Where is ... Tim Bender? (cont'd)

"I look back at Nashville," Reiser said. "I met him in the parking lot, got him in the car and got him out in the first practice. I don't know ... I don't even look back at it. It just clicked. He told me what was wrong and I tried to fix it."

Although Reiser told reporters for weeks that Kenseth's status was temporary, Bender was out. According to Bender, a lack of information and experience on both his and Reiser's part had resulted in the team's lackluster performance.

"My biggest fear going into it, which led to my demise, was that we didn't have a good setup going into these places," Bender said. "Robbie was inexperienced as a crew chief and I was inexperienced as a driver, so the combination was not ideal. He was extremely organized, we got along great and worked together great, but we didn't have the notebook with all the setups in it.

"And, I didn't have a lot of short-track experience. I really only had one year in the Dash series and one year in a Modified, and that was really the only short-track experience I had. If I would've had more short-track experience, I think I could've done much better than I did."

Kenseth and Reiser have gone on to countless great things in NASCAR, including the 2003 Cup championship, while Bender returned to his roots in snowmobile racing. He is currently the team manager for the Rothschild, Wis.-based Hentges Racing, a Polaris-backed snocross operation for which son Brett is racing ... and winning.

The operation's 2006-07 schedule consisted of 10 events, from New York to as far west as Colorado and Montana.

"We have six riders," Bender said. "We have three rigs, and we race two riders out of each rig. Each rig has a crew chief. I crew chief one of the rigs, as well as manage the whole team. It's a team that has actually been around seven years, but they'd had limited success up to this point. This team runs out of the Polaris factory race department."

The day Bender was hurt at Bristol in 1997 was the last time he's been to a NASCAR event. He's not raced any kind of stock car since then.

"It took everything I had financially and emotionally to get to that point [of making the switch from snocross racing to NASCAR]," said Bender. "I was out of gas, basically. I didn't have any more in me to go back and do it again. Do I regret that? Of course, I do.

"I was sitting there watching the Busch race at Daytona about three years later on TV, and Matt was obviously extremely successful. I was thinking to myself, 'Boy, I wish I would've went back and gave it one more good shot.' Then, somebody made a stupid move and took 15 or 18 other guys with him. I thought, 'You know what? There's a lot of things I don't miss about it.'"

Still, there are times when he sees what Kenseth has accomplished and thinks about what might've been.

The "what ifs," if you will.

"Oh absolutely ... absolutely," Bender said. "How could I not do that? There's a couple of ways I look at it, depending on the day. It took one of the best in business to replace me. There's a little bit of satisfaction in that. No. 2, I look at it realistically, also. He obviously showed early on that he had a lot of talent, and probably more than I had.

"But there's a lot of guys in the sport today that I raced with and beat in the Sportsman series. Todd Bodine, Ward Burton, Jack Sprague, those were the guys I was beating. It's hard to say how far I could've gone. But I can't beat myself up over my decisions today. It'd be too hard to live with myself. I've gotta look back and say I did a pretty good job with what I had to work with, and I had fun doing it."