Marlin looking to cut back, but never short on stories (cont'd)

"You know, working with Sterling kind of reminds me of working with Michael Waltrip when I was with him for three and a half years," Labbe said. "They're really laid-back. They're hard racers. They like to do good, but they're kind of more just the type of drivers who tell you what they've got and what they've got going on and then you try to fix it. They kind of let you do your job and they do their job.

"So he's a lot of fun. He's been around the sport a long time. He's got a lot of friends, and a lot of stories -- a lot of crazy stories. Every day it's like something new. Whenever you get down and out, just talk to Sterling. He'll make you laugh."

Ah, the stories. Yes, Marlin has plenty of them -- some he can't even tell in a family setting.

"His stories are endless. The thing about him is he's got a memory like a hawk. He remembers phone numbers like crazy," Labbe said. "He's really sharp. When I went to work for him last year, I didn't know he was 49 years old. He doesn't act like it. If you didn't know it, you wouldn't think he's 50 years old. He's in really good shape. He's a lot of fun to work with. He makes it very enjoyable."

One of Marlin's favorite stories of survival to tell is from when he was a kid and tagging along with his father, former NASCAR driver Clifton "Coo Coo" Marlin, to a race at Talladega. This was back in the day when drivers hauled their racecars behind them on open trailers.

"We were coming out of there one day. The road dead-ended and turned right. He was running about 85 [mph] after driving that racecar all day, and he's towing the racecar behind us," Marlin said. "I was sittin' in the middle of the cab in his truck and I was thinking, 'Man, he needs to be slowin' down.' He went to hit the brakes and I remember seeing the brake light come on. There wasn't no brakes.

"He hit the curb and flipped, and we slid across the highway on the roof. The racecar come loose and like to have run through some poor woman's house. It didn't hurt the truck. It knocked the mirrors off, but we flipped it back over, put some oil in it and the next day we drove it home. We had to weld the trailer back together a little bit, but that was about it."

As he prepares to scale back to a part-time schedule as a Cup driver, Marlin thinks back sometimes to the days when he was a part-timer doing all he could to get a full-time ride. He drove his first Cup race in 1976, but didn't land a full-time ride until 1983 -- and then had to wait another four years after that before climbing into a full-time Cup ride for good.

"I've had a good time. I wouldn't trade nothin' for it," Marlin said. "When I started with my dad, changing tires and putting engines in, helping him get the car on an open trailer that you pulled behind your truck. ... That kind of stuff makes me appreciate more what I have now. So many of these younger guys don't know what it was to race like that vs. the way we do now.

"There weren't many good cars back then. You have five or eight good cars and the rest of 'em were field fillers. You had to drive your guts out just to try to get somebody to notice you. When we were in Nashville, I was 18 or 19 and I was running fifth all night and blew a motor with about 50 laps to go. I was like, 'Man, somebody's going to be calling me. I just showed I could drive a racecar.' But that call never came."

That was in 1977.

"Around '82, I was bumming rides here and there, just trying to get something, and then [car owner] Roger Hamby called me to run as a rookie [in 1983]," Marlin said. "He wanted me to run the whole deal, but he only had $120,000 to run the whole year. So we ran the whole year on that, and had a big time. We drove in every race.

"I think made 30-some thousand dollars [in salary] the whole year. And I was like, 'Man, this racing is good. I like it.' We had a good time. We would pile into a van and drive to California or wherever."

Marlin couldn't quite help Hamby break even in 1983, when he failed to finish 11 of 30 starts and managed only $143,564 in winnings. But since then he's gone on to rack up more than $40 million in race winnings.

"You didn't make any money back in the beginning, but it was a lot of fun. It wasn't the pressure-packed deal that it is now," Marlin said. "When I was short-track racing in Nashville, that was with buddies I went to high school with, buddies that you would pile into the back of a pickup truck with and go into Nashville with on a Saturday night. It was just as much fun winning there as it is winning one of these races. You got just as much a thrill out of doing it."

The only things that have changed over the years are the surroundings that make up his weekly office 36 weekends out of the year.