Lake Speed’s Perspective on Recognizing Unproven Talent: How Did He Find So Many Future Standouts?

being an underdog is a real motivator daryl walsh had asked me one time he said how in the world do you run as good as you run with no more money than you have a lot of them it was first chance a lot of the guys that came through had never had an opportunity to work in nascar i've seen people thought they were mechanics and you know you go right over there and do something so stupid anybody would know better to do that we got to see the cartoon network fire suit behind you if we don't show there's going to be a bunch of comments saying i think that's a cartoon network suit on the wall oh yeah we're out here at gopro motorplex with lake speed and lake speed junior again and we got kind of a follow-up questions on some of the guys that used to work for blake because they all i mean a lot of them went on to do really significant things and we were talking we're like this has to be elaborated on because this doesn't just happen by accident we kind of the hall of fame crew chief school was went through lake speed inc or melling or wherever you were driving managing you know been a lot of people a lot of good people the list it had started off people that were instrumental in my nascar career daryl derringer was a retired race car driver stock car driver he kind of adopted me when i first showed up uh first time on the scene to charlotte he picked me up the airport and took me and showed me all around and uh you know i told him i said you know i don't know about this going in circle stuff i just i've never done that and he said well we're gonna go to a race and we'll let you watch and see what's going on and set the other so we we went and watched the race up in martinsville and sure enough that i was looking at it and said you know it didn't look like there's maybe a half a dozen those guys know how to drive because they're all over the racetrack and uh he said i think you're gonna find this a lot harder than it looks and uh sure enough uh they worked out a deal for me to go test the car at rockingham uh back in november i think it was that year october november went down there and drove the car a little bit they said oh man you're doing great i didn't run hard yet and when i proceeded to run hard i crashed and tore the thing all two pieces bruised myself all up and everything i thought hmm this is harder than i thought it was gonna be and just weird the car was weird i was used to driving with these things it has no suspension you don't even see my hands move when i'm driving around the track you don't turn the steering wheel hardly any and i was thinking nothing this big thing and it's flopping around and back then this nascar cars weighed 3 800 pounds i mean they were tanks and no trick shocks or anything so they're floating flopping all over which way you know so anyway that was my outing and so i've crashed the car now now what am i going to do and said well you know you were doing good if you just hadn't wrecked there's a race coming up in atlanta here in a couple of weeks uh you want to go down and run a second car this is a dk ulrich who was doing this deal and he said put a second car together for you take it atlanta so we went to atlanta i ran in practice ran fast enough to make the race and i'm sitting up on top of a hall or 18 wheel holler watching the guys qualifying at that time buddy baker was running really good i watched him drive off and turn one he went off the corner didn't sound like he lifted out of the throttle he got halfway into the corner i thought i can do that no wonder i'm not running as fast as he is got time for me to qualify i drove in it's fun out before i got to the center of the corner because i had never cracked the throttle anyway wind up crashing down the distance right on this other track that's a track it doesn't really tell you exactly yeah i wasn't used to this tracks that big go-kart tracks not very big but anyway it really uh threw me for a curve darryl said you know i don't think you're gonna get to drive anybody else's car you're probably gonna have to get your own if you want to do this but obviously obviously you're not afraid so that's that's a good thing and uh so we bought this old used car and carried it out to drove drove barrel said okay i'll get a couple guys work for us and one of the guys that was working for dk that had seen me run practice and then go down to the racetrack and run he said i want to be part of this so he volunteered and come to work for us we left dk came workforce a couple other guys we took this old raggedy car and went out to uh ontario motor speedway at that time the last race of the year missed getting in the race by one or two spots i don't remember which but didn't get in and then they took us the next weekend they said while we're already in california there's a winston rest winston west race next weekend at phoenix we'll go there and get you some experience run with those guys okay so we get over there we're running the race and i'm running along their mid-pack i said all right daryl comes on the radio and says okay you're going to be pitting here in a minute now get ready don't don't get flustered or anything we're going to pitch you you come here get some gas and uh so about the time i'm starting to go down come down pit roads no no no stay out stay out don't come down don't guys what the heck's going on what's going on he said john the guy that we bought the car from he'd come with us john didn't buy any gas he said he didn't think you'd last this long so that was kind of my introduction to things we came back to charlotte and i finished 15th in the race i think well that was facilitated by daryl derringer uh daryl was was overseeing the team the little bitty team well i mean like i said it was like three people so he was overseeing i was still living in mississippi at the time i hadn't moved to north carolina dean anderson was the guy's name was working on the car for me then i think you know he was he's a good guy i've been around a lot stayed around for quite a while i don't know what ever happened to dean but at the end of that year we had we've finished garland i think i was either seventh or eighth i think i finished both seventh one raised in eighth the other race is a rookie down there darling was always a place i just loved and did great at uh and the following year got with roger hamby roger uh from up north wilkesboro and he's kind of had a starting park thing almost just it was a bunch of guys that just wanted to be there and be part of it whatever roger had a muffler shop and a couple of kids working high school kids working on his cars whatever that's where i met donnie disharoon donny was one of the kids there and donny was he still i think working one of these cup teams right now he grew up through it and when we started our own team later in 86 he was one of the first guys to show up and uh he was a great job one of the first members of the arc yeah the guy the original people who just showed up yeah he was a tire changer fabricator he could do anything everything he had to build motors with rogers everything he was kind of all around that was good really good so uh randall roger roger kind of ran out of junior's uh junior johnson he did work for him was he had a little construction company too on the side so he stuff for them and so we could run out of junior's throwaway parts so we'd go fast and break usually that's what happened so anyway after that year with roger uh i don't remember all the details but we put the other deal to go over to hoss ellington's deal he whoever was driving for him i think buddy with baker might have been driving foreign right before i got there and buddy got hired by one of the other teams a bigger team ran all the races and that was the number one car the uno number one car yeah yeah yes we got there and that's where i run across shelton pittman and call him run i never could call him run because i have way too much respect for that man taught me how to race stockholm i went from being a world champion go carter to learning how to really race stock cars i'd been driving and just driving and didn't know anything about the cars you know just didn't have no knowledge whatsoever and runt really taught me a lot and uh put me in cars that were fast and we almost won a bunch of races bunch of races we were close at really close at and i don't like that again every time we went to dolphin we were just heading hands down generally the best car there it was crazy shelton was great then i went from there to the raymond team which mock deal and butch was crew chief there and worked with butch you know he had successful teams and did really well all through and he was a hands-on owner he wouldn't just sitting in the office guy he was out there turning wrenches and working on the cars and worked with me a lot had had a big time with that we split up and in 86 we i've told you the story before about the uh the ark y'all call it but uh anyway daryl derringer therapy their help daryl bryant uh was one of the first guys to come they just closed down cliff stewart he'd been with cliff stewart for years and years and had won some races and ran really really well had jeff beaudine driving for him i think when they were having all their success and then after that rusty wallace went there and daryl was managing all over that running that whole program so he shows up and uh then gosh jay beard her engine builder he had been there stewart's and he came down said hey i'm following following the crowd here we would come down and he brought a guy named gail pauley that gail's one of the top engine guys in the country for all kinds of engines still does everything at one time he was doing development work for all three of the big big three general motors for all of when dodge came back didn't he have he was like the main development guy for dodge he's like one of the cylinder head manifold gurus in fact i think in the first video there was a picture in the grinding room that was gail and grinding away he's a legend yeah still he is yeah he kind of cut his teeth at in your team he came with plenty of know-how when he got there but him and him and jay worked together and did did really well you know this helped us we had stuff that would run up front you know we won one one and almost one several same the same time uh jay and gayle were there there's another guy been behind the scenes a lot his name is randy clary randy was there with us too and randy went on to he's still building engines today it went on most of the from what i'm understanding and told all the restrictor plate races that the earnhardt's won that was all randy stuff that yeah he was he was a guy over there he just did restrictor plate stuff nothing else just that and he was awesome still everybody knows everything now costs way more than it used to a few years ago and that sucks it's a good time to find ways to 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in at the business pay as usual with credit or debit card and get paid you just upload your receipt to the app you can cash out any time to your bank account paypal or an e-gift card for amazon or other brands download the free upside app and use code stapleton to get five dollars or more cash back on your first purchase of ten dollars or more also back in that same era there were the 83 car uh pit crew guys two brothers gary and walter smith that were the first pit crew coaches around they were in that picture the purex picture yeah purex picture they owned a gym in kannapolis and you know they said you know all these guys need to need to get more physically fit and do more training on it and everything so they wound up coaching teams a lot of the top teams so they were the ones that started they started with uh gary i remember those guys yeah yeah yeah didn't one of those guys they were going to hendrick and doing something like that they did stuff for just about everybody over over those years there and that kind of what brought the pro football players and everybody in too i think was short yeah beginning making the pit crew guys athletes that's a strategic thing to make yeah the races better or to have an advantage was having the faster pick crew 88 they were hitting my car when we won at darlington and you know the whole year yeah time too so and then just stayed with me and after that ruby harrington robert harrington was crew chief and he he brought some guys with him over there there some of them are still in racing michael cooper and steve and steven crow gordon gibbs just a bunch of guys that were fabricators mechanics whatever that went on did work for gordon i think wound up being a shot forming at earnhardt the uh all these guys at some place another were actually crew chiefs or crew chiefing cars or car chiefs or whatever like that with some of the top teams how many of these guys when they came to you had like hardcore experience somewhere there was a few that did most of them didn't uh like for example tony gibson tony had worked with his brother on the orchestra but he's never worked on a tough car so i mean he knew a lot about the cars but never at the level [Music] they didn't have an all-star resume but they knew how to work on a car yeah they yeah they they had to stuff it's kind of fat back mcslain i mean he'd worked on some cars and whatever but it never worked on a cut car i mean it's just different everything's different at a different level can you talk about the day you had tony gibson work for you yeah fat back work for you troy selberg worked for you um jim long peter suspension that's between the lake speed inc and the melling but right i mean all five of those guys all won races the screw chiefs yeah at the cup level not sure how many races that is total but i know it's that's a bunch yeah was it a situation where they were volunteers to work for you or did you give them that everybody got paid everybody got paid i'd like to have anybody that i can't produce enough to be you know makes making money out of the thing i didn't know if it was one of those scenarios where they came to you wanting to work or you hired them like you gave them their first chance kind of a lot of them it was first chance a lot of the guys that came through had never had an opportunity to work in nascar and they've maybe worked on some short track car done something else like that mike that big mike mike moore mike moore he was a student in college here and then he when he would get through his classes and whatever he'd come work at the shop he wound up being our jack man and when we closed our team purex went away yeah iron hearts much harder so he's jacking he went straight from my car to jack and dale earnhardt's car nothing in between my engine guy when we closed down robert yates had been trying to hire him for two years and john went over there he was a top cylinder head guy for robert yates i was blessed to have a lot of really good people that work for me are with me i tried to i never asked anybody do anything i wouldn't do myself you know i tried to be involved because of the karting background with the cart stuff i built my own motors i bought my cars i built everything i did it all by myself everything and didn't have anybody in mississippi there was no top racing going on in mississippi so i had to learn by myself and i you know i give all the credit to god i mean there is no way that i could learn there was no place to there was no books he gave me this ability to be able to look at something and understand how it works and then if you understand how it works you can try to figure out how to make it work better and all the people i mean guys dying to have these kind of people come in and come and want to work for you is like i said i i just give god all the credit there's no way that the things that happened in my life and my career could happen without it divine intervention because it just just can't happen yeah to have essentially five almost hall of fame crew chiefs just come show up at the door not a i want a job yeah that's pretty unique and each of those guys played their own role in helping keeping things going along you know a lot of times we were on life support you know oh yeah most of the 90s was that way it was almost closed down or did close down and go work for you know kale i went down and managed his team drove it then melons called me and said man we're we've missed 14 races in a row we can't even make a race we've got to have some help you weren't going there we never missed a career too but i didn't get that it didn't have much as much to do there because i mean they were established they've been doing this stuff before i was born you know so they they kind of was set in their ways is what they were going to do you know i put in my two cents worth every once in a while but it was not not being really received but that's one reason i wanted to leave it didn't let me have as much influence as i wanted to have observation i had is michael mcswain and he talked about on dale jr's show how he went door-to-door all these different teams and everybody said no and then he ended up at your door and you said yes i thought maybe you take a guy like him who is determined to be successful that he goes that far to take that many rejections and end up at your door there's there's a common denominator in people like that that they they had something in them that wouldn't quit yeah and you ended up with all of those guys that had that in them did you see that in him or did that was that a coincidence you know i can't remember back exactly but i do remember working with him you know he came to my shop and then later run across him he was already yelling when i got there so that was a familiar face somebody that i knew and knew me and knew knew my principles and how i operate whatever and uh so that was that was a really really good thing but to answer your question you know you interview people ask questions talk to them and you try to read them and to see it's like there's a lot of people that want to be nascar mechanics but some of them just don't have the gifting for it they weren't wired for that they might be super fans but they're not wired for it so i tried to always figure out talking to people and interviewing them how to evaluate what they've done already whether they know where to put a lock nut on right side up or upside down i've seen it all i've seen people thought they were mechanics and you know you go right over there and do something so stupid anybody would know better to do that you know this this 30-day trial is over you've got to go you know this is not your cup of tea is that what you would do you'd like say give them a few tasks and see if they screw it up 30 day notice baby but 30 days see what you can do if you can do it fine if you can't you know no no offense just we've got standards and you've got to be able to…