Conversation: Darrell Waltrip

Conversation: Darrell Waltrip
By Dave Rodman, Turner Sports Interactive November 11, 2003
2:13 PM EST (1913 GMT)


As three-time NASCAR Winston Cup driver Darrell Waltrip himself has said many times, if ever a driver was meant to transfer his career from the cockpit to the broadcast booth, it was the native of Owensboro, Ky.

Now, after his third season as an integral member of FOX Sports' NASCAR broadcast team, Waltrip stands on the verge of actively getting back into the sport as a team owner in the Craftsman Truck Series.

As he looked ahead to the end of the NASCAR season, Waltrip took a few minutes to talk with NASCAR.com's Dave Rodman about meshing a busy family life with his multi-faceted career as a broadcaster, part-time driver and team owner to be.

What kind of rejuvenation to your career has your time in the truck seat been?

Darrell Waltrip: It (racing a truck) does me a lot of good. I act as a driver, I speak as a driver, and that's how I want the guys in the garage area to think of me. I don't want them to think of me as a former Winston Cup champion that does TV.

I just want them to think of me as a racecar driver that goes up there and does TV (but) I speak their language and I'm a member of their fraternity. Getting out there in the truck and mixing it up a few times a year keeps me connected to that group of guys and that's really what's exciting about it, to me.

It also gives me some resources for talking about things that are going on during races, so it's served a lot of good purposes -- but rejuvenating my career was not one of them.

It's a little bit late to rejuvenate my career (laughing). I never did really want to retire, in 2000 -- but there just wasn't any place for me to go. I guess, in all honesty, that I had harmed my reputation by driving cars that were not competitive, so it was hard for me to find anything to do at my age.

Nobody wants to build a program around 53-year-old racecar drivers. I really had no options, so retirement was really the most logical thing to do based on what was going on at the time.

Quite honestly, I couldn't have been luckier, because in that process, in the year 2000 the (current) TV deal came along and everyone had always said, if there was one guy that was made for TV, that was me.

I think the Lord had something better planned for me all the time, if I had just given him a chance. If I had of just listened to the Lord instead of myself I probably would've been a lot better off in a lot of cases -- but certainly in this case.

How did you look at the timing of NASCAR's TV deal with partners FOX, NBC and TNT?

Darrell Waltrip: The great thing about the TV deal is that it's kept me involved in the sport. My vision, a long time ago when I had my own (Winston Cup) team was I would retire as a driver and continue on as a car owner with someone else driving my car.

I had to sell my team when I ran into sponsorship troubles, (but) if you want to talk about rejuvenating my career, Dale Earnhardt certainly did that when he put me in that 1 car (replacing the injured Steve Park in 1998). That let people see that even an old guy can still get the job done when he's in a good car.

What the TV package has done is let me stay involved, go to the racetracks and hang out with my buddies and still do the things I always loved to do. I think any athlete; part of the drill is the camaraderie he has with his teammates and the people that he competes against.

I think that's something people overlook a lot of times and for me, it's huge. It's one of the reasons I wanted to have my own team, so I could have my own guys and we could hang out together.

That's what makes it hard for a guy to walk away from any sport that he participates in, because there are so many relationships you have.

But that's the neat thing about the TV deal. I get to keep my motorhome and fly to the racetrack like I always did and the guys still think of me as a driver. So honestly, I have the best of all the worlds right now.

I couldn't have a better job (and) I'm working with great people -- a great team -- and that's how I approached it from day one.

I looked at it as though we were putting together a winning race team. That's the way we look at it every week, Larry (McReynolds) and Jeff (Hammond) and Mike (Joy) and I. We're just getting in there and getting ready to go racing.

Since you've been in the broadcast booth, do you think people should cut you guys a little bit of slack and realize how difficult it is to do that job?

Darrell Waltrip: I think something that maybe people fail to realize is that our sport is unpredictable. We're flying by the seat of our pants lap after lap after lap. You don't know who's gonna make the move, you don't know who's gonna have trouble.

You drop the green flag and buddy; you've got to be ready for anything. You've got to be ready for the point leader to have trouble, or for someone in the back of the pack to have trouble. There's always something and you have to roll with the flow.

We try to have stuff ready and we try to anticipate what's going to happen next. I think that's one of the things that we do really well because I've been to all of the race tracks and a lot of time I can script out what might happen, and get it pretty close.

That helps us to be pretty prepared for when we do the telecast. But we can't be ready for everything. Sometimes we have a graphic and we pop it out there and it just fits, but a lot of times we walk out of the booth saying 'Man, we could have done a better job of explaining this or that,' or 'We didn't give so-and-so enough credit for the kind of day he had.'

But there are 43 guys out there. You try to do the best you can for all of them, but for the most part the interest and the excitement is at the front of the field. We try to get back through there and give everybody their due, but man, it's tough.

I think one of the things that FOX does is use all the cameras -- we cover every race like it's the Super Bowl. They listen to Larry and me and Mike and they take us where we want to go. They don't put something up there and expect us to just talk about it.

Do you guys go into the next season feeling like you have to outdo yourselves from the past year, or is it just a comfortable shoe deal where you just carry on and the team, and the product prevails?

Darrell Waltrip: Certainly, the more time that we work together the better we're going to be. We walk out of the booth in July and we don't go back in, to do the races, until February. That's a long time to be away from calling the action, even though we still do some things on Speed Channel, such as Trackside and qualifying shows.

I study my tapes from the races just like I did when I was driving. I get the tapes from the races on Tuesday and I sit down and watch them two or three times, listening to everything I said and what Larry and Mike said and how we can complement each other better and do a better job of covering the race.

It's a lot of hard work. It's not just walking into the booth and putting on a coat and tie and watching a race. You have a lot of homework to do, what everybody's done at every track, what changes are being made on race teams, what car they have, what engine, who their crew chief is, who his wife his, their children, where they stay, what they had for dinner, how they got there. . .

You've got to know a lot of stuff and you better get it right. The way this sport is watched by so many millions of people today and with all the news shows and magazines and radio -- you better get it right, because if you don't someone is going to let you know about it in a heartbeat.

As much as the family is the glue for a lot of what goes on while you're driving, what has the impact of your family, Stevie and your daughters Jessica Leigh and Sarah; once you stopped driving?

Darrell Waltrip: If there's one thing, more than any other, that is beautiful about my job, it's that we only do work half the year. Still, our half the year is the same as an entire season in any other sport.

But I work half the season, and the other half of the season I do what Stevie and the girls want to do. I've told people I'm trying to pay Stevie back 30 years, a half a year at a time, and that's gonna take a while. She's put 30 years into this sport just like I have and I'm trying to give her back a little of that at a time.

Jessica has just turned 16 and she wants to get her (learner's) permit and Sarah's 11 and they've got so many interests that they need their dad there to help them with.

I don't play the piano and I don't do ballet. Sarah thinks she'd like to be an actress, but it just makes them feel so much better when all their friends are in a recital or whatever they're doing -- and not a lot of dads are there but their dad's there.

I know how important that is to them and how good it makes them feel and it's neat that I'm able to do that. Even though we spent all that time together at the racetracks for all those years, that was just quantity time -- it wasn't a lot of quality time; and that's what I'm able to give them now, where in the past I wasn't able to spend that quality time.

How exciting has it been for you to see your brother Michael succeed as much as he has over the past couple seasons at DEI?

Darrell Waltrip: I've always worried about Michael because I always knew he could drive a racecar. Until he won the Daytona 500 in 2001, I had always said he was the best guy out there that hadn't won a race.

He just never was in the right situation so that he could show what he could do. But he had a ton of experience and Earnhardt knew that. Dale and I talked about it time and time again, about giving Michael an opportunity, and when the chance came to put Michael in the NAPA car Dale was excited because he knew Michael could win races.

I was excited because I knew, for the first time Michael was in a situation that was right for him. I guess you could just say that he's a late bloomer. He's matured late, I guess, but I think the thing that really helped Michael was the confidence that Dale showed in him and instilled in him for putting him in that car.

Winning the 2001 Daytona 500 was the greatest thing that could've happened for Michael, but it happened under absolutely horrible circumstances (when Earnhardt was killed). It affected Michael, for about six months after, when he just couldn't get over what had happened.

If you remember, people were saying that Michael and Steve Park were going to be out at DEI. Well, Michael and Teresa (Earnhardt) and Ty (Norris) and all of them sat down and Teresa told Michael he had to get focused back on what Dale hired him to do -- that was what Dale would expect him to do.

They had a really great pep talk with Michael and from that point on, he has been driving the best I have ever seen him drive in his whole career, and this season particularly. He is driving as good this season as anyone I've seen.

The race he won at Talladega (EA Sports 500), those moves he made on the last lap were Earnhardt-esque moves -- it looked like Dale was driving that car. At tracks where he really had struggled at in the past he's done well and it's a shame he's not going to be up in the top-10 in points.

Yes, I'm proud of my brother and he's doing a great job. People sometimes give me a hard time about talking about Mikey. But if he wasn't my brother, he was just some guy driving that 15 car, based on how he's performed I'd be doing the same thing for that guy as well. It just so happens it's my brother.

You've been part of a lot of changes in the sport, but what do you see such moves as the onset of Nextel as Winston Cup Series sponsor and Sunoco as the official fuel mean to the sport?

Darrell Waltrip: I look at changes like that just like I look at the fan base that we've created. Our drivers are younger and our demographics have probably moved from an older crowd maybe to a little bit younger crowd.

There's not many of them down there that have watched Darrell Waltrip win 84 races, or that watched Bill Elliott qualify at 212 miles per hour and make up two laps to win at Talladega.

We have an incredible past and an incredible history, but I also believe that people sometimes get complacent and they don't drive the sport. I believe that with these new sponsors that are coming into our sport, the caliber of Nextel and Sunoco, I think that's good for our sport.

I think they'll have a different outlook and a different approach. I think they'll have marketing ideas that we haven't seen in the past. I think there will be a lot of good things come out of these relationships in the future.

As much as I liked R.J. Reynolds and the people there, who are some of my dear friends, with government regulations they were limited in what they could do and limited in the benefit that they could derive from their sponsorship. Those are limits that Nextel won't be faced with.