Elliott stays grounded as 700th start approaches

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Whether Bill Elliott makes his 700th career Winston Cup start is now nature's caprice.

Rain drenched Darlington Raceway on Saturday, soaking the Busch series event and hopes for Sunday's Carolina Dodge Dealers 400. The wet stuff is forecast to persist throughout the Southeast, so there's no guarantee Elliott will join the 700 club this week.

"From my standpoint, it's just another number," Elliott said. "But I guess if you look at the history and how few people have made it to that point, I guess I'm fortunate from that side. And I guess I'm lucky to still be here."

MILESTONE WEEKEND  Bill Elliott isn't the only driver reaching a milestone in the Carolina Dodge Dealers 400, the 100th Winston Cup race at NASCAR's oldest superspeedway.  •  Complete story, click here

Fate obviously likes him. Amassing 43 wins, 166 top fives, 307 top 10s, 55 poles and one series title requires a certain dose of serendipity -- as well as durability. Elliott has ducked all but a few broken bones and the usual bruises and occupational-hazard hits.

He's also manufactured much of his luck, but he hasn't done so alone.

Such a large role belonged to his family -- his late parents and his brothers, Ernie and Dan. And family, better than anyone, can assign perspective to this latest milestone.

"The thing that we're all faced with is old age," said Ernie Elliott, the oldest brother. "I'm 55, and when I was growing up and I looked at people who were 55, I said, 'That's old.' Now 80's old."

Bill Elliott's rise to NASCAR prominence is part fairy tale, part good yarn. A tight-knit family from rural North Georgia sticks its collective toe in the sport in the late 1970s and dominates a decade later.

Bill, 47, is the youngest brother. Growing up in Dawsonville, Ga., he shared a bedroom with middle brother Dan and had no shortage of self-entertainment. The siblings' father, George, owned the local Ford dealership, and a grandfather owned nearby farmland.

"We'd take the cars that daddy got traded in over there," Bill said , "the ones that were undesirable -- $20-$25 cars -- and we'd go over there and field-race 'em."

	Each of Bill Elliott's 43 Winston Cup victories is lettered on the storefront glass of the Dawsonville Pool Room in Dawsonville, Ga., Bill Elliott's hometown..

Their father, who thought NASCAR would be a natural next step from local short tracks, fueled the brothers' real racing career. Bill began working for Ernie (and the family team) in high school, and Elliott Racing entered NASCAR competition in 1976.

Dan remembers driving a borrowed trailer to Pennsylvania to fetch a race car their father had purchased from Roger Penske -- with proceeds from their mother's sale of some inherited property. The return trip included two flat trailer tires, the second repaired only after Bill had walked to the next interstate exit and returned several hours later with a new wheel and tire -- thanks to a lift from a policeman.

Just outside the Georgia state line, the trailer hitch broke. Instead of locating a welder, the siblings hijacked an Interstate-85 fence post and chained it to the hitch.

"I can still show you the place where the fence post came from that we got off the side of the interstate," Dan Elliott said.

"We've had some times," said Bill, who also remembers a trip to St. Louis to meet businessman Harry Melling, and that shyness kept him quiet most of the conversation. Ernie ultimately negotiated Melling's 1982 purchase of the family team, and Bill finished 25th in the Winston Cup standings that season.

But in 1983, Elliott's performance talked for him. He finished third that season, and wouldn't finish out of the top 10 again until 1991, his last year with Melling. Bill Elliott won a Cup title in 1988 and was the runner-up in 1985 and 1987.

"I never knew I wanted to be a race car driver," Bill said. "I still don't know I wanted to be a race car driver. I thought it'd be neat working on cars. I enjoyed working on cars and probably I enjoy working on it more than I enjoyed driving it.

"Really."

	Bill Elliott isn't the only member of his family involved in racing. Credit: Autostock

With Ernie building engines, and Dan multi-tasking (driving the hauler, doing drive-train and transmission work), the Elliotts stuck together through sweet and sour.

"Ernie has always been noted for having a pretty good temper, and back in the 80s, it showed pretty well," Bill said. "Under certain circumstances, he'd be the one that would throw the radio down or do something like that. At the time, it wasn't funny."

"We had our disagreements, but we knew one thing -- lay it aside and do what we had to do," Dan Elliott said. "We knew what job we had to do to be there to compete Sunday, and try to be the best."

In 1992, Bill Elliott finished second to Alan Kulwicki by 10 points, the closet championship margin in NASCAR history. It was the first of three seasons with owner Junior Johnson, and it marked the start of a much rougher ride. After parting with Johnson following the 1994 season, Elliott owned his own team from 1995 until 2000, when he sold lock, stock and North Carolina shop to Ray Evernham.

Ernie Elliott continued building engines (today, he supplies Chip Ganassi Racing drivers Sterling Marlin, Jamie McMurray and Casey Mears). Dan Elliott works with Thunder Road, the Dawsonville-based museum featuring Georgia's stock-car racing history. Bill and Ernie usually travel together on the weekends. Dan comes to the track when he can.

"Ernie's kind of mellowed, and Dan's kind of gone in a different direction," said Bill Elliott, now in his third season with Evernham Motorsports. "But all in all, I think we've kept our sanity pretty well for as long as we've been in this sport."

His brothers say he's simply enjoying himself, even with this season's early struggles. Elliott is 36th in the standings after the first four races of 2003.

"He's pretty calculating," Ernie Elliott said. "He may not out-drive you on some situations, but he'll out-think you."

"He's a good driver, and he's a smooth driver," Dan Elliott said. "Knows how to conserve the equipment. For the long haul, he'd be hard to beat."

Aside from good health, Bill Elliott feels flexibility -- mental, not physical -- has factored in his longevity. He thinks he's a better driver now than five years ago.

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"Like in the 80s I had a mindset of this is the way I had to be," Bill Elliott said. "If I'd have kept that mindset today, I wouldn't be here. So to me, it's made me a better, more adaptable person. A lot of times I can't get what I want, but I've been able to adapt."

Adaptability is apparently a family trait. Ernie Elliott says the brothers were, "probably more open-mined than we needed to be," early in Bill's NASCAR career.

"We wanted to try things and we wanted to do new things, but it bit us," Ernie said.

"I think that's the reason we were so successful in the 80s," Bill Elliott said. "I mean, we came in and didn't know any better, just like these kids come in today. They come in with a different mindset, and they're not used to doing things a certain way. They come in with a whole new approach, and a whole new deal."

"Everything that I look back on is like a steppingstone," Dan Elliott said. "Had one of the stones been missing, it would never have been the fairy tale to me that it turned out to be. And I think that's the remarkable part of it."