Conversation: Carl Long

LAS VEGAS -- Carl Long was cruising along, staying out of trouble, minding his own business and eyeing a solid top-25 finish for his self-owned, unsponsored team in the Subway 400.

Seconds later, he was barrel-rolling wildly down the back straightaway at North Carolina Speedway.

Scary? Certainly. Unfortunate? Yes. And no.

	Carl Long Credit: Autotstock

He killed a good car, but in the weeks since has experienced a media blitz unlike any in his career. His car was on ESPN SportsCenter. Sponsors called to help out. Next thing he knows, he's headed to Las Vegas to roll the dice in the UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400.

He is a walking feel-good story.

Sunday morning, prior to the Vegas event in which he started 39th and finished 38th, he hung out with NASCAR.COM Senior Writer Marty Smith for a conversation about his unique sponsorship concept, his personal website and, of course, the wreck.

To start, man, you have to take me through that wreck at Rockingham. You're coming out of the corner, and next thing you know, you're on your roof.

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Long: The spotter had told me we had some people coming up and they were racing. In the middle of the corner you give them room, pull it down, don't make a real hard exit. Just give them room.

Next thing I know I'm turned into the fence, flipping upside down, looking at spectators, sliding on the side. You're thinking, how did I get myself into this position? (laughing) How do I get this thing to stop?

Because when it flipped over, gas dumped out of the carburetor, some gas dumps out of the fuel cell before the check ball shuts off, and sparks are coming into what used to be my side window. And where the roll cage is grinding on the racetrack, sparks are hitting me in the visor and you're smelling gas...

What's going through your head right then?

	"Next thing I know I'm turned into the fence, flipping upside down, looking at spectators, sliding on the side..."

Long: I might not make it to work tomorrow! (laughing) I think I'm fixing to get a little bit messed up, here.

I heard earlier this weekend that you'd already removed the steering wheel, or you'd have driven it away.

Long: Actually, I wouldn't have drove it away. When the car was upside down I started pulling the steering wheel off, trying to figure where I was at so if I pulled the seatbelts, which side I would fall out of or go to.

But the car hadn't finished rolling. So when I pulled the steering wheel off it kind of got to a stopping point upside down, then it bounced over on the wheels, and I had the steering wheel in my hands. So most of the damage on my legs might have come from me beating the steering wheel down through my legs when it landed.

But as soon as you do that, you look out your window, you see the oncoming racing traffic and that there's not a car coming dead at you or sliding. Everyone was pretty much under control.

I reckon I flipped so long that by the time I stopped sliding they had, too. I popped the belts and pulled the window net down, and the safety people were there as I was coming out.

You've gotten a lot of attention for that particular crash. It's been on TV a ton, even SportsCenter. Has there been a more fortunate crash ever in your career?

Long: No. (laughing) It's still pretty (unfortunate) because you lost your racecar. But at the same time, the fans, the media attention I've gotten out of it is unreal.

I think what it is, it's just that the story I have in my racing career is the same as most everyone used to race with years ago, before it became the big, corporate, glamorous PR machine that it is.

	"I popped the belts and pulled the window net down, and the safety people were there as I was coming out..."

I'm still just a racer. I'd say 75-to-80 percent of the fans are still associated with Saturday night racing. They're racing, and I'm just like them. I still walk through the crowds and I don't have the media bombard me. There's a few autographs I do here and there, and I'm happy to do them.

Along those same lines, is there any room, anymore, for the "Little Guy"?

Long: Could be, but the problem with it is -- the "little guy" is a good deal if you can go to one race a month, something like that, can take care that the guys that work on the car can come home, work on it at the shop, go back and forth from the racetrack.

But once you become a part of this, kind of, traveling circus, you've got to have Atlanta cars ready today. Well, the guys working here can't put an Atlanta car together because they're here. So you have to hire more people.

A good mechanic at a dealership can make $1,000 a week, and if you don't have at least that capable mechanic, I don't know if you really want to be out there riding around at 200 miles per hour, not knowing if your car's going to do like it ought to. So you've got to hire good people and you've got to be able to spend the money.

That's where your multi-million dollar people become involved. Right now, the guys that help me have another job during the day. So they help us at night. We put stuff together. It comes out pretty decent because you don't have a salary.

If I had to pay all these guys that are working on this stuff a weekly salary for their income and so forth, I wouldn't make it. But there's lots of room for the little guy, but more than anything else what I'm trying to generate is a sponsorship deal for the "little guy."

If I can get a bunch of small corporate people to become involved - and then maybe once a week we take a lottery for the hood and quarter panels. If I could get a small business that could spend five, ten thousand dollars instead of $10 million, that's what I'm hoping (for).

Maybe get a group, and if you can pick up 30 or 40 five and ten thousand dollar sponsors that are going to be a part of our team, they'll have access to the team. But once a week we go to a lottery and pull out them and say, 'Hey, you've got the hood this week.' That's an idea I have. Whether I can make it happen or not, I don't know. We'll just see what the future holds.

Now, if one visits carllong.com, a page pops up with a bald-headed guy hanging out on the beach. You know this guy?

Long: I don't know if I do or not. I don't think so. If you go carllong.com -- now, I had my name registered for a while, and somehow or another register.com dropped the ball on me and wouldn't give it back. So my website is carl dash long.com.

Yeah, I found you.

Long: (laughing) It was quite frustrating. I had that website for four years and never opened it up. And this guy that does my website now, when we got ready to transfer ownership, somehow we'd lost it. But that's somebody else's business. How do you get it back? I don't know...

Explain something to me. What is racingjunk.com?

	Credit: Turner Sports Interactive

Long: Because of this media fringe, we've got racingjunk, racingmetal, and we also picked up Liquid Salvation Water (sponsor tosses Long a bottle)...

There you go. Nice sponsor plug, boys. Alright!

Long: What racingjunk is, this is a trade site. Buying and selling racecar parts. From go karts, midgets, short track cars, drag cars, this is kind of a classifieds for people to buy and sell racecar parts.

Is most of the car you wrecked at Rockingham on that site?

Long: Not at this moment. I've got a lot of good parts on it that didn't get messed up, that we'll have to transfer to another car. Then, we also have racingmetal.com, which is a company that specializes in racing sheet metal from the race teams, for people who may want to put it up in a bar, at their home or business and have a hard time.

Because you have to get in touch with the race teams. So what this guy has done, he's got himself in a position with different race teams to pick up their trashed sheet metal, paying the race team something for it, then selling it and making a little profit himself and everybody's happy.

Someone might have a bar somewhere up in Connecticut and can get a bumper from Dale Jarrett's car, or whatever, through this deal. Basically, all these people are small business people who love racing. They're race fans first, business people second, and they came on board to help us out.

This is not M&Ms. This is not your big corporate deal. But these people have made it possible for us to come out, get a couple extra sets of tires, help pay for the hotel bills. I don't know if your realize, and I always thought Vegas had really good hotel rates, but on race weekend, it's on up there...

My hotel, last night, the race was $369.

Long: Fortunately for us, Treasure Island sponsored Hermie's (Sadler) Busch car and we got some complimentary rooms, but if I'd been doing this thing on my own...

You'd have bummed a bed off of someone over there in the campground?

Long: Well, there's about five guys over here that are helping me. One guy, who's kind of the lead mechanic of the Petty Driving Experience in Las Vegas, used to live in an apartment of some friends of mine.

He worked on my racecar for a couple years, came out to Carolina to be a big time short track racer and decided it won't no different being a short track racer there than it is here if you're not a marketing machine and have somebody tied in with money.

So he moved back home, and I have him and four of his buddies out here from Petty Driving Experience working on the car, because Hermie's team was all helping him on his Busch stuff. So we were really limited. His shop guys are here, and they've all gone back home, so today I've got his Busch team and my guys.