1on1: Mark Green has a full plate balancing two careers (cont'd)

Q: You've got a busy racing schedule yourself, so when Tyler decided he wanted to race, did that create maybe the perfect way to have family outings and get more family time?

Mark Green: It is the perfect way, and I know when we -- David, Jeff and me -- were growing up, we started racing go-karts before we were teenagers, and my grandparents and parents, we would load up on Friday night, drive to a race and race Saturday and Sunday and come home Sunday night.

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He is good enough and he wants to do it and he enjoys it enough that now it's hard because we say, 'how are we going to advance this?' Without the support of some sponsorship or a car owner it's going to be hard to advance it.

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-- MARK GREEN

The best thing that came out of that was the family time, where you were with your parents or your family. A lot of kids, with stick and ball sports, some of it you can get to, but it's not like racing because [racing] takes everybody to do it and you have to travel, so you're there with each other.

It just makes it to where you get that bond more, I think.

Q: Is it a bonus that Tyler's had some success since he's been racing?

Mark Green: It is a bonus. It's like I told Cathy. If he wants to do it, we'll give him the chances that we can afford to give him. And it's like man, if he wasn't good enough or didn't enjoy it as much, it would be easy to kind of walk away from it, for him.

But he is good enough and he wants to do it and he enjoys it enough that now it's hard because we say, 'how are we going to advance this?' I can spend the money to do it myself, doing some Legends racing and we ran 10 Late Model Stock Car races last year and we'll do that this year. But, you know, without the support of some sponsorship or a car owner it's going to be hard to advance it.

So from that aspect it's really hard for me because I know how hard it is to move up to the next level. Tyler just turned 20, so he's still a young man in most eyes, so we'll just keep digging.

Q: And how many championships has he won?

Mark Green: Since we moved over here he won his first title in the Young Guns class in the Bandolero division in the 2004 Summer Shootout Series. He also won the same class in the Winter Heat Series at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

We moved to the Legends class and he won the Young Lions title in the Winter Heat Series and the Winter Heat Pro title. Two years ago he should have won the Pro class, but Lowe's Motor Speedway management came out with a "Chase" format [smiling], and he had like a 600-point lead after seven races.

But after seven races they took the top 10 and there wasn't any point difference -- 10th had as many points as first place. So he got beat by 10 points for the championship and basically got screwed out of that deal. So I told him we've got a little unfinished business because we're going to go out there and make a dire effort to get that title that they took from us.

Q: What's his racing program going to be for 2009?

Mark Green: We've run Legends cars quite a bit around Charlotte. They run the Summer Shootout Series at Lowe's, which is a pretty good event because it gets a lot of exposure on SPEED. So we're going to do that, running in the Pro division. We've rebuilt our car and we've got it ready to go.

We've got a Late Model Stock car that we're going to run around Caraway [Speedway], Hickory [Speedway] and Tri-County [Speedway] -- we're going to run around home and we'll do that, financially, as many races as we can do.

So it's not a lot, but it keeps him driving and it keeps that flow going. We can't afford to run an ARCA car or a [Camping World] East car, just because of the financial part of it. So we just financially do what we can do and hopefully we can attract maybe some sponsorship or a car owner that has the opportunity to give somebody a chance. (Continued)