You just can't help but like Rick Wilson.

He's a good ol' boy from a small town in the deepest part of the South, a town they call Bartow, Fla., about 40 miles outside Tampa. When Wilson's had enough of something, he's had a "bate" of it. When he refers to children, he calls them "young'uns." Wilson uses the term "Get 'er done," and variations thereof. You get the distinct impression that he was saying it long before Larry the Cable Guy made it his signature line.

Inside the Numbers

Rick Wilson's career stats

Year	Races	Start	Finish
1980	3	17.3	29.3
1981	8	17.5	28.1
1982	8	25.1	24.0
1983	1	34.0	37.0
1985	2	31.5	23.5
1986	17	15.9	21.4
1987	19	18.3	24.3
1988	28	17.4	21.9
1989	29	14.6	19.2
1990	29	23.1	23.8
1991	29	22.5	23.0
1992	1	38.0	23.0
1993	29	20.3	24.0
1997	3	33.0	20.3
TOTALS	206	19.7	22.9

Wilson runs close to a thousand head of cattle on about 2,000 acres, and has about 200 acres of citrus groves. Sure, he has hired hands to help out, but Wilson's not above getting his hands dirty.

Rick Wilson is good people.

Today, Wilson says that he just doesn't know if he could get by in today's NASCAR -- not because of any lack of ability, but because today's NASCAR is just ... different.

"It was awful tough when I tried [breaking into the sport]," says Wilson. "Back then, raw talent would get you a long way. You had to pretty much field a car and drive the wheels off of it without knocking the fence down or blowing the motor up to even get noticed.

"This day and time, I really believe money gets a lot of these kids a long way. ... You see a lot of people coming in and you've never heard of 'em, and all of sudden, they're driving a Busch car or maybe even a Cup car. Have they got that much talent or are they sitting in good equipment? Well ... you know the answer to that."

He's not angry about how money has changed the sport; he's not bitter. The sport has grown, he says, and being a businessman himself, that's what any business is supposed to do -- grow. It's just the way it is. Can't do anything about it, so why fuss and moan about it?

It's a perspective that comes from years of getting to the top, and even more struggling once he got there. It's also a perspective that he's tried to share with his son, Travis, who is 23 and an up-and-coming ASA driver.

Like his father, Travis was rip-roarin' ready to be a race car driver. The old man, though, put the brakes on. He wanted his son -- he and wife Teresa also have a daughter, Lori Ann -- to be a normal kid in high school.

"I knew a lot of fathers who started their kids out when they were 7, 8 years old," Wilson says of his son, who has moved back to Florida after working for teams fielded by Travis Carter and Chip Ganassi. "Sometimes, the kids didn't really like it that much. It was more their fathers wanting to do it.

"I wanted him to play football, go to school, have girlfriends, go to the prom and not have to worry about getting home every afternoon to work and race cars and be gone every weekend. ... He's got eat up with it now. Racing is his deal. I just kinda wanted him to have a normal deal."

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."