generational age scale, which among its more senior members are included driving greats David Pearson, Bobby Allison, Donnie Allison and Caleb Yarborough; reciprocating-engine geniuses like Robert Yates; and, a cast of unmentioned thousands.
Though relatively young as compared to many of the others of his motorsports-racing generation, Nelson has lived and aim’s still to live a life of accomplishment.
Nelson almost exactly split his roughly 30 years in stock car racing between first being a race-car team member and, in the second half, an integral part of NASCAR’s administrative team.
From floor-sweeping to heading teams, sometimes at the same time, Nelson’s posted some notable achievements: 1982 and 1986 Daytona 500 wins; winning at least once at every NASCAR track then scheduled; and, oversaw 1983 NASCAR Sprint (Winston) Cup champion Bobby Allison and, on the sportscar side, led Brumos Racing to its most recent Rolex 24 At Daytona overall win (2009) and, in what likely was the dark-horse racing win of the decade, Action Express Racing’s 2010 Rolex 24 victory.
If size be a requisite for topmost accomplishment, Nelson’s done that, too, in NASCAR’s Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C., which opened in 2003.
Built across the street from the Concord (N.C.) Regional Airport, when new the facility’s 61,000 square feet dwarfed its nearby neighbors -- after going awry was a simple-enough purchase of a partially developed but financially stressed 16-acre site.
Initially having an unfinished edifice, Nelson believed it could be converted to NASCAR’s needs but company architects nixed that idea and decreed the existing steel structure worthless, subsequently ordering its removal and whereupon Nelson proceeded to turn some of the resulting scrap metal into a crash-test sled, among other “recycled” things still being used.
The mere mention of the R&D Center, today, and often integral to sentences such as, “Your car has been impounded and you’re instructed to take it to …”, often spooks drivers, team managers and team owners across four NASCAR series, including Grand-Am.
In Nelson’s racing life, among that competing for top honors in Nelson’s most “unusual” category is the 1985 Pepsi Firecracker 400, for which he was crew chief of a plain-Jane No. 10 Chevrolet devoid of sponsorship.
Like the bettor who would’ve scored a cool $50k on a $100 bet had Virginia Commonwealth advanced to and won the recent NCAA basketball championship (in which UConn beat Butler) someone would’ve scored big, too, had they possessed the temerity to place a wager on Nelson’s car, with driver Greg Sacks at the wheel, to win that 1985 race, so improbable was such seen beforehand.
“We even had to borrow the pit crew from other teams (while the race was underway),” Nelson recalled.
Steadfastly claiming to be at Daytona International Speedway only for the purposes of “data collection,” the plan was to head home after a first full fuel load had run its course.
However, the car ran so strongly among the leaders that team co-owner Bill Gardner (the “Gard” part of DiGard Racing; fellow co-owner Mike DiProspero being the “Di”) made a mid-race call to keep it on the track.
The repercussions of that call, along with Sacks’ eventual win, would trigger a ripple effect that lasted for the remainder of the ’85 season and perhaps even Di-Gard’s bankruptcy the following year because lead DiGard driver Bobby Allison, who’d won the championship just two seasons previous in 1983, was driving a Buick.
Allison didn’t see the Chevrolet as anything but an abdication of the team’s commitment to Buick, even though Chevrolet was and still is a part of the same parent company, General Motors.
Others saw Bobby Allison’s ire as being little more than sour grapes after a veritable pick-up shined a bit brighter than did he.
No matter: Two weeks later Allison moved on; Sacks went from an all-but-broke, off-the-radar driver to fulfilling Allison’s remaining 1985 driving duties with a top-rated team.
By the end of 1986, though, DiGard was gone and Nelson was all over the job boards in the following years, even being among the groundbreaking first of TV’s “insider” race commentators before taking the NASCAR “technical director” job.
In racing, an ability to “scramble” is a favorable attribute for any participant, whether on the track battling for position or collecting a paycheck with one team one week and yet another paycheck at another team a following week.
It is a world in which diffidence reigns, real certainty often only comes when a checkered flag falls or a paycheck clears – which then starts the cycle anew.
Having faced his fair share of uncertainty, Nelson sees “scrambling” as something to be defeated as much as any opponent on the track and characterizes it with five syllables: “Wasted resources,” Nelson says.
As would “Professor Roy Hinkley” (Russell Johnson) while on “Gilligan’s Island,” Nelson takes great joy in accomplishing much with very little, usually precipitated with a brainstorm.
“I’ve been working in racing since 1969 and I haven’t seen perfection, yet,” Nelson said.
“There’s always more to be done. You can get all the poles and win every race but then you’d still be looking at ‘did we have the best pit stop’ and ‘how can we improve that?’”
The four-wheeled, motorsports-wide carryall “war wagon” found in your favorite pit box came into existence as a result of Nelson once sending a crewmember on a 10-minute, mid-race errand for a replacement drive-shaft.
“He didn’t have to go to the parts store; just the hauler. I figured it out and he ran something like one mile, round trip. I just figured there had to be a better way,” Nelson said.
Ultimately, Radio Flyer wagons (yep) years later came out on the short end of that deal after Nelson’s idea became de rigueur – though more so by the hand of Ernie Irvan’s father, Vic, than Nelson – because up until then the “Little Red Wagon” was a NASCAR garage-to-pits-and-back transport mainstay.
In a following war-wagon developmental brainstorm, Nelson added a seat so he’d “have someplace to sit during the race and see the pit stops better.”
According to some, it was Nelson’s practical side which caused NASCAR to take notice and put him to work.
“When Bill France and I first talked about coming to NASCAR, he said, ‘We need some help in the technical inspection side, come on over for a year and see if you like it,’” Nelson recalled.
Held responsible while a crew chief for some if not most of NASCAR’s most famous (or infamous) “technical innovations” (Darrel Waltrip’s Daytona 500 fall-a-way bumper being among this author’s favorites) many in the racing community believe NASCAR was simply resigned to hiring Nelson as the best, simplest and least expensive means to keep him in check.
Mention those supposed innovations today, or even speculate as to the reason behind his switch from being behind a pit wall to lording over its entire length, and Nelson, with twinkling eyes set over a broad smile, will say only “no comment.”
Not long afterward named “Cup Director, Nelson began examining everything that had anything to do with an on-track wreck, including personal inspections of accident sites and whatever remained in the metal-twisting aftermath, even having an accident’s inert remains, video footage and any other “evidence,” bundled and shipped to a site – eventually the NASCAR R&D Center –so as to minutely dissect cause and effect.
“I was on a mission,” Nelson said.
“I’d just seen too many people I know tore up in the years I’ve been around racing. I felt there were things we could do from our standpoint to help protect them better.”
Though Nelson can point to many individual driver safety improvements as having originated in NASCAR’s shops – the implementation of which many times crossed into other racing series – they later were wrapped into a single package that came to be known as NASCAR’s “Car Of Tomorrow.”
A name which probably too neatly characterized the project, Nelson didn’t particularly favor “COT,” but another catchy title wasn’t immediately available and it stuck.
Like it or not – and many clearly didn’t – the COT project, whether piecemeal or wholly, nonetheless achieved its primary purpose: Since Dale Earnhardt’s death in February 2001 at the season-opening Daytona 500, no fatalities have been recorded in NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide or Craftsman Truck series competitions.
“Accidents can’t be prevented and they are a big part of racing,” Nelson said. “But deaths and serious injuries as a result of those accidents is another deal altogether.”
Time and again, Nelson would face one challenge, conquer it and turn to another arising from the first.
“No one project really ended because there was always an overlap from one project to the next and that's the way I like things,” Nelson said.
“Fixing problems kept my brain working and, before I knew it, fifteen years had gone by – with no contract, mind you, just a verbal agreement between Bill and me for my work at NASCAR.
“One day I just looked at it all – kind of like taking a look in a rearview mirror at all the stuff you passed – and it was just time for me to be on my own.
“For as long as I could remember all I wanted to do was work for myself. I'd never done that. I didn't want a complicated career, like owning a car or a team; I just wanted to be in racing somehow. And that's where the consultant idea kicked in.
“After pretty well finishing up the Car of Tomorrow we were just getting started on the engine of tomorrow (presently used in NASCAR's weekly and regional series racing; supplied by Nelson) so I took the COT through the summer (his final months at NASCAR) and took on the engine program in my consulting practice.
“Brian (France) and I talked about it and first thing you know NASCAR was my first customer. But I've got others, one of which is Brumos Racing,” Nelson said.
In the summer of 2006 – at the same time Nelson was winding down his NASCAR day job and ramping up his consulting practice, Brumos Racing was approaching another season’s end still absent of a Rolex Sports Car Series Daytona Prototype win – a dubious record stretching to Sep. 21, 2003, at Mont Tremblant, Quebec (David Donohue, Mike Borkowski; “Red Bull” No. 58 Porsche-FABCAR).
Facing a 2007 season with near dread after failing a full-on, two-year attempt at fixing what ailed it – including a fall 2005 evaluation of a complete Fabcar FDSC/03 at Porsche’s Weissach, Germany, facility – failed to return Brumos Racing to the winner’s circle for the first time since the 2003 12-race DP season, during which its four drivers, Borkowski and Donohue, in the No. 58 Red Bull, along with J.C. France and Hurley Haywood, in the No. 59 “Brumos,” claimed a combined five wins (three and two, respectively) in the inaugural season’s 12 races.
(NOTE: Before certain naysayers regularly disposed of denigrating the Rolex Series’ DP commence yapping about the degree to which drivers participated in that series at the time: More drivers (six) competed in all 12 of the Rolex Series’ 2003 DP races than did the number of drivers (five) competing in nine 2010 ALMS LMP races. Just for the heck of it: total 2003 DP drivers vs. total ALMS’ 2010 LMP drivers = 44 to 25, respectively.)
Having made a gut-wrenching midseason-2006 decision to change from its near-iconic Fabcar to a, well, now-iconic Riley Mk XI, Donohue and co-driver Darren Law (replaced Borkowski beginning in 2004) introduced Brumos’ first Porsche-Riley chassis (No. 029) on July 30, 2006, at Barber Motorsports Park.
A second Riley Mk XI (No. 030) followed at Infineon Raceway on Aug. 30, 2006, replacing Hurley Haywood and J.C. France’s No. 59 Brumos-liveried Porsche-Fabcar (FDSC/06) – the pair having scored the series’ historic March 2003 first-overall DP win in a Fabcar FDSC/01 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Despite great expectations, the late-2006 Fabcar-to-Riley change produced only moderate gains in race results. Brumos Racing’s Donohue and Law scored only a team best sixth-place effort at the Aug. 11 Crown Royal 200 sprint race at Watkins Glen International; the two-car team combining for an almost confirming 13th-place average finish.
The race-car exchange (Fabcar to Riley) having only moderately improved the team’s results, Brumos Racing’s great, late leader Bob Snodgrass in the fall of 2006 sought the input of Nelson – who by then had departed NASCAR and established his North Carolina-based racing consultancy, Nelson and Associates.
“In the fall I started checking out different things and first thing I know I was talking with the Brumos folks to be an advisor and help them,” Nelson said. “But I wouldn't commit to anything long term until I had a chance to see where they were at.”
“I went to the Homestead test in December and I liked those guys. I already knew the Grand-Am officials and so I just felt like I was at home between the both of them.”.
Of course, only Snodgrass would know for sure whether he believed or wondered whether Nelson would be the deciding aspect in the team winning the 2009 Rolex 24 At Daytona (No. 58 Brumos Racing Porsche-Riley; Donohue, Law, Antonio Garcia and Buddy Rice) and, the team having mostly morphed into Action Express Racing, the following year’s race, as well (No. 9 Action Express Racing Porsche Cayenne V8-Riley; Joao Barbosa, Terry Borcheller, Mike Rockenfeller, Ryan Dalziel).
“Most of the talent was already there,” Nelson said, “and I believed we’d eventually do good after we ironed out some of the wrinkles but I would’ve never imagined what we faced in 2009 and 2010.”
So convincing were those 2009 and 2010 Daytona ‘round-the-clock wins that the cars’ across-the-board results produced record-book statistical assaults of such quality that the two Nelson-led Rolex 24 victories now occupy top-5 spots (third and fifth) in the history books.
Unfortunately, the teams’ “highs” didn’t last and the first-place Rolex Series DP championship points standings for each wouldn’t last for essentially opposite reasons.
Unwinding as their respective seasons advanced, in 2009 the No. 59 Brumos Racing Porsche-Riley of Donohue and Law was dismantled by Grand-Am officials almost as would Josef Mengele a dental patient – methodically, excruciatingly.
From engine revs and added weight to transmission gears, the Porsche flat-six and, thus, Brumos’ Donohue and Law were throttled right out of what likely would’ve been a championship run.
While Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix (y José) Sabates’ No. 01 TELMEX BMW-Riley has made winning look easy, very few ordinarily reach a championship-capable level of performance so the 2009 situation was especially frustrating for Donohue and Law.
“Other than complain, there’s nothing I can do about what they (Grand-Am) do so there’s no point in talking about that one (2009), but it was tough. It is what it is,” Nelson said in resignation.
To the extent 2009 went wrong through external factors, 2010’s Action Express Racing’s post-Rolex 24 victory fall-off for Joao Barbosa, Terry Borcheller, Rocky Rockenfeller and Ryan Dalziel’s was an” inside job,” noted Nelson.
“In 2010 it just seemed like we couldn’t catch a break for ourselves. I can’t tell you how many nights I was laying in bed trying to sleep but thinking about what or how we could do better than we were. 2010 was a big let down because we were mostly in control of our own fate and we didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“There were just too many guys in there who took the team’s operation too lightly. I don’t want to disparage them, though. It was more a matter where some of the guys had day jobs, and good ones, elsewhere. They could mess up in the pits and it wouldn’t affect their day jobs. We needed guys whose jobs depended on what they did here. The motivation is entirely different in that circumstance.”
On the heels of a10th-place finish at Watkins Glen – the fourth in five races, a string broken only by an 11th-place at New Jersey Motorsports Park – the No. 9 AER team’s hard fall from first to 13th-place in the championship, along with Donohue and Law’s No. 5 AER car’s fall to eighth (from which it’d rally to finish sixth in points with two remaining races), Nelson knew the two-car operation was likely to experience little beyond fading hopes for 2010.
With the 2011 season on the horizon Nelson started building toward it, trying to fit together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle pieces and personnel here and there as though completing a jigsaw puzzle.
For two of those pieces, Nelson reached into the NASCAR ranks for Iain Watt and Elton Sawyer.
Watt was easy: he took the FABCAR-turned-Coyote and started a body changing massage that corrected some deficiencies and made it a car in which Christian Fittipaldi could and did briefly challenge the No. 99 GAINSCO Chevrolet-Riley in that team’s 2007 championship run. Unfortunately for Cheever Racing and Fittipaldi, Gillett Evernham Motorsports learned of Watt’s talents and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
As Gillett Evernham started morphing by name and melting down otherwise, Watt exited and after a couple of jobs in NASCAR Sprint Cup, including crew chief for Robby Gordon, Nelson snatched the Scotsman at the end of 2010, the net effect having a positive impact on the team.
The next to come on board in the off-season was NASCAR veteran Elton Sawyer.
Although the native Virginian competed in both Nationwide (in which he won) and Sprint Cup series, Nelson sees Sawyer as a likely successor on the pit box.
“First of all, my role here is not to be a general manager,” Nelson said.
“My role is a consultant. My goal is to find and fix a problem and then move on to the next project. I suppose, in a manner of speaking, my primary job is not to have one job at one place forever. I need to keep thinking and challenging myself with new situations.
“Well, when I get to that point with Action Express I just can’t leave them in a vacuum. And that’s where Elton will hopefully come in.
“I was impressed with what he did to get Red Bull’s NASCAR operation started. He did a heckuva job in developing the team’s structure and business plan, getting that team off the ground on solid footing that’s paid of for them. When I heard he was available I couldn’t pass up the chance to see how he’d work out over here.”
“My goal is to make this into a great racing team.”
Though a third-consecutive Rolex 24 At Daytona win wasn’t in the cards for Nelson this year, AER’s two Porsche Cayenne V8-powered Rileys nevertheless scored a third-place podium finish with Barbosa, Borcheller, France, Christian Fittipaldi and Max Papis.
The No 5 AER team of Donohue, Borcheller, Buddy Rice and Burt Frisselle, which ran in the top-5 running order through much of the race, finished ninth.
At Homestead-Miami Speedway the two AER cars followed with second (No. 5, Donohue, Law) and fifth-place (No. 9, Barbosa, Borcheller, France) finishes.
After having driven their No. 01 TELMEX BMW-Riley to consecutive firsts, the familiar faces of Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas currently occupy the topmost position on the Rolex Series’ DP championship scoring pylon.
Beneath numero uno, however, are seven drivers occupying a tight second and third-place points fight - five of those drivers wearing the Action Express colors (the other two being Ricky Taylor and Max Angelelli of SunTrust Racing).
“We were a little disappointed that we were one spot farther back than where we thought we should’ve been with the (No. 5, Donohue, Law) car and thought the No. 9, Barbosa, Borcheller and France) car would’ve finished higher, too, but it’d come from a lap down earlier in the race after being penalized for running over an air hose.”
At the Homestead-Miami Speedway and in the wake of that penalty, Nelson was asked for his thoughts, during the expression of which he didn’t indicate any negative behavior.
Nelson didn’t direct anger at the air hose, the guy who handled it, the Grand-Am official who saw the infraction nor the person in the control tower handing down the penalty.
Surprised at Nelson’s lack of negativity or, more so, his refusal to initiate play of the ever popular “Blame Game,” the questioner inquired as to why.
“We wrote a mission statement for this team, we’ve got places where everyone sees it every day, and the last line says, ‘We will have a positive working environment that promotes teamwork, innovation and continuous improvement,’” Nelson read from the statement itself, adding, “and ‘continuous improvement’ is underlined.”
“That mistake with the air hose at Homestead is a part of this team’s building process.”
“The foundation here is solid, the walls are up and strong, we’re at the point where the rafters are going in and the team’s trend line is upward.”
DC’s bold prediction: if the TELMEX team is to be displaced this year, it’ll be Action Express Racing which does it.
Later,
DC
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