Where is ... Rick Wilson? (cont'd)

In the end, maybe it all comes down to the fact that Wilson is a father. He didn't want Travis to face the same hardships he faced.

"There's a lot of heartbreaks and it's hard in this sport, as you well know," says Wilson. "When you get in it, it basically controls what you do. I wanted to make sure 10 years down the road, it didn't take something away from him."

Wilson is probably best remembered for finishing a close, side-by-side second to Bill Elliott in Daytona's summer event in 1988. Still, he says there were other races that meant as much, if not more, to him. There was a Coca-Cola 600 -- he called it the World 600, old school all the way -- in which he'd ran well and led before blowing a tire. He won a couple of Busch Series races, both of them coming in 1989. He won an ARCA race at Daytona that got him noticed.

Who knows how things might've turned out if it had been Wilson, and not Elliott, who'd come out on top of that long ago Daytona 400 miler? Maybe if the tire hadn't blown at Charlotte? It couldn't have hurt, he says.

Wilson loved the competition, as well as his friends in the garage. They made what might seem to some as a oddly matched group, Wilson, Michael Waltrip, Harry Gant, Brett Bodine, Phil Parsons, Jimmy Spencer, Rick Mast.

"Me and Harry and Michael were really close," says Wilson. "We were all in a little group right there. We played golf. If we weren't at the race track, we were doing something. We had a lot of fun ... we had a lot of fun. We joked and played. I go now to these races and I don't really see a whole lot of that. It might be there ... but we had a real, close-knit group. We helped each other out the best we could."

Gant had more than decade on Wilson, two on Waltrip. If they gave him a hard time about his age, however, it didn't happen often.

"He wouldn't let you do it very much," says Wilson. "He'd pop you on top of the head. Harry ... he was the one we all looked to. Harry was a very sharp individual, a great racecar driver and just a good guy all around. If I had a problem, I'd be up in Harry's trailer ... or I'd have to wait behind Michael to get the question answered."

As far as technology has advanced, Wilson doubts very seriously that he would have much of an adjustment period if he were to get in a car these days. It's not bragging. Again, to Wilson, it's just the way it is.

"Me and Harry was talking not too long ago, and back when I came up through there, you had to drive these things," he says. "They were a handful to drive. I really believe that they've got so much technology, they've come so far with aero, they've come far with tires -- they might surprise me -- but I believe I could get in one today, and I haven't drove one in years, and probably get pretty good pretty quick. The cars are driving good. As long as I didn't just be stupid and didn't run into something, they would haul butt."

After spending time with Morgan-McClure Motorsports, the team with which he got his first big break, Rahmoc and the Stavola Brothers, Wilson was the first driver hired by Petty Enterprises after the retirement of Richard Petty. Wilson didn't replace Petty in 1993; you don't replace a King. Although the results were, to put it nicely, disappointing, Wilson will not come close to criticizing anything that took place that season.

After leaving the team at the end of the year, Wilson made just three more starts in his Cup career, four years later. They were the last starts of his career on the circuit. He went back to Florida, and his family.

"I would say I was burnt out," says Wilson. "There were times that I knew when I went to the race track, I could run my guts out that day and the best I was gonna run was 15th or 20th.

"I'm a racer. I'm an old-time racer, and I want to run up front and win races. When you get to that point where you start saying, 'I'm not gonna get nothing accomplished today,' that's not what I want to do.

"I knew I could make a living doing something else," he says. "That's just the way it is, and at that time, the good rides just weren't available. If I could've run 15th or 20th every weekend, I probably could've milked it for a long time. That just wasn't me. And, at that point in time, I had kids coming up. That was a big factor. I hadn't even seen them grow up hardly. There are certain things in my life that were more important than sitting in that race car."

Priorities firmly in place, Wilson still visits the track once in a while. It's a different world, and he's not a part of it.

So be it. There are things he might've done differently in his career, but he can't change that now, so why worry?

"The France family has done a great job with what they've done," says Wilson. "For an ol' country boy, it's almost gotten too big for somebody like me. I'll always have my regrets, but I made my bed. Nobody held a gun to my head. What happens is what happens. I don't hold nothing against anything.

"A couple of decisions I made in my racing career were bad. It always boils down to money, to be honest with you. I was out to make the best living for my family I could. At one point in my career, I made the decision that money was more important than racing. It was a bad decision on my part. I learned from that."