Zoomster Connects
(c) 2002 Dwight Drum

"I've had a strange career, and I took a tough road to get here. I appreciate just being in NASCAR Winston Cup racing. My time will come. That's the way I look at it. I think if people have followed by career, I've never been in the best of situations. I've just got to take it day by day and week by week. I had a lot of wins as a driver in my career, and there could have been a lot of wins in Winston Cup if certain things didn't happen. I think it makes me stronger and bolder and things will get better down the road."

"When you get into a Formula car, the car tends to move around just a little bit. They've got wings on 'em and they've got slick tires. They're very light, not a lot of horsepower. The Formula cars I drove, if you drove them hard you could really attack the race track. If you're very, very aggressive and precise, you can make up a lot of time. As far as the Winston Cup cars, they're heavy. They have small tires. They're very hard. You can't attack with these cars. You more or less have to be very precise. You have to be sensitive to 'em. If you go in the turns and use a lot of brakes, these cars just don't want to turn with the brakes on, so you've got to know.... They're just a lot more difficult to drive, and I think it's more of a feel thing and I think it's more of a rhythm thing.

"I think everybody wonders how Bill Elliott does so good compared to these young guys that are coming in. They have a lot of experience with these Winston Cup cars and they know how to drive 'em. I feel like that's why it's so hard for new guys to come in to Winston Cup race and try to make it because it's a difficult car to race. I think Ryan Newman is doing a great job. Penske raised that kid. They did a super job of raising him. They brought him up slowly. They let him run some Busch races. They did a lot of testing. They ran him in ARCA races. Now they're running him in Cup and he's got excellent equipment and he's going a great job. That's what it takes to bring up new guys to be competitive in Winston Cup racing because it takes so much time to get used to the cars."

"When I first got involved back in '95, I tried to pursue NASCAR and I got a sponsor to go run five Busch races. Back then it just seemed like you had to get in the click. People had to know who you were before you actually got a ride. I did five races and then I kind of sat around. I didn't know what to do. I did well, but I don't think I was in it long enough and did it well enough to pick up a ride right away. It just took some time. You have to work hard at it. You have to meet a lot of people. I spent months and months working at race shops, working on cars, working at the shop and getting parts and pieces for the team. This was with Richard Jackson. Then finally it was like, 'hey man, I want to race.' I had to raise a little bit of money. I got in one of his cars, went to Charlotte and finished second in an ARCA car. The next week I was in a Cup car."

"My deal was an unbelievable deal. I was in the right place at the right time to get an opportunity. I think anybody can make it if they have enough devotion and enough determination to stand by it and keep plugging along and working at it. I think I've made a lot of determination to get as far as I have today. As far as the racing itself, how it is everyday to do it, it's not as bad as a lot of people may say it is. We do a lot of races. It's the most that any professional race series runs, but if you love racing that much you're going to want to do it as much as you can. I know when I was used to run dirt and asphalt modifieds, we could run 60, 70, 80 races a year. I know the dirt races run up to 100 or 120 races a year, so that's a lot of races. As far as Winston Cup, that's a lot of demand. You're there at the race track for four days to do one race. You get in on Thursday. You practice on Friday, you qualifying on Friday, you practice more on Saturday and you get ready for Sunday. There's a lot to getting up to the race. You have sponsor stuff that you have to do whether it's autograph sessions or meet and greet with your sponsors, radio shows. There's just so much more you've got to do, and I think maybe that's where it's a hassle. If you were just having fun, you could kind of do your own thing and just show up on the weekend. There's just more demand in Winston Cup.

"I hadn't found my right home. You look at guys like Dale Jarrett. He didn't win until like five or six years he was in Winston Cup. He found the right place. I think he was with the Wood Brothers when he got his first win. You never really heard much of him until he got in a competitive race car. Once he got in the gate, he was winning everywhere. He won the championship. That's the kind of position I'm in right now. I'm just trying to find the right home. I'm trying to find the right place with the right chemistry with the right people to work with. So far, the Pettys have been great to me. I think we know as a team that we need to get better to run up front. It showed that last weekend at Indy. We're going to work hard to be more competitive. As far as going from team to team, you get to learn a lot. You get to learn a lot about how the team is run and how competitive the team is. You learn a lot and suck in a lot of that stuff and hold it in my head. Hopefully down the road I can use some of that information."

"I guess you can say I'm still looking. I'm just trying to see where I'm going to end up next season and beyond that. I'm not saying it gets tiring. I think my whole life I've just kind of been on the edge. I thought things were going to go well at Hendrick and they just kind of fell apart. It just wasn't the right place for me to be. I never seemed to be getting anywhere. We were a flash of brilliance like Hendrick would say at times, but at other time we were never consistent. I think that team has been like that the last 10 years. We don't why. It can get tiring, but my head is still up high and I'm still working hard to find a good situation. I think I'll be in a great situation next year."