The Colorado license plate gives away the final destination. Other transporters leave the racetrack and head east on the Interstate, toward North Carolina and the hub of NASCAR nation. But the brown and black truck turns west, on the lonely road toward the only Nextel Cup shop nestled on the front range of the Rocky Mountains.

Home for Furniture Row Racing is Denver, a city better known for pro football than auto racing, a place 2,000 miles removed from the multitude of race teams and support companies clustered around Charlotte. In an old waterbed manufacturing plant converted into a race shop, they assemble cars and load transporters and try to find their footing in NASCAR's premier series.

"Quite honestly, I think it's a good thing. I'm not just saying that," team general manager Joe Garone, a former NASCAR official, said of Furniture Row's unorthodox location. "It's harder to get going, but I believe once we're done, once we're built and our team is rolling, it's going to be a better situation."

Furniture Row is owned by Barney Visser, a Denver-based businessman who has fielded cars on NASCAR's top circuit since 2005. The attempt to go full-time has been a difficult one, with the team making just 10 events this season. The organization split with driver Kenny Wallace after the Aug. 12 race at Watkins Glen, failed to make Michigan with Scott Wimmer in the seat, and will have Sterling Marlin in the No. 78 car for this weekend's event at Bristol.

But those struggles, Garone believes, aren't related to location.

"The common thought is, there are a lot of negative things, maybe all negative things, about being out in that area. What we're finding is, there are some positives," he said. "Once you have your people, and whether you train them or whether you hire them, once they're there, they're more apt to be focused more on their program. They don't have any race teams there to be interrupting their work or their thought process.

"In the Mooresville [N.C.] area, everybody tends to go to lunch together and they share information and lot of conversations take place and guys jump from team to team. Not that that's bad, but it's just something we don't deal with out in Denver."

For Garone, a Denver native, taking the job meant coming home, to a city where his parents and his wife's family still live. Not so for crew chief Jay Guy, who was well ensconced within the NASCAR bubble in his previous job working for the Wood Brothers and living in Kannapolis, N.C.

"We've gotten some people from some big organizations to come here, and they were in the same boat that I was -- tired of being in the rat race in Mooresville, where people are jumping ship all the time and all that," Guy said. "This is kind of refreshing, because there are no other race teams around here on this level. You can work on a lot of projects and keep secrets that will help the car go fast from getting out by lunchtime."

They rave about the skiing, and the landscape, and the fact that you don't bump into employees from other shops in line at the grocery store. But the distance clearly presents hurdles, most of them logistical for a team much father removed from eastern races than its competitors. Cars are prepared not two weeks out, but four weeks. Parts have to be ordered a week earlier than they would be for a team based near Charlotte, where many of the sport's vendors are located as well. Cars have to be loaded a day earlier on the transporters, which have to depart the race shop a day earlier than their eastern counterparts. (Continued)