Bobby Gill Faces New Challenges

Bobby Gill has been around the stock car racing wars since 1983, and he's seen a lot of drivers come and even more of them go. He's been close a time or two to going on himself. There just doesn't seem to be a place for him in the high-tech, high-pressure world of stock car racing these days. He's a man who needs a mountain to climb, and he's looking across a lot of open prairie these days. In 1997, Gill was on top of the world. He had won 15 races and the USAR Hooters Cup Series title in Gene Eisenhower's Terminal Trucking Chevrolet Late Model.

No problems, right? Wrong. Eisenhower got out of the business, leaving Gill with no car and no prospects for the future. "That's when I had the most fun," Gill says from his home in Dalton, Georgia, speaking of his trip to the victory banquet as the series champ. So, after bumming around for most of the winter, the 40-year-old transplanted Floridian finally hooked up with Bob Kline, who had a Chevrolet Monte Carlo for him to drive in the Hooters ProCup Series. "We were at the end of the road, didn't have no place else to go, and then we hooked up with Bob Kline," Gill says. "We've been struggling, waiting on a new car. I was leading the points up until this last race (May 1 at Georgia's Peach State Speedway), and it seems like it's slowly getting away from us." Gill is pragmatic about his fate so far this year.

"It's just the way the times in racing are now. The way it is now, whoever's got the money gets about any ride they want. Driving skill don't matter any more, seems like. I don't understand it. There's people out there with plenty of sponsors can't do nothing. Somebody like me can't get nothing.

"I think it's sport-wide. Racing's so big right now, there just isn't hardly enough to go around for all of us anymore as far as sponsorship." Pragmatism, obviously, should not be taken for wholehearted agreement. Kline, whose Aquatech International Contractors sponsors Gill's Chevrolet, has high praise for his driver and feels better times are on the horizon. "He's phenomenal," says Kline. "I'm not a racing guy, I'm a businessman, so that's probably not a good racing word, but that's what he is. He's got patience, fortitude, and he knows when to fill a hole and when not to." Kline can appreciate what it takes to be a high-performance athlete. He was a tight end for the National Football League's San Diego Chargers at one point in his life and was a corporate yacht captain as well.

There have been times in Gill's career, which began on the short tracks of Florida where his father, Billy Gill, ruled the roost in years gone past, when he's just about made the break and settled down to do something else. "I thought about stopping a couple of times--if it gets to where I can't get nothing I guess I'll stop," Gill muses, talking as if he had been asked about the weather. "I do this for a living, but I really ain't making nothing at it. My wife and I own a restaurant here in town, and if it wasn't for that, I'd probably have to do something else." Gill's Grill, a meat-and-vegetables spot in Dalton, is just three miles off I-75.

Straddling America's busiest interstate 30 miles south of Chattanooga and 90 miles north of Atlanta, Dalton, the world's "Carpet Capital," sees thousands of visitors traveling to and from Florida each year. This is heavy stuff for a man who's won in just about every kind of car he's ever driven. Gill estimates his career victory total at "between 125 and 150" races. Included in that magical 1997 season were victories in both the All-American 400 at Nashville Speedway USA and the 20th Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Florida. Those are two of the top Late Model races in the country. He began driving in 1983 at the age of 22, starting out at DeSoto Speedway in Bradenton, Florida.

"I started in a Sportsman class that was top-of-the-line at DeSoto until they sort of went a different way with it," Gill remembers. "We went to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) Series that All Pro put on, won the title, and then went to the NASCAR trucks in 1995." Gill made the jump from the Southeast to the mostly national truck series, but came home after a season or so. "I really enjoyed the trucks, that whole deal, but I was on the wrong team," says Gill. A year later, he hooked up with the Terminal Trucking gang and set about winning the Hooters ProCup title. And now he finds himself stuck in the middle again, working to find that mountain to climb back up. He has his own short-track cars, and runs them when he can and when the Hooters series schedule doesn't conflict.

He'll be in that car when the season ends, hoping something new and better comes along. "The way it ends up being, it's about the end of December before we know if we've got anything," Gill says. "This deal here (with Kline) didn't come about until the end of January." That's pretty late in today's year-round racing season. "When I first started, it really wasn't year-round, but now, you start at Speedweeks and stop the first week of December," says Gill. "But that's not one circuit. That's the whole deal. I more or less right now just run my short-track car where they pay the most." Places like Five Flags Speedway and the often-renamed Peach State Speedway--whose two prior incarnations were Georgia International Raceway and the Jefferson County Fairgrounds Speedway--are good places for Gill to race. He also speaks highly of Nashville, where he won the All-American 400.

"We should have won more than that," Gill insists. Despite his successes, and despite the ever-growing popularity of the speed sports in American culture, part of Gill wants racing to be as it was, not as it is today. "Racing used to be fun, but it isn't fun anymore," he says. "It's more like a business. Now it's changing. You can't enjoy it like you used to. Now it's all serious." Spoken like a true son of a racing father. Gill enjoys the actual business of his business, driving the race car, but the other stuff leaves him with a serious case of the blahs. "I enjoy the driving part of it. But the getting there...racing's so expensive now, and the racing we do doesn't really pay enough for expenses. If you haven't got a sponsor it isn't really much fun." When it was most fun for Gill, besides the Terminal Trucking years, was when he first got involved with the KISS Series.

"Paul Hostetler and Vinyl Tech is what really got me going in racing," Gill says, recalling the team owner and sponsor that set him up in the KISS Series, and eventually, the All Pro Series. "We won that first race that Bob Harmon put on in the KISS series, and from there it's been uphill.

I was with him (Hostetler) for like 4-5 years. He did it for a hobby, and it turned out I was able to make a living off it." The biggest change Gill sees in today's racers is that they aren't yesterday's racers. "The young new talent that's coming in...it seems like the old guys I used to race against, like Jody Ridley and them, aren't around any more," Gill says. "There's not a lot of us old guys out there doing it. There's no more of them around. It's all new people."

So, Bobby, why keep doing this if it isn't fun any more? "I don't know, really," he says, pausing long to think. "I enjoy the driving part of it. These Hooters Cup cars...you still have to have a good car, but it takes a better talent to do these cars than it does these short-track cars. You don't have much there to work with, and you have to make the best with what you've got."That appeals to Gill's sense of how racing should be: driver has talent, driver wins, or at least doesn't get blown off by technology.

"A short-track Late Model is generally lighter, and doesn't have as much horsepower," he says. "But the throttle response is much better than a Hooters Cup car. Hooters Cup cars are basically (NASCAR) Busch (Series) cars with a stock-head engine and a little less horsepower than a Busch car; a little heavier crank." Asked why he never aimed at the Busch Series or Winston Cup, Gill shrugs while answering. "When I started, Cup and Busch wasn't that much of a thing for me because I didn't know that much about it," he says. "I knew it was there, but it wasn't like it is now. My dad raced for years, and that's what got me into it. I just liked racing and it didn't matter what it was." Gill says today's special events and series on television help a lot of young drivers get to the Busch and Winston Cup ranks a lot sooner.

"I guess today, whatever local track can get you where you're going is where you have to be," he says. "Like out at Tucson, that Winter Heat? That helped a bunch of people, and ASA helped a bunch of people. If you look at most people in Cup and Busch, they come from ASA." All Pro is very similar to ASA, with the exception of geography, although it is less similar these days than when Gill was running with All Pro. He nearly won a couple of All Pro titles, however, losing out in late-season chases with Jody Ridley and Mike Cope. Despite losing the titles, Gill still had fun because he was competitive and got to drive.

"I think the racing was easier back then," he says. "When I got into it with Vinyl Tech, the money was there and we had what everybody else had. Now anybody can get that. "Years ago, when I was racing for Frankie Grille, about everywhere we went, we ran the same shocks and springs. Now the technology has gotten into it so much." Asked his favorite race behind the wheel, Gill summons up one of All Pro founder Bob Harmon's most successful promotions, the World Crown 300 at Missouri's I-70 Speedway. All Pro was a series based in Prattville, Alabama. For it to draw well in Missouri was due, in no small part, to Harmon's knack for promotions.

Gill recalls that victory at I-70, a half-mile high-banked oval similar to the "hills" in Winchester and Salem, Indiana. "We got two laps down, made those up, and lapped the field by three laps in a 300-lap race," Gill says with a trace of wonder in his voice. Another race he recalls is the annual ASA pilgrimage to the Minnesota State Fair on Labor Day weekend. "We won that race, sat on the pole and dominated," he says proudly. "That race right there paid $27,000 to win." If Bobby Gill doesn't find that mountain he's looking for, he'll put away the tools of his trade and pick up some new ones. "Before I started racing, I was a plumber, when I got out of high school. Then I got into diesel work. I really enjoyed diesel work, so I guess I'd be one of those two." As long as there's a car to drive, and racing to be done, it's probably a good bet Bobby Gill won't be busting drains or wrangling big rigs. He'll be having too much fun climbing mountains.