Sellers Brothers Racing - On A Shoestring

When Sellers finished a gratifying Fourth in the car's first outing, he caught the attention of Chip Lofton, a successful businessman who developed Strutmaster, an innovative suspension system for luxury cars.

"I'm not sure I get any real benefit as a businessman," Lofton said. "But I've always been a race fan and it's easy to help out a guy like Peyton, given what he does with what he has.

"I don't know a team that works harder and gets better results with less equipment and a low budget."

The second and third races were an East-West shootout in the Midwest in May. It was the first time drivers from the two newly-minted Grand National divisions had a chance to compete head to head, at two tracks, on successive nights.

Sellers finished Sixth among the Busch East drivers at Elko, Minnesota. The next afternoon, he was running Third on the new Iowa Speedway oval, behind Logano and Kevin Harvick, when his engine let go.

That's the way it is in racing. It doesn't make much difference if you are running a bomber on an oval or a car in NASCAR's top series. Bad nights follow good nights. Teams that do best are those that simply soldier on.

And that's what Sellers and his crew did.

After the blowup in Iowa, he finished Second at South Boston. Then it was 14th at Stafford, Connecticut. He qualified Fourth and finished Ninth in New Hampshire and took a 12th at Thompson Speedway, where he damaged the car.

"It was about the worst time to have something like that happen," said Ben Farmer, one of the volunteer crew members. "We had a race the next weekend at Nashville. It meant working all day and then going to the shop, wrenching on the car 'til one or two in the morning and then going back to our real jobs.

"But that's the cool part of this team. No one gets paid. If you look up and down the line of transporters, everyone else is getting a check for working on the cars. We do it because we really believe in Peyton. We know that if we put a good car under him, Peyton will do his part."

He was 16th in Nashville and Fifth at Adirondack International in Beaver Falls, New York.

Lofton owns a second car that is available to Sellers. The team often takes it to tracks "just in case," but the only time Sellers raced it was on the road course at Lime Rock. It made more sense to set up that car for left and right turns than trying to convert Peyton's regular ride.

He finished Eighth.

"I was real nervous about it," Lofton admitted. "But it came back with hardly a scratch on it."

"I'm a lot more careful with the equipment now that I'm a team owner. There was a time, starting out, that I'd just drive into someone's door and tear up a lot of cars.

"I think I've matured a lot in the past season. There is just too much to do keeping the team running to be spending a lot of time repairing damage that didn't need to happen."

"I can see the difference," said Richard Buck, director of NASCAR's touring series. "There was a time Peyton would stick the nose of his car just about anywhere, and sometimes that would come back to bite him. Now he's a lot more calculating. He picks his moves and drives a lot smarter. He's showing the maturity of a driver who sees the big picture instead of just the next move. And if you look at his season, it shows. He's almost always running up front at the end of the race.

"His success proves that if you have a great deal of talent and good people working with you, a driver doesn't need a huge budget to make a name in this series."

"There were times during the season that I wondered if I was just trying to do too much with too little.

"I guess I really questioned it at Mansfield. I had an awful qualifying run and was feeling kind of overwhelmed. I was having trouble with the track and the setup, and we didn't have what we needed.

"We had about three sets of springs. If the red ones didn't work we'd try the blue ones.

"We were parked next to Matt Kobyluck and he must have had 15 or 20 sponsors on his car and just about anything he needed to run well. I began to wonder if we wouldn't be better off just going back to South Boston and running a Late Model, where we could race up front every weekend and be competitive.

"But we were Third in the points. Then I realized that the only thing we had more of than anyone else was heart."

He finished Seventh at Mansfield, Fourth at Loudon and completed the season with a Ninth place run at Dover.

It left him Third in points, behind Logano and Sean Caisse, who raced for Andy Santerre out of New England. And he finished just ahead of Kobyluck.

"I had an idea what we were coming to at Irwindale, because I had raced here three times in 2006 when I was with McAnally.

"But H.C. had never seen the track before we unloaded the car, so it was all new to him.

"It's a different kind of track, not as easy as it looks at first. I tried to tell him as best I could what to be prepared for, but until you actually get there and begin driving the car-I had never been to the track with this one-you don't know exactly what you are working with."