For NASCAR hopefuls, talent alone isn't enough

Two years ago he won the biggest event in late model racing, a 300-miler at Martinsville Speedway that paid him $25,000 and a grandfather clock. Last year he won on the high banks of Bristol Motor Speedway, and earlier this season he replicated the feat. He has six career victories in the United Auto Racing Association, a late model touring circuit that counts Steve Wallace, Danny O'Quinn and Eric McClure among its graduates.

He's won championships in go-karts and Legends cars. He's competed in ARCA, ASA and the Craftsman Truck Series, foregoing title quests on smaller circuits to compete in arenas where he might garner more notice. And still Alex Yontz, a 22-year-old driver from Walnut Cove, N.C., waits for that one moment or that one telephone call that will lead him to a ride in one of NASCAR's national divisions.

"I'm not going to say it's all talent anymore, but talent doesn't get you where you need to be anymore, that's for sure," Yontz said. "You've just got to have the right things happen on the way. If you can get in front of the right people, I guess that would help, too. It's just hard anymore. With the level we're at, this late model deal, it's all family-owned and family-funded. There's no sponsorship outside of that. It would be great if we could move to Camping World East and run a few races and get in front of some of the bigger teams. But the money situation kind of puts you at a stopping point. This is all we can do. It's a tough situation."

He needs his own version of the big break -- that quirky, fateful, almost lucky instance that's propelled so many current Sprint Cup drivers to the highest level of NASCAR. Sure, they're all talented, but they've also been fortunate, and they know it. Unlike most other major professional sports, where prodigies land on a team's radar screen at a young age, NASCAR has no comprehensive scouting system. There are very few ways to identify the handful of real prospects among the thousands upon thousands of drivers who race across America every Friday and Saturday night.

For a hopeful like Yontz, simply winning isn't enough. There are a lot of drivers who win. But very few win in the right car in the right place at the right time, with the right set of eyes watching them, and the right circumstances set in motion. Baseball pitchers know that if they throw 90 mph, someone will take notice. Basketball players know that if they consistently knock down outside shots, their name will end up on a prospect board somewhere. For a driver, there is no such luxury. There's no scout watching him on a weekend night, no database his name is entered into. Drivers can only win and hope. They have to be exceedingly good and get exceedingly lucky if they're ever going to have a chance at finding the big break.

Just ask Elliott Sadler. The three-time winner on the Sprint Cup tour was driving a family-owned car with no sponsorship when he qualified sixth for a Busch race at Hickory Motor Speedway in 1996. The No. 29 car of Diamond Ridge Motorsports failed to make the race, so they took their sponsor and put it on Sadler's blank vehicle. Soon afterward, Diamond Ridge was summoning the Emporia, Va., native to Charlotte, Darlington, and O'Reilly Raceway Park outside Indianapolis for tests. Sadler wound up in the No. 29 for the final seven races of that season, won in it three times the next year, and his career was off and running.

He had found his big break, in the unlikely form of another driver who had failed to qualify for an otherwise forgettable Busch event on a North Carolina short track that's no longer on the schedule. Many of his peers on Sprint Cup tour can relate -- their paths to stardom began when someone got hurt, or some team needed some equipment, or the right person just happened to be watching on TV. Certainly, they brought talent to the table. But fate took care of the rest.

"I'll tell you what I learned. In '95, I set every record you could set in a late model stock car, won about every race you could win, ran up front," Sadler said. "I took my credentials to a bunch of Busch owners at the end of 1995, and they were like, 'We want to see what you can do in a Busch car. All this stuff doesn't mean anything. It's local track, short track racing, it doesn't mean anything.' We sold all of our things and bought one Busch car and one Busch motor, and we ran it every once in a while when we had enough money to race. And Hickory happened to be one of them. Right place, right time."

Lucky breaks

Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Matt Kenseth caught Mark Martin's eye leading to a ride at Roush Racing.

Like many young, up-and-coming drivers, Yontz has been trying to make his own break. In 2005 he made four Craftsman Truck starts in family-owned equipment, hoping to catch someone's eye. But two of those efforts were doomed by parts failures, and he never finished better than 28th. In return for turning his UARA seat over to Austin Dillon, a Richard Childress Racing developmental driver (and the owner's grandson) who at the time was in need of asphalt experience, Yontz was provided with RCR equipment that allowed him to start three ARCA events. But his best run ended when he was tangled in lapped traffic.

Yontz was one of 100 drivers interviewed for Roush Fenway Racing's most recent "gong show" open tryout in 2005, but says he didn't make the final cut because team officials told him he was too young and didn't have a stock-car championship on his resume. Yontz and his team recently purchased one of Jeff Burton's old cars from RCR, in the hopes of entering the Camping World East race at Dover in September. Of course, that's if the money comes together. And even then, there are no guarantees.

"You kind of feel like, what do I have to do? What else can I do? What have I done wrong?" Yontz said. "I don't know. It does get frustrating at times."

His efforts can only take him so far. This isn't Major League Baseball, whose teams each dispatch dozens of scouts to examine high school and college talent. Although NASCAR has an office that helps bring race teams and potential sponsors together, the sanctioning body doesn't match teams with prospective drivers. Many of the people who act as de facto scouts for race teams often have race weekend duties that don't allow them to scour short tracks for the next big thing. As strange as it seems, NASCAR's top organizations often discover promising drivers second-hand, hearing about them through word of mouth or reading about them in a publication like Late Model Digest or National Speed Sport News.

"I understand there's a necessity for manpower at the racetrack, and a lot of current driver development coordinators are on the roof and spotting every Sunday," said David Smith, who provides one of the sport's few independent scouting services through his Web site, davidsmithmotorsports.com. "But they do make a pretty good attempt to keep up with what's going on in the short track world. It's just that they don't break down every prospective driver the way a Major League Baseball scout would, the way an NFL scout would. There's a lot of hit-or-miss that goes on. And most of the times the hits, sure enough, they're lucky breaks."

Granted, there are the exceptions -- drivers like Joey Logano and Kyle Busch who have been tracked and financed by big teams since their early teens, drivers like David Ragan (son of former Cup driver Ken) and Kurt Busch whose performance in Roush's open tryouts earned them full-time rides in the Truck Series. But in the Sprint Cup garage, lucky breaks are as ubiquitous as tires and fuel.

Michael McDowell just happens to join an ARCA team with another driver, Josh Wise, who has a developmental deal with Michael Waltrip Racing, providing McDowell with the connections that have him in the No. 00 car today. Matt Kenseth just happens to catch the eye of Mark Martin in a Busch race at Talladega Superspeedway, leading the NASCAR veteran to pass the youngster's name on to Jack Roush. The late Benny Parsons just happens to notice an unknown named Greg Biffle driving at Tucson Raceway Park, and calls Roush with the tip. Clint Bowyer just happens to have an ARCA car sponsored by a company that's also associated with Childress, and a friend asks the NASCAR team owner to watch the Kansan in an upcoming race. Joe Gibbs Racing just happens to call Denny Hamlin's late model team owner for equipment for its diversity program, and lets the young Virginian shake down the cars.

And it goes on and on and on. By such amazing circumstances, Sprint Cup careers are born.

"It's meeting the right people at the right time, or knowing someone to get your shot," said Hamlin, who has won four races and over $16 million, but might still be welding hitches for his father's trailer company had Gibbs looked elsewhere for a few racecars. "There just aren't many tryouts like there used to be. There are so many good drivers out there, I think it's tough for people to distinguish who's really got it and who doesn't, is it equipment or what have you. There is a lot of talent out there. It's a matter of going through them and finding out who they are."

So just how many drivers are there who might have the right stuff to make it to the top of NASCAR but never will because they can't get that one lucky break? "Hundreds," Biffle said, without hesitation. "I think hundreds. Because you know, there's a guy racing in Utah somewhere at a local short track that's just a plain wheel man. He's as good as all of us, Joey Logano, whoever you want to compare him to, and has a tremendous amount of talent. But what's he going to do? And that probably holds true for Montana and other places that are out there, and even more in the mainstream places like the Midwest and Hickory, places where the guy's good, but that's all he can afford to do. He can't really make the next step. So it is really difficult in our sport to get the opportunity."

Numbers game

Autostock

Joe Gibbs Racing had their sights set on Joey Logano at a very early age.

After Yontz won the Bailey's 300 at Martinsville, the biggest event on the late model calendar, he thought he had done something that top NASCAR teams would take notice of. But the only telephone call he received was from RCR, offering the ARCA equipment in exchange for Dillon's seat time in Yontz's late model. He took the deal, even if it might have cost him the championship the Roush folks had been looking for a year earlier. But he had been hoping for more.

"It's just frustrating, man," Yontz said. "You feel like you're almost there, and maybe that's your break, and then you kind of get let down."

In reality, the odds are overwhelmingly against Yontz, or any other short-track driver, ever making it to the top level of NASCAR, and it's all because of one simple number: 43. Football teams employ a network of scouts because they're trying to fill a 45-man roster, baseball teams because they're trying to fill hundreds of positions within a minor-league farm system. After next year, all NASCAR teams have four seats, maximum, at the Sprint Cup level. In an age where Nationwide seats are filled by moonlighting Cup drivers and Truck teams face enormous sponsorship hurdles, that premier division offers the only thing close to stability.

And that division isn't easy to break into. "The Sprint Cup Series is so tough," Smith said. "Every Sunday there are 43 competitors. There are 300 NBA players, there are 600 or 700 NFL players. There are only 43 NASCAR drivers every Sunday. This is quite honestly the hardest professional sport to reach at the top level. There are a lot of talented kids out there, but the odds aren't good. Not everyone is going to achieve their dream. For them that's disappointing, but it's also a reality."

That reality is the reason why top NASCAR teams don't employ their own scouts. What good would a network of scouts be to Joe Gibbs Racing, if the organization didn't have anywhere to put the drivers it discovered? For that reason, teams seem content with second-hand information that allows them to fill seats only as they become available.

"Let's say you have five good guys, and they're all out there -- what do you do with them? Do you sign them up and just sort of let them sit there? The resources you have as a race team, there's no college to go to. You have Nationwide, which is very expensive. You have trucks, where you can only do maybe one or two guys at a time. I feel like we have a pretty good group of guys who kind of know what's out there, who the young guys are, who's someone to watch and keep an eye on. Is it compared to the NFL? No, it's not compared to that. But they're looking to fill a roster of 40-something guys. Here, you're looking for one. So it's a lot different," said J.D. Gibbs, president of Joe Gibbs Racing.

"You try to get the best you can get, like a Joey, like a Marc Davis, give those guys the opportunity and really work and invest in them. Like we did with Aric Almirola, who kind of came through here. That's where Denny came from, where Kyle came from with a different team, and I think Tony [Stewart], too, kind of came through that same way with us. So if you find those guys, it doesn't always work out. You don't have the resources to do four or five guys at a time."

Compounding the difficulty is the fact that young drivers often don't have very long to prove themselves. Even on the Nationwide and truck circuits, there's often the pressure to perform immediately and take care of equipment. What may seem like a big break can actually turn out to be a bad career move if it leads to a hasty exit. Because the only thing tougher than breaking into NASCAR's national divisions is having to break into them a second time.

"You only get one shot at it, unfortunately, it seems like," Bowyer said. "I've seen a lot of guys get an opportunity that I thought, 'These guys are going to set the world on fire,' and just for whatever reason they didn't rise to the occasion. Racing late models, dirt cars, wherever their background was, they were the heat. And then they got that opportunity, maybe it wasn't the right opportunity, maybe things went wrong. But it seems like if you're not running good in those first couple of races, you're pushed by the wayside pretty quick. It's unfortunate, sometimes guys come in so far behind in experience, that they don't even get a chance to showcase their talents. It's unfortunate, but it is a very, very competitive, very close form of racing. It's hard to get inside this thing."

Hamlin agrees. "There are a lot of people on the local level that probably will never have the shot," he said. "They read the local paper and say, 'Aww, man, this guy would be great in NASCAR.' But there just aren't that many spots available. There are only 43 spots out there. There are a lot of great drivers who will be in this sport for a long time, and until really kind of the next generation comes in, it's going to be tough for anyone to make it. That's tough, because there's a lot of hidden talent out there that people don't know about."

Four stars

51 Sports

Alex Yontz is one of the top-ranked non-NASCAR prospects in racing.

Every so often, a situation arises where a driver is able to turn heads with pure performance. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was a 19-year-old unknown out of Mississippi in 2007 when he replaced the injured Tracy Hines at Tony Stewart Racing -- an unlucky break for Hines, but a very fortunate one for Stenhouse, who took advantage. He went on to record seven combined victories in sprint and midget action, and Jack Roush noticed. The NASCAR team owner signed Stenhouse and put him in a car in the ARCA series, where the driver is currently third in points.

"That magical season still has significance," Smith said. "Gracing the pages of National Speed Sport still counts for something. What young short track racers do every Friday and Saturday night doesn't go unnoticed. As a matter of fact, they're scrutinized very heavily. But the fact is, there's not a lot of formal scouting. Teams and team officials may not be able to point out who a driver is if he's not wearing his driver's suit and helmet. Maybe that's something that will change down the road."

Smith's efforts may have something to do with that. He started his Web site as a sophomore at the University of Florida, and began to receive almost immediate feedback from officials on NASCAR teams. He ranks NASCAR prospects (Logano is No. 1), non-NASCAR prospects (Stenhouse is No. 1), as well drivers by age from 16 to 24. He posts recent short-track race winners, driver resumes, and even ranks driver development programs (Roush Fenway is currently tops). He's already seen more than 100 races in person this season, and estimates that he spends 48 of every 52 weeks on the road.

To anyone who's ever read Allen Wallace's SuperPrep or Bob Gibbons' All-Star Report -- recruiting newsletters specializing in college football and basketball, respectively -- it all seems very familiar, right down to the star ranking that Smith awards prospective drivers. Yontz earns four out of a possible five stars, and is currently ranked 16th on Smith's list of non-NASCAR drivers. How someone who's won at places like Martinsville and Bristol can be invisible to owners at NASCAR's upper echelon baffles even the talent scout.

"For him to really win big events like that and continue to fly under the radar is pretty fascinating, because you wouldn't see that in other sports," Smith said. "You wouldn't see somebody like [Davidson guard] Stephen Curry go unnoticed in the NCAA [basketball] tournament. Every NBA scout knows he did that. Well, winning at Bristol and Martinsville is a similar feat. And it doesn't guarantee him a spot at the top level."

Nothing does. All hopeful drivers search for that rare, almost magical confluence of talent, luck, and timing, but so much of it is beyond their control. They don't know when a representative of a NASCAR team might be tuned in, when a seat is about to come open, when their name is being whispered into a certain ear. All they can do is win, and shake hands, and win, and make connections, and win some more. A lifetime of work can come down to one night with the right person watching. And if a fuel line bursts -- well, that's racing.

"You have to have things fall in place," Kasey Kahne said. "You have to win lots of races, you have to always be up front. It's the nights that the right people are watching that count. If you're in the back that night, then it doesn't matter. You have to consistently be a guy that runs up front. I think if you do that, there are enough people out there these days looking for the next young driver or the next up-and-coming driver, that I think a lot of kids are found these days. And some of them are found, and they don't work out, and then they go and find someone else. There are plenty of people looking."

So Yontz will keep trying. There's little time to rue what might have been -- there's a car to prepare for a race next weekend on a short track in Callaway, Va. He keeps going, keeps moving forward, keeps hoping that one day the big break that's befallen so many other drivers will one day find him.

"That's my motivation every day, just thinking that that day is going to come," he said. "You have to keep on your A game, you have to keep yourself motivated like that, keep thinking, 'It's going to come.' Who knows, you may get the call today or tomorrow or next month. But you need to do all you can do to make yourself look good. You never know who'll be watching."