Eddie Sharp - 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.