We're going to move through this column like the thunderstorm you may have had at your house last week. Stay with us because we're going to answer some questions that people ask.
This lady wanted to know the one person who has been the greatest inspiration in my racing career. That would have to be Daddy. In the early days, all the other drivers were running against and trying to beat him. He started out like a lot of the early drivers: He did not have much money and made his own way. As it turned out, he was successful at what he did. He was my hero.
This is another question often thrown at me: "Who is the best driver you ever raced against?" The answer is David Pearson. I pick him because he could win on any track-superspeedways, short tracks, dirt tracks, or road courses.
Then somebody wants to know who is the smartest driver I ever raced against, and I take that to mean smartest from a standpoint of strategy. I guess that would be Freddie Lorenzen. He was good at figuring things out as he went along during a race. He knew at every stage of the event just exactly what his car needed. Also, he was simply a good race driver. But I think he won a lot of races just because he out-thought everybody else.
The next question along these lines is usually, "Who is the toughest driver?" Cale Yarborough, I would say. Cale focused only on driving a race car. When he got to the racetrack, no matter what else was going on, the car was the only thing he found interesting.
I was never sure how much he even cared about setting up the car. He just wanted to get in and drive, and it didn't matter if he was leading the race or was one lap behind or 10 laps behind, he would drive just as hard as he physically could. He never quit.
The person that I know of with the best organizational skills is Dale Inman. He was my crew chief and the best in racing at keeping everything organized. I'm talking about a lot of races before computers came along. Dale observed what everybody else was doing, and he reacted accordingly.
Let's take, for example, the 1981 Daytona 500. We were a fourth- or fifth-place car. Bobby Allison had a Pontiac, and he was the best. He would keep coming to the front, and a few laps after every pit stop he would be leading a pack of five or six cars. We were in that pack. It gets down to the end of the race and he has to stop. He gets gas and two tires. Everybody else in the pack of cars right behind him stops for gas and two tires. Dale watches all this taking place. I start down pit road, and he says we are going to gas and go. No tires. We could get gas quicker than we could take on two tires. That's what we did, and it put us out in front of everybody by two or three seconds, and we won the race.
I had one lady, God bless her, come up to me and ask who had the greatest religious influence on my life. I thought about it a minute and said Lynda, my wife. I grew up in a Christian home, but when you are a kid, sometimes you don't pay a lot of attention to things around you. Once Lynda and I got married and started having kids and a home life, then I realized we weren't alone in this world, that we needed help with what we were trying to undertake.
A gentleman in a three-piece suit asked who was the one person I looked up to most in racing from a financial standpoint. I had to think about that one. I told him I guess it would be Roger Penske. He has to be a good judge of character, buying these businesses and starting these businesses, and then hiring somebody to run each one of them. I have a lot of respect for the way he operates, and I admire what he has accomplished.
Somebody else asked me to name the biggest contributions to racing over the years. This is a tough one to answer because there are so many, but I would say the fuel bladders and Goodyear's improvement in tires are two of the biggest.
Then, too, people ask me if there was one thing I could do different in my career, what would it be? Win more races, I tell them. No, seriously, I have thought about that. I am afraid if I changed something here, that it was mess something up over there, if you see what I mean. Oh, I look back and say, "I should not have wrecked in such and such a race;" but if I had the chance to change it, I wouldn't. I might change something else on down the road.
So, the way I look at the overall picture is that we're lucky we made it this far, so let's don't change anything.