Living Life One Day—and One Appearance—at a Time

For them, life is measured not by passing days or seasons, but by sponsor appearances, autograph sessions, dinners, and golf tournaments.

Oh, and when there’s time, they race.

The average race fan attending a NASCAR Winston Cup race these days is aware, peripherally perhaps, that the drivers they gather to cheer and jeer lead interesting lives. They have airplanes and motor coaches and neat cars and nice houses, and what they do for a living can only be termed glamorous.

Much of that is true, except that it also means a great deal of sacrifice and commitment on the part of the drivers and their families. In the course of the soon-to-be-36-race season, it also means that those planes and coaches are simply necessities of life, not luxuries. High-ticket items like nice houses and fancy cars sit idle most of the time while the driver and his family gad about the country like barnstorming performers caught in an endless, motorized three-ring circus.

Take, for instance, Kenny Wallace, driver of the Square D Chevrolet out of the Andy Petree Racing stable. His life was made much simpler recently with the purchase of his first airplane. The plane, like a rancher’s truck or a salesman’s automobile, is a vital part of his day-to-day life.

“I honestly see no way a Winston Cup driver can do this whole deal without an airplane,” Wallace says. “I know that with my races and my appearances, I’ll probably max out my appearances at about 65 this year.”

Those include Sunday-morning hospitality appearances at each of the 34 Winston Cup races, around 28 separate appearances for Square D at various places around the country, several NASCAR Busch Series events for Lance Snacks, his Busch sponsor, and 15-20 personal appearances.

“Let’s put it this way: The whole month of July I was home three days,” Wallace says. “The month of August I’ll be home maybe about six at the most. The airplane, I don’t make a big deal about it, don’t talk about it because people don’t understand, but I don’t see how anybody can keep mooching rides off people. For the last two years I’ve been buying rides from Kenny Schrader just to get to the racetrack. I guess I could have continued to do that, but I couldn’t include my family. My children could never see me, never come to any racetrack, because there just wasn’t room for my whole family on his airplane. Kenny’s been excellent, a super-good guy to let me ride with him all the time, but there just wasn’t room on his airplane.

“So I had a choice to either bite the bullet and buy the airplane, and worry about the taxes when I get rid of it, or I could live my life with my children knowing me somewhat. I decided to get the airplane and live my life accordingly.”

Wallace is quick to point out that while the average fan might think owning an airplane is an extravagance, the frame of reference is quite different from his side of the fence.

“Any fans that come to the racetrack, you have to remember, it’s their vacation or their week off,” he says. “We don’t have weeks off or vacation. The vacation we take is from a Monday to a Wednesday, which, I don’t care, I’m not asking for anybody’s sympathy whatsoever. But there’s absolutely no way to do all this commercially. No way. When you do this commercially, you’re planning for all those flights to be on time, and you’re planning that they have everything available for you when you need it. That’s not the way racing works. USAir isn’t going to say, ‘Well, Kenny needs to leave right now, so …’”

So he bought the plane, and now he and his wife Kim and their three daughters travel to the races together.

Tony Stewart, one of the hottest commodities in NASCAR these days, says people would be “startled” to find out how much time drivers spend working away from the race car. “I don’t know what the number [of hours] is, but yeah, you could physically sit down and do it, and it would startle people, I think, if they knew how much time we actually spent working outside of the race car.

“If we can get one day off each week and four days off in a month, then that’s a great month,” he says. “If you get two days in a row off, that’s what guys in Winston Cup call a vacation. We don’t get a lot of time to ourselves. I just got off of a three-week stint where I hadn’t been home. It’s hard to get time off, but at the same time we get to do a lot of fun stuff too while we’re out.”

Stewart says there is very little time alone for the average Winston Cup shoe, both at and away from the track. “Pretty much anytime I’m not inside the car, I’m with someone,” he says. “If it’s not with Greg [crew chief Greg Zipadelli] and the crew, it’s with media, or sponsors, or friends and family who happen to be at the track.”

OK, so just how crazy is a Winston Cup driver’s schedule these days? You be the judge. Here’s what a typical week looks like for Wallace: “I’m going to leave the Brickyard 400 on Saturday night,” he said from Indianapolis Motor Speedway the day before the race. “Monday night I’m headed for Green Bay, Wisconsin. Tuesday I’m going up to run a Race of Champions, where me, Dick Trickle, and Matt Kenseth are going to put on a match race and sign some autographs at the RE/MAX 300 at Wisconsin International Raceway in Kaukauna. After that little deal is over, I’m going to race a 300-lap short-track race. After that, I’m going to fly home Tuesday night, leave around midnight, and get home at 3 or 4 in the morning. I’ll wake up the next morning and head to Lycoming, New York for a Square D appearance at a nuclear plant. I’m going to entertain some people from 5 to 8 p.m. that evening, and then on Thursday, I’m going to Rochester, New York for Square D to attend a Triple-A baseball game. I’ll sign some autographs there. From there, I’ve got to race sometimes to make a living, so I’ll run a Winston Cup race Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That is a typical race week for me.”

A driver’s life—not to mention the men and women on the various pit crews—is not just measured from the time they arrive at the racetrack on Thursday, Wallace notes. “If I told you my schedule before the Brickyard 400, it’s out of hand,” he says. “For example, I left Pocono on Sunday, went home, and left for St. Louis at noon on Monday. I got into St. Louis, and on Tuesday, I got back in the airplane and flew to Chicago for Square D again and went to a coordinator’s meeting. One of my biggest heroes in racing, Larry Phillips, is stricken with cancer. I went up to see Larry on Wednesday. That Wednesday night, I went to Busch Stadium [home of Major League Baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals] to help promote Lance Snacks and the Gateway Busch race. On Thursday, I made two appearances for Lance Snacks around the St. Louis area, and then we raced Friday and Saturday. You get the gist.”

Stewart says on average he spends “every bit of 12-14 hours in the air going to and from appearances and to and from the racetrack that weekend. We spend a lot of time moving around, trying to get to places.”

What does an appearance consist of, and how long does it take? The answer varies with the sponsor and the driver, as well as the schedule. Where is often as important as why and how, Stewart says.

“It just depends on what time of the year it is,” he says. “Sometimes you won’t do any in a week. Sometimes you’ll do anywhere from six to eight appearances during the week. It just depends on what the schedule is, where you’re going, and what market you’re in. That’s the hard part about our schedule. There’s never a set schedule where you can say ‘I’ll take every Monday off.’ It doesn’t work that way. You may have Wednesday off one week and no days off the next. We did a West Coast trip where we were in Arizona and Seattle before we went racing in California. Our schedule is very random, and that’s what’s hard about it. It’s hard to make plans and do things when you don’t know what your schedule’s going to be from week to week.”

As for the typical appearance, Stewart broke it down. “The typical duration of an autograph session is about two hours. Depending on whom it’s for and what type of session it is … you may have a meet and greet before you do your sit-down session, or you may have a Q and A session in front of a large crowd. You never know what you’re going to have. Our Home Depot appearances go for two hours with the public, then we go to a back room and spend a half hour with the store associates. It varies from company to company. It’s normally a lot of fun. In my opinion, that’s the best time to do autographs is at those sessions. It’s a lot more relaxing for us as drivers, and we’re not thinking about race cars at that time like we are at the racetrack. It’s a much more appropriate place.”

Ask Stewart what the most satisfying aspect of his frenetic schedule is, and you get the straight dope. “Just being able to go out and entertain people on Sunday and being able to race with the best drivers in the country, if not the world, in my opinion,” is the way he put it. “I’m in the top series in the country, and that’s one of the things that makes me happiest as a race car driver. That’s what I’ve dedicated my life to doing—driving race cars at this level. That’s probably the most satisfying thing to me.”

Wallace is a much bigger fan of talking to people than signing autographs, as anyone who has ever met him would likely surmise. “I’d rather talk two straight hours than sit and sign autographs,” he says with a laugh. “Autographs are like tying my hands behind my back and saying, ‘Sit down—you will sign your name 100 times.’ I used to get punished that way in school. They used to make me write my name 1,000 times. The only reason I don’t like signing autographs is that I have to sit in one spot. If somebody asks me to sign an autograph here or there, like in the garage area, that’s no big thing. But to sit down and sign autographs for two straight hours drives me up a wall because I’m hyper. I want to walk around.

“The most fun I have is going to an appearance and knowing that all I have to do is talk to people and answer questions,” he continues. “You just about have to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time in this sport. Nowadays, being a good driver just isn’t good enough. And it’s always vice versa, you know? If you’re a good driver but you can’t sell the product, they’re mad at you. If you can’t drive but can sell the product, they’re mad at you, so you really, really have to do it all. There’s too much money involved.”

There’s a price for all the fame and fortune that goes with being a NASCAR Winston Cup driver.

“I feel like sometimes I have to be a little ruder than I want to be.” Wallace says. “Sometimes, it’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to 22 golf tournaments this year for charity.’ That’s what makes you mad sometimes, that you have to be a little bit ornery. Golfing is fun, but I can’t do a golf tournament every week. Everybody is on this charity kick, and you cannot please everybody with these tournaments. Racing is such a huge sport that a lot of people are benefiting from it. You have to be careful not to piss the wrong people off.”

Wallace’s corporate schedule is kept by his public relations firm, The Motorsports Decisions Group, but his personal schedule—which he refers to as the “master” schedule—is just that: personal.

“As far as my own personal appearances, I keep all my own scheduling as far as where I’m coming or going,” he says. “Me and my wife Kim work on all the personal things. There’s two schedules: the sponsorship schedule and the master schedule, which is mine. There’s never just one schedule. There’s gotta be two, where you can schedule a supper at your own house one night—where you can actually eat with your own children. Then there’s the schedule where you have to go out and eat with the sponsors.”

Personal time, which is somewhat taken for granted outside the sport, is a concept foreign to any Winston Cup driver who has a ride these days. It is guarded jealously, and drivers and their families tend to make the most of it when it comes around.

“I have to build that personal time into my own schedule,” Wallace says. “That’s the reason we can’t do golf tournaments. They require you to come in a day before the races, and then I have a choice: either leave a day early to go play golf, or spend a day at home with the kids. So I build that in there, and it works out really nice. I love being with my kids.”

One such example in July was a whirlwind family trip to the Bahamas—in his new airplane. “We left on a Monday and came back on Wednesday,” Wallace says. “That was a lot of fun. We cut it a day short; would have liked to have stayed another day, but it didn’t work out.”

Wallace realizes one thing is for sure: his schedule is the way it is because his sport is so popular. The reason he can afford a King Air 200 is the same reason he needs one—to do his job. To him, being in the hospitality tent before every race is just the cost of doing business.

“There’s only two drivers in NASCAR Winston Cup who do hospitality every Sunday morning, and that’s me and Jeff Gordon,” he says. “I know for sure that I hold the record. I do hospitality every single Sunday morning, and that’s the only way our sponsorship works, because we entertain customers. As soon as I get upset and worn out from doing that stuff, I have somebody knock me upside the head and say ‘That’s the way it is.’”