It has been 32 years since H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler was tabbed to run what today is called Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., on the outskirts of Charlotte.

This is his favorite time of the year, when for a good chunk of the month of May all eyes in the stock-car racing world are focused on him and his racetrack. This Saturday night LMS will host the Sprint All-Star Race, and during an eight-day span it also will be home to a Truck Series event, a Nationwide Series race and the Coca-Cola 600, one of Sprint Cup's most prestigious races.

The president and general manager of LMS sat down with NASCAR.COM and talked about what's going on in his world, which Wheeler basically controls.

Q: Did the recent controversy stemming from the Kyle Busch-Dale Earnhardt Jr. wreck at Richmond really help fuel ticket sales for this weekend's all-star race?

Wheeler: Nothing beats drama in entertainment. And pro sport and pro motorsports is entertainment as much as Young and the Restless and General Hospital. So without drama, things get boring. I think that's what got us here -- we've had a tremendous amount of drama in this business. People are not going to talk about the ordinary. It's the extraordinary that people are going to talk about, and that was an extraordinary event.

Q: How so?

Wheeler: What was extraordinary about it was, I'm not sure how many drivers would have attempted the pass to start off with -- knowing they had second locked up, and knowing that their car was just a little bit slower than the lead car. It's just so tempting and it's so easy to stay back there and sit, and just say, 'I finished second. I had a good points race,' which is one of the real fallacies we have in this business right now.

The emphasis, everything should be on winning. Second place is something else. I know there are car owners like Smoky Yunick turning in their grave right now. If his driver had said, 'I had a great points day. I finished third,' he probably would have fired the driver right then. They wanted to win.

So the fact that Kyle Busch made the attempt to win the race was a big thing. I definitely think his car was the slower of the two, off by just a hair. And on a real tight racetrack like Richmond, that's a big deal. So it's like many of those races that we sit around and watch, whether they're at Thunder Road up in Vermont or at some little track or a Legends race somewhere of whatever, and you see a bunch of guys running close together with a few laps to go -- and the two front guys are running as close together as those guys were. You would say, 'Hey, who's running third? He's going to win the race -- because those two guys are not going to make it.' And that was precisely what happened.

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.

Q: Musco Lighting has gone on to become a huge player when it comes to lighting sports venues, hasn't it?

Wheeler: They've since become the premier sports lighting company. They've done all the Olympics since then.

That was the deal I made with him. The Atlanta Olympics, their whole lighting contract was up for grabs. And I said, 'You do this. Make a deal with us and do it at the right price, and I'll sweeten up all those people from Atlanta for you. This will show them what you're really capable of doing -- because if they see you can light this place, you can light anything. A soccer field will be nothing after this.' And they did get the Olympics. They got Melbourne, Australia, and then they got the Olympics in Greece.

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We need to redo this points system to put more emphasis on passing for the lead. And I think more points need to be awarded to the winner of the races. The emphasis ought to be on winning, winning and winning. That's what people come to see.

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H.A. "HUMPY" WHEELER

Q: They did all right for themselves then?

Wheeler: Yep. And we did, too.

Q: And that guy is probably still talking about getting to do the Petty driving school?

Wheeler: As a matter of fact, he bought a Legends racecar after that. Then he later built a Legends racetrack up there in Iowa. So he kind of got bit by the racing bug.

Q: Getting back to that 1992 race, talk about what else made it so special?

Wheeler: I think the great thing about that race was it was probably the most exciting last lap we had seen in racing, because we had Earnhardt, Kyle Petty and Davey Allison all battling for the win coming out of [Turn] 2. Kyle and Earnhardt were in the lead going into [Turn] 3, and Kyle spun Earnhardt out. He just knocked him right up into the wall. And when he did, Davey Allison dipped down below him -- and Kyle wasn't about to lose the race, so they started smashing fenders down the front straightaway. And they eventually crashed right at the start-finish line.

Davey Allison was declared the winner. But for the first and only time in the history of NASCAR or any major American motorsports event, maybe in the world, the winner couldn't come to the Winner's Circle because he was unconscious. So we brought a wrecked car up there and made the best of it.

And then everybody expected Earnhardt to be furious. He stomped into the garage area afterwards and went over and put his arm around Kyle and said, 'Boy, you sure are a good racer!' Because he knew he would have done the same thing.

Q: Is that the kind of finish you have hoped for every all-star event since then?

Wheeler: The great thing about the all-star race is that the rules are relaxed on contact. And the best thing about it is that there are no points. This point deal we've got right now, we need to do something about it because we're not selling tickets to a points race; we're selling tickets to the race that day.

We need to redo this points system to put more emphasis on passing for the lead. Particularly earlier in the race, so you don't have a bunch of guys just running around the racetrack. And I think more points need to be awarded to the winner of the races. The emphasis ought to be on winning, winning and winning. That's what people come to see.

But it also enables us to be able to go once or twice a year and have a race like the all-star race, and not worry about points and let 'er hang loose. You know, that's a race where the crew chief says, 'Bring me back the steering wheel or the million dollars.' No one ever remembers who finishes second. The only second-place finisher I can even think of right now is Kyle Petty, because he crashed at the start-finish line with Davey Allison in that '92 race. That's it.

It also may be a portent of what we may see way down the road in racing. You may see us go to shorter type races like that.

Q: Some drivers have suggested shorter races recently ... but wouldn't that hurt concession stand sales from your standpoint?

Wheeler: If you keep people at the facility the same number of hours, it actually would work out better if the format of all races was more like the format of the all-star race because people would have a break then. Right now we're the only sport that doesn't have any breaks.

I think if you look way down the road, there will have to be people other than those of us who are running the sport today. And we may see some changes like that.

It's like baseball. Who says it's gotta be nine innings? Somebody made that up somewhere. I don't believe anything in sports should be set in stone. I think you should be able to change when you need to make the product better. That's something that we don't get enough of in pro sport -- and I'm talkin' about all sports. We tend to get bogged down in the past, and somebody back in the day made the decision for 15-minute quarters, or the baseball to be a certain shape, or races to be 500 miles. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way. I believe in innovation, and I believe the all-star race is a very innovative race. And certainly the fans think that, because we sell a lot of tickets to it.