NASCAR Growth Has Its Roots In North Carolina

CHARLOTTE, N.C. —  Jimmy Watts is all smiles as he arrives at the fog-shrouded airport, even though he got up at 3 a.m. and it’s still two hours before the first rays of daylight.

The Charlotte firefighter is on his way to his part-time job jumping over concrete pit-road walls and pouring 80-pound gasoline cans into race cars for Jasper Motorsports.

In what has become a weekly pilgrimage from NASCAR Town, U.S.A., to tracks all over the country, Watts is joined on Sundays by about 150 people at a private terminal at Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

They are there to catch a ride on the Race Day Express to such vital but low-profile racing jobs as scorers, spotters and tire-changers. About half of them are involved in racing full time, but many are regular folk -- police officers, teachers, factory workers -- who simply love the sport.

For this, Watts gives up lots of sleep, almost all of his vacation and plenty of quality time with his family.

“When that alarm clock goes off, I’m usually not too happy,” said Watts, whose job takes up 18 hours or more every Sunday during the Winston Cup season. “But then my second thought is that everybody who’s a NASCAR fan would give their right arm to be in the position I’m in. It’s a great, great part-time job.”

Especially for someone from Charlotte, which has steadily emerged as the cradle of stock car racing because of its proximity to the North Carolina hills where moonshine runners helped create the sport.

The skyrocketing popularity of Winston Cup in the past 15 years has only strengthened Charlotte’s role as the hub for most race teams and all the related businesses they’ve spawned.

Those businesses have been created and thrived as a result of NASCAR’s recent expansion into such nontraditional markets as suburban Los Angeles, Dallas, Las Vegas, south Florida and Indianapolis, the longtime home of open-wheel racing. The Winston Cup circuit returns to Indianapolis Motor Speedway this weekend for the fifth annual Brickyard 400, and once again a crowd of about 320,000 is expected.

The sport’s explosion has been so boundless that North Carolina Charlotte researchers conducted a study of the industry to try to determine its impact.

The study, completed in December 1996, found that in Charlotte and its surrounding counties of Cabarrus, Iredell and Mecklenburg, NASCAR racing is responsible for about 2,000 jobs producing more than $200 million in expenditures annually -- figures that many in the industry consider conservative in 1998.

A prime example of that entrepreneurial success, NASCAR style, is Race Day Express.

The service is the brainchild of D.K. Ulrich, a former Winston Cup driver and team owner who went into the air charter business and formed U.S. Aviation.

Ulrich began flying drivers to and from races and other appearances, and one day, he and a colleague were discussing the problem of getting people to races on Sundays. Race Day Express was born.

Renting large jets from major airlines, Ulrich operates flights that generally leave at 5 a.m. for most East Coast races and are back in Charlotte by 10 at night.

He contracts with team owners at the beginning of each season for the number of seats they want, and he moves 140-175 people every Sunday. Many teams have just a few seats; Roush Racing, which fields a circuit-high five teams, has 27.

“In 1994, our first year, I think we only had about 60 people the first flight,” Ulrich said. “By the third trip, we were sold out.”

There is a distinct NASCAR flair to the operation.

Racing carries over to departure time, when the boarding order is determined by how their respective teams qualified for that day’s event.

“It’s pretty neat because that means you usually get to sit with somebody new each week,” said Watts, who has used up virtually all of his vacation time from his fire-fighting job so he can work in racing.

Watts is content to keep racing as a part-time job, but for many, the industry has a strong allure that can be financially rewarding.

The North Carolina Charlotte study found an average industry wage of about $40,000 in the region, a figure that prompts disbelieving chuckles from many employers. Crew-chief salaries are safely into six figures, they say. Mechanics can make $50,000. Skilled specialists -- fabricators, body hangers -- can make $50,000-$100,000.

And because there is such a concentration of race teams in the region, competition for workers can become downright ruthless.

“You can actually look out the window at times and see people pushing their red tool carts from one shop to another,” said Michael Kranefuss, co-owner of the Winston Cup cars driven by Jeremy Mayfield. “They can go from one job to another in 20 minutes. When I first started in racing 30 years ago, if someone quit on you like that in the middle of the season, you wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole. But that’s changed.”

It’s changed in part because of the establishment of places like Lakeside Park, a 245-acre business and industrial complex whose tenants include 12 Winston Cup teams and 30 other race support enterprises.

Lakeside, which opened 16 years ago, has become a popular destination for tourists. On race weeks at nearby Charlotte Motor Speedway, traffic in the park routinely becomes so heavy with people wanting to visit the shops of Mayfield, Mark Martin, Ricky Rudd, Rusty Wallace and others that police are posted at the main entrance to restrict access.

Lakeside is about 25 miles north of downtown Charlotte in Iredell County, which is proud of its role as the home of numerous Winston Cup, Busch Grand National and Craftsman Truck Series teams and related businesses.

The Mooresville-South Iredell Chamber of Commerce has gone as far as copyrighting the term “Race City USA,” and is putting up brightly colored banners in downtown Mooresville to celebrate the name. The chamber has even printed guide maps to race shops.

The chamber doesn’t offer maps to the drivers’ homes, but that hasn’t stopped hordes of sightseers from finding them anyway. Many of the drivers have homes on the shores of Lake Norman in western Iredell County, and there are routinely reports of brazen fans docking their boats at the drivers’ homes and walking onto their property.

The other region that has a high concentration of race teams is in the Cabarrus County community of Concord, about 20 miles northeast of Charlotte.

The area grew mainly because of its proximity to Charlotte Motor Speedway, which was built in 1960 and has long been regarded as a pioneer on the Winston Cup circuit: the first track to offer stock publicly and the first to build luxury suites and condominiums.

The racing industry’s growth is prompting a response from the region’s educational community. Clemson, North Carolina State and South Carolina all offer technical courses designed to help students apply engineering knowledge to racing.

Rowan-Cabarrus Community College is taking it one step further. The school’s Concord campus next June will produce its first graduates in a two-year motorsports management technology program.

Richmond Gage, who started the program last year after spending 16 years in various management jobs in Winston Cup racing, said the school has had to cap yearly enrollment at 60. This year’s freshman class includes students from Oklahoma, California and New York.

“The response has been nothing short of amazing,” he said.

Plenty of other people have noticed Charlotte’s growing importance in the racing arena.

When ESPN began a daily auto racing show on Monday through Friday nights, the network chose not to produce it at its main studios in Bristol, Conn., or in Indianapolis. Instead, it chose the south Charlotte suburb of Fort Mill, S.C., to make “RPM 2Night.”

When NASCAR decided to open a licensing office, the sport’s sanctioning body didn’t put it at its main headquarters in Daytona Beach, Fla., but in the north Charlotte suburb of Huntersville.

“There’s so much day-to-day business done in and around Charlotte, it was a natural,” NASCAR spokesman John Griffin said of the office, which opened less than three years ago with five employees but now has 21.

Much of NASCAR’s recent growth involves off-track enterprises, especially in the area of souvenirs and sponsorships, and it has attracted a new breed to a work force long dominated by Southern blue-collar employees.

At the forefront is Don Hawk, the president of Dale Earnhardt Inc. A bible college-educated native of Allentown, Pa., Hawk oversees the business operations of a driver who has parlayed a tough-guy image and seven Winston Cup championships into an estimated personal income of $20 million annually.

And now Earnhardt’s son, Dale Jr., is becoming a force as well -- on and off the track.

The August issue of a racing merchandising trade magazine ranks the 10 hottest commodities, and not surprisingly, the elder Earnhardt is listed on top. Ranked third is his son, who is in his first full year on the Grand National circuit.

“This whole sport has moved to a new level,” Hawk said. “People have really overcome the old thought that we’re basically barefooted, bib-overall moonshine drivers.”

Perhaps no one embodies the new spirit of NASCAR better than Roush Racing president Geoff Smith, a lawyer whose introduction to the sport consisted of representing Jack Roush in business deals nearly two decades ago.

These days Smith oversees an operation that has 350 employees, more than 125 licensing contracts and 60-plus sponsorships.

“It’s important to us and to the sport that other people succeed besides us,” he said, “because the foundation of NASCAR is its ability to attract corporate sponsors at a level that’s approximately equal around the board.”

Smith grew up in Michigan, the grandson of a former attorney general and gubernatorial candidate there, and attended Colorado on a ski scholarship. He built a successful business law practice, only to walk away from it eight years ago to join Roush Racing.

“When you’re 42 years old and you’re selling a 50 percent interest in a law firm that you’ve been senior partner in for 10 years after serving your apprenticeship, some people naturally wonder if I’ve completely lost my marbles,” he said. “Then there are others who understand.”

And you can find them in Charlotte on any Sunday morning during the Winston Cup season, walking through the darkness to catch a plane and chase a dream.