Eddie Sharp NASCAR Racing - Sharp Focus

There is an old saying that states, "If you work your fingers to the bone, all you get is bony fingers." That's not always true, and Eddie Sharp is a prime example of that.

Sharp has almost been driven out of the racing business a couple of times due to a lack of finances, but today Eddie Sharp Racing stands as one of the premier teams on the ARCA circuit. The team is now the first step up for the drivers coming through the Dodge Driver Development Program.

It's been a long road, but Sharp can now look out of the office window in his new shop and see the work progressing on three different race teams. He has a heritage of speed, as his father, Ed Sr., was a racer in the Florida regional hydroplane circuit. After growing up watching his dad on the water, Eddie followed him into the sport.

After a couple of accidents in the mid-'80s, they decided it was time to take their skills to dry land. Eddie went to a couple of races at some of the short tracks around the Tampa area and soon bought a car that was capable of running toward the front. The first thing he did was take the car back to the shop and take it apart. Beginning at a young age, Eddie was interested in the mechanical side of the sport, in how things really worked.

While Eddie was learning the art of short track stock car driving in the bullrings of Florida, his dad went the other route and joined the SCCA. Soon, Eddie was winning on the short tracks and his dad on the road courses. In fact, the elder Sharp was the GT1 SCCA Central Florida Region Champion in the early '90s.

Eddie got the phone call that every short track racer in the South wanted in 1983-an offer to drive in the Busch Series. He moved to Charlotte and began driving for Thackston Racing. Unfortunately, things weren't as promised at Thackston and he ran in only two races before the team went down.

In a strange city and without a ride, Sharp went to work for Ken Schrader and constantly pestered him for a ride. Schrader told him to get some experience in the ASA (American Speed Association), then come back and talk to him. It just so happened that the '93 ASA champion, Johnny Benson, was making the transition to the Busch Series, running four races in 1993 and then a full season in 1994 for Bace Motorsports. They became friends, and Johnny offered Eddie the use of his shop and his house in Michigan to start his ASA team.

Eddie spent the next few years on the ASA circuit, with moderate success, until he decided it was time to switch his focus and concentrate on the car ownership side. Eventually, he shut down his operation to work for other teams; it led to a position with Bill Baird Racing in 1998. Eddie was to be the crew chief with the understanding that Bill would step down as driver at the end of their second season together, and Eddie would drive the car. Well, that didn't happen. But under his leadership, Bill won the 1999 ARCA Championship (coincidentally, the last team to beat Frank Kimmell for the title) and decided not to step out of the car. Again thwarted in his ambition to become a top driver, Sharp left the team and knew that he had reached a crossroads. "I realized that I had a choice to make," he recalls. "I could continue to chase that dream of mine, or I could go forward as a crew chief or car owner. I chose to be a car owner."

He restarted his team in late 1999, but remade it into an ARCA team. For the next couple of years, he had a brief stint in Nextel Cup as a crew chief for BAM Racing with Shawna Robinson as driver, and spent time with Hermie Sadler's Toys "R" Us car. Sharp then brought a succession of young drivers on-board his ARCA effort in an attempt to give them their first step up in the sport. Drivers such as Joe Knott, Mike Swaim Jr., and Justin Labonte all had seat time in his cars.

At this point, Eddie Sharp was just about burned out on racing and ready to leave it altogether.

"Everything I tried turned out wrong," Sharp says. "People made promise after promise to me, and none of them turned out to be true. So I took six months off to get ready for the birth of my daughter and re-evaluate what I wanted to do with my life."

He then made the decision to give it another try and moved out of his small shop in Concord, North Carolina. He built a new 20,000 square-foot facility in Denver, less than 30 minutes away. That shop houses his two cars: the No. 22 driven by Ryan Matthews and the No. 20 piloted early in the year by Ken Weaver. The team had a late season effort with Michael McDowell, a Grand American Road Racing Association star.

Eddie Sharp Racing also has a joint effort with another organization. Last year, Sharp blended his team with Cunningham Motorsports and became the team manager for Cunningham, which is owned by Kerry Scherer and Briggs S. Cunningham III, the son of the famed racer and team owner from the '50s and '60s. Together they ran a six-race deal for Dodge in its driver development program. This season, the Cunningham Motorsports Dodge is again part of the Dodge Driver Development Program with drivers Scott Lagasse, Chase Miller, Josh Wise, and Kevin Swindell.

The Dodge Driver Development Program is the wave of the future. Each year, Dodge officials decide which drivers they would like to see in actual racing environments.

Chase Miller took the initiative to gain entry into the program.

"It started at Gateway last year, when I got a ride in the Bobby Jones Racing Dodge," says Chase. "I only had eight laps of practice in the car before qualifying. We started 15th, and I just kept picking cars off until I got into the lead. I led a total of eight laps and was running Fifth with a few laps to go when I tried to pass the Fourth-Place guy. He got into me and wrecked us both. I got a lot of attention in that race, so I started calling Dodge about this program. I kept calling, and in December they called me back and offered me a spot here."

Dodge Motorsports also picks the venue for each driver. Sharp Racing's first job in the program is to prepare the cars so that each driver has a race car capable of running up front on any given weekend. The goal is to give the driver the best possible opportunity to showcase his talents. Sharp then turns the drivers over to the crew chief, who tunes the setups on the cars according to input from each driver, calls the races from the top of the pit box, and coaches the drivers on and off the track.

Eddie says that he keeps a pretty low profile at this point. "I try to stay out of the way," he says. "I don't want to interfere in the relationship between the driver and the crew chief. The only time I step in is to settle any differences that might pop up."

Perhaps the most important part of Eddie Sharp's job occurs after the teams are back in the shop. That is when he has to prepare a report on the driver for Dodge Motorsports.

"When I started looking for criteria to judge the performances of all of the drivers, I looked for things that were important to me as a car owner-but I wanted them to be fair to all of the drivers," Eddie says. "Performance on the track is important, of course, but that is pretty much black and white. You can see the results on paper. It was the intangible things that I wanted to look at, so I came up with a five-item list. Their mannerisms, how they react to problems, work with the media, and so on, [including] their appreciation of the opportunity they have, how they act toward the crew, [and] how often they visit the shop. Because if they aren't interested in how the cars are put together and what the crew does, it'll be hard to get the crew to stand up for the driver. I look at their actions off of the track because that's very important today.

"Finally, I look at their communication skills, both within the team and with the public and the media. It's a media-driven sport these days, and if the driver can't put on a good appearance with the press, a sponsor is not going to be interested."

Sharp Racing will go into next season with several unknowns.

"I don't know what the lineup will be for next year," Eddie says. "Dodge may decide to keep one or two, or even all of the guys here next season, or I might just as easily have an entirely new group of guys to work with. That's all up to the folks at Dodge."

Sharp Racing has already visited Victory Lane with one of its young drivers. Miller won the first ARCA race at Pocono and could easily have found himself there again as he dominated the second Pocono race, only to drop a cylinder with less than 10 laps to go.

Most race teams would love to have a young driver on the team who is already a proven winner so they can build around him, but Eddie Sharp knows that is not his role.

"My job is to bring the guys in, teach them as much as I can, and then move them on up the ladder," Eddie says. "I love my job."