1on1: Humpy Wheeler (cont'd)

Q: You said that, in a way, you were glad to see Clint Bowyer win that race. Why?

Wheeler: It was good to see Clint Bowyer win because he's kind of a throwback driver, in my opinion, to the drivers of yesteryear. Here's a guy who was sitting in a body shop, putting bondo on cars like Earnhardt was before Rod Osterlund hired him [as a driver]. And Richard Childress called him, and Clint washed the bondo off his hands and came to North Carolina. So it's good to see a guy like that doing well.

Q: You've always been pretty close to the Earnhardt family, though; how do you think Junior is handling the frustration of his current 73-race winless streak in points events?

Wheeler: I know it was terribly disappointing to Dale Jr. I put a sign up on the toolbox in Earnhardt's pit [during recent testing at LMS] and think he'll use it as a rallying point. I just got a piece of duct tape and a Sharpie and I just wrote, 'It'll happen.' Those guys got a charge out of that, I think. The fact that they've come so close this year, and it just hasn't happened, then it gets frustrating.

Being around race drivers as long as I have, after a guy wins some races and he goes through a long drought, it really starts working on that teeny part of his brain that's real negative and says, 'Hey, you may never win another one -- because there's no guarantee that you will.' So that puts doubt in the brain, and that doubt affects the confidence -- and confidence has so much to do with driving a racecar.

Going through a drought like that is nothing new. His father went through one. Richard Petty went through one. It really is a mind-numbing thing when you do that because you've got all these people working on your car back at the shop -- 80 people or whatever it is. They want the car to win; the car owner wants to win; the sponsor has thousands of people working for him and they all want you to win; and then you've got millions of fans who want you to win. And you're not winning. It's just frustrating.

Q: Who was to blame for the incident, in your mind?

Wheeler: As Bill Elliott said, 'It's one of them racin' deals -- two cars trying to go into a very narrow area, and something had to give.' The fact is both of them gave. Was there evil intent? No, I don't think there was any evil in it. I think Kyle Busch wanted to win the race; and I think certainly that Earnhardt Jr. wanted to maintain where he was. It was two insurmountable forces, and they didn't make it. And meanwhile, Clint Bowyer gained a big win off that.

Q: You wouldn't mind a finish like that for your all-star race, would you?

Wheeler: No, I wouldn't. And you know the all-star race is perfectly capable of having finishes like that. So I'd like to see that happen. That would help everybody. We've had some dull races this year. So anything that will liven things up at this point is something I love.

Q: Do you have a favorite all-star moment?

Wheeler: The seminal moment here undoubtedly was 1992. We had announced six months before that we were going to light the track, and everybody said we were crazy and you can't do it and all that kind of stuff. I wondered there for a while whether we could do it or not, because the first couple of attempts we made to make it work didn't, in fact, work.

Q: How much trouble did you actually have?

Wheeler: We had terrible trouble. It had never been done before. But I figured if you could light a half-mile track, you could light a mile-and-a-half track. The problem was, when you stretch the lighting out that far, it does produce some challenges that you don't have when you're just doing a small area. That was the largest area ever lit for a sports event in the history of sports at the time.

So we had some real problems early on. But we brought Musco [Lighting] in -- a bunch of guys from a little town in Iowa named Muscatine. I think the turning point -- and not many people know this -- but the guy who ran the company, he was a brilliant engineer. And he says, 'I want to take the Petty driving school.' I said, 'Why do you want to do that?' And he said, 'I want to see what these guys go through.'

And after he took the Petty driving school, he saw what he had to do. I didn't want any poles in the infield, because I didn't want that picket fence effect. That would have negated the whole thing, to me. And that's when he came up with the reflective mirrors, which was really ingenious. (Continued)