Carter welcomes back self, McMurray to Victory Lane (cont'd)

"A lot of guys had a hand in it. We were watching the last 10 laps and our engineer, Derek Stamets, wouldn't look. I kept hitting him on the shoulder telling him he should be watching this. Then with a couple laps to go I hit him on the shoulder again and said, 'This is getting good, you better watch,' but he would not look up so we had some fun with that.

"On the last lap I thought, well, we might win this thing. Then he came off of Turn 4 and I thought, well, we're going to finish second. But we had the perfect pit stall to watch the finish, directly across from the finish line and we could see it. I mean we could see it just as perfect as it could be. I was 99.9 percent certain we had won."

And when you were 100 percent certain?

"When I finally knew for sure, I looked up and everyone was gone," Carter said.

They were all headed for Victory Lane.

And who was the first person Carter ran into on put road? Donnie Wingo.

"He said congratulations and gave me a big hug," Carter said.

To win the Pepsi 400, McMurray had to recover from a penalty for dipping below the yellow "out-of-bounds" line to make a pass. Carter simply told his driver to stay cool and things would be OK.

"I was fine with it. I saw the replay. I don't think NASCAR is trying to hurt you. They just want to make the playing field even. If you've got a decent car the chances of getting the Lucky Dog were good. It would only be a matter of time. The caution came out and the whole thing turned out to be very fortunate. We wanted to change spring rubbers but you would not want to do that under green or even yellow if you were at the front of the field. You would end up at the back and things can happen back there. Since we were already at the back it didn't make any difference so we changed the spring rubbers because the car was too tight. We needed to loosen it up. I think he was loose the rest of the night."

I'll say.

This was the second win for Carter as a crew chief. He won with Rusty Wallace at Martinsville in 2004. His road to No. 2 was about as difficult as McMurray's path on Saturday.

At the end of the 2005 season he was working with Wallace, who was retiring, at Penske Racing. Kurt Busch was coming in. Roger Penske called Carter into his office and said he wanted to make a change. He wanted Carter to stay on and mange the Nextel Cup operation, but Roy McCauley would be the new crew chief. Penske wanted things to be more "engineering-driven." He asked Carter what he thought.

"I thought it was cool that he asked me. I told him it's your race team; if you want to make a change, make it. But I've always been competitive. I like to be at the track, working on the cars. That's the kind of job I would love to have later in my career but right now I want to be a crew chief."

Penske asked Carter to think about it over Christmas but even after the holiday, Larry did not change his mind. He wanted to move on and Penske released him from his contract.

"I was just driving around one day after that and Michael Waltrip called and asked what I was doing. I told him I was waiting for an apple to fall and he said, 'One just hit you in the head.'

"I thought going over there [to Michael Waltrip Racing] would be a good move. Toyota had the potential to do well, and they still do. But there, the expectations were very high. People were looking for immediate results. And the closer you get to the moment when it is time to produce, the greater the pressure gets. I told them immediate success was two years down the road. I tried to tell them we could miss 20 races this year and that was a legitimate possibility. Some of the people involved figured no way, that in a couple of weeks we'll be just like Hendrick [Motorsports]."

That didn't happen. And when McMurray called in early December of 2006, Carter was ready for a new opportunity, one that has already paid off with a win.

"A bunch of people worked for six months on this team to try and win a race, and every time you win one whether it's a week, a month or a year in-between, you put so much time and effort into it that it's a big release when you win. You know the guys you're competing against are the best at what they do in the biggest series that there is, so it's quite an accomplishment."

Now I could hear the passion, and satisfaction, in his voice.

"I just came out of that meeting this morning and told the guys it's time to go to Chicago and do it again, but enjoy it. Enjoy telling your family about it. Enjoy talking about it. Don't forget it.

"Daytona and Indy are the two big places we go to. I thought, man, if I could just win a race as a crew chief. Then after winning one I thought, man, now I need to win at Daytona or Indy."

Carter does not take his cell phone to the pit box.

"I left it in the truck like I do every week. I don't really have a lot to do in tear down so I walked down to the truck to check my phone. I must have had 17 or 18 messages." (Continued)