First NASCAR Experience and Mentorship

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