Conversation: David and Buzzie Reutimann (cont'd)

Q: You guys got a fix on how many feature races you've won?

Buzzie: I had a friend of mine who'd come down to Florida each year and he'd get out all my old scrapbooks and have 'em all over the table and try to document how many I'd won.

And he come up with a deal I think that was close to 1,200 times that I'd won. Of course, I started when I was 13 years old so I drove in a lot of races.

I think at one time I won 20 in a row at Phillips Field in Tampa. No, they didn't put a bounty on me, but they used to try to beat me pretty regular.

David: I'm probably in the neighborhood of 212 or 215. I've got a pretty good ways to catch him, because he's about a thousand ahead of me.

Q: You know this is going somewhere, though. Buzzie, did you ever start the Daytona 500? And as you sit here on the morning of the Daytona 500, as a racing father and son, what does it mean to be on the verge of that?

Buzzie: No, I never started the 500, though I've run over here at the [Daytona] Speedway with my Modified. I came over here in 1964, I think it was, to watch a race.

I come out here on the infield and of course you couldn't see anything, anyway. It took us three hours to get out of here with the traffic. So I said, 'I'm never coming back to this place again.'

So here we are again, with the kid getting ready to start his first Daytona 500. So it's quite a range of emotions going, there.

Q: Did you ever sit, watching your dad in a race and say 'I don't know how he did that?'

David: Yeah, a lot. I've seen him do things in a car and you sit there and you're like -- you wish you could run it back on some kind of tape, so you could see what he did, or see how he did it.

But I think in his situation he'd always react so well. He was aggressive when he had to be but he was more of a calculating, smooth driver.

And that used to amaze me, because any time the track used to get black-slick and those guys would be out there hung out sideways, smoking the tires -- and he'd make 'em look like they'd never driven anything before.

To me, you had to have just raw talent and ability to do that -- to make the thing do something it wasn't going to do.

But I can't count the times I've sat in them stands or sat in the infield and turned around to somebody else and say, 'What was that? How did he do that?' I mean, it's cool because it's your old man out there putting the boot to somebody else and that's pretty cool.

Buzzie: We can go back to a time. A lot of people always thought we had high-dollar equipment. We didn't. We built most of our own stuff and a lot of times we built David's own motors out of spare parts we had laying around.

For instance, we could go to Ocala [Florida], where he probably won 20 or 25 features a year or something like that, and we knew there was cars there that were faster, but David could always get an extra ounce of speed out of his car and capitalize on the other guy's mistakes.

So I guess there's a lot of me involved in David. And it made me really proud to be able to watch David take something that we knew had less power and maybe some more used-up tires and to be able to beat those guys.

So I think he has a lot of talent, in doing that.

Q: Short-term, as both your careers continue, what are you most looking forward to this season?

Buzzie: Well, I think David should win the Daytona 500, but I guess we've got to face reality with his [lack of] experience. But I guess I'd love us to be a top-20 car before this year's over.

You don't want to set your expectations too high, but we always do the best we can with what we've got.

David: On my end, I'd love to make every race and to get up in the points to where we don't have to worry about making the show, while making steady improvement.

And for [dad], I think we're fixing to get him a new dirt car -- a Modified -- because he's about got his other one wore out. He told me this was probably the last car he'd ever have and I said, 'yeah, OK.'

That one made it three years and he's saying, 'my old car's getting pretty beat up.' And I said, 'yeah, I know Buzz, let's get you something else.'

I'd like to see him win some more races and race when he wants to race and enjoy it. So we'll get him a fresh piece so he can get out there and go back to winning races again.

He always loved it, but there was always a lot riding on it all the time -- the fact that he had a family to feed and stuff like that. Now I just want him to race, when he wants to and where he wants to.

If he doesn't want to race but once a year or if he doesn't want to race at all, he still has that option and I'm glad, because he deserves at least that much.

There's a lot of stuff he's done for me that took away from his own racing -- by a lot. He's let me drive stuff that he should have driven and now it's nice to go out there and see him race a little bit and have a lot of fun.

It still gives me something to bust on him about, when he doesn't win, and that's something I look forward to.