It will have been a full 10 years in April since Tim Bender last stepped foot inside a NASCAR racetrack. There are probably just too many "What ifs ..."

What might have happened if Bender hadn't gotten hurt? What if he'd been able to build on the success of his first career Busch Series pole position, which he'd claimed just a few weeks prior to his injury? Or what if his replacement had fallen flat on his face, which he most certainly has not? Or what if he'd tried a little harder to come back?

See -- too many "What ifs ..."

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Tim Bender

Bender began the 1997 Busch Series season with father-and-son team owners John and Robbie Reiser. Bender had previously found success in the ill-fated NASCAR Sportsman division, and this was another step up the ladder. Despite sitting on the pole at Atlanta, however, Bender and the Reisers found little success once the green flag dropped.

The results were particularly brutal. Eight races with the team brought finishes of 27th, 26th, 29th, 40th (after starting first), 34th, 25th, 30th and 17th.

"We were making progress, but I wouldn't have been happy until we won the championship," Bender said. "We were making progress, which was good. We started to make more right [decisions] before I got hurt. We had a good team and good cars. It was a great situation. It's too bad I couldn't capitalize on it a little bit better than I did."

Then came Bristol in mid-April. Bender herniated discs in his back and neck in a crash during qualifying, forcing Robbie Reiser to take over for the race itself.

Reiser started 40th and finished 41st, and over dinner that night, he and his team tried to decide what to do about Bender's injury. Eventually, Reiser turned to a virtual unknown he'd once raced against on any number of Midwest short-tracks, an unknown who had all of one Busch Series start to his credit at that point.

The replacement's name ... Matt Kenseth.

"When Tim got hurt, I felt I needed to make a change in our team and the direction we were going in, to try to solidify the team to the point where we could go out and win races," Reiser said. "I had to do that, because we weren't going anywhere with what we had."

Reiser and Kenseth formed an instant bond. Kenseth qualified third at the old Nashville fairgrounds racetrack in his first race with Reiser Enterprises, and finished 11th. A week later, Kenseth scored a seventh-place showing at Talladega. It was the first time he'd ever seen the place.

"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."