Childress reflects on career that started behind wheel

As a kid growing up in Winston-Salem, N.C., Richard Childress dreamed about becoming a race-car driver. And through a series of breaks and fortunate circumstances, he got his wish. Even though he never experienced a win at NASCAR's top level inside the car, Childress found himself enjoying the thrill of victories and championships as one of the top car owners in the sport.

With drivers like Ricky Rudd, Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer and the legendary Dale Earnhardt behind the wheel, Richard Childress Racing has amassed close to 200 wins and 11 NASCAR championships, six of those coming in Cup.

Q: How did you get started in racing?

Hall of Fame bio

Long before he became one of the preeminent car owners in NASCAR history, Childress was a race car driver with limited means. Still, he persevered, which is what you do when you purchase your first race car for $20 at the age of 17.

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Childress: I started out when I was a kid. We went to Bowman-Gray Stadium to sell peanuts and popcorn, something to make a little bit of money. First, we went over there and my stepdad took us over there and I got to watch them race, and I thought, "Man, this is pretty cool." I asked if I could go back the next week. I had seen these kids there, selling peanuts and popcorn. I wanted to go back and go to work. He said, "Go ahead." So we'd jump the fence or walk in with somebody who would walk us in and we'd get in there and work.

When you couldn't be up selling during the race, you'd sit down and watch. That's something I really liked doing as a kid, you know, 11-12 years old. Then we started going in even earlier in the evenings and hanging out with the drivers, and going over to them. Guys like Billy Myers, Bobby Myers, Ted Swaim, all these guys who had race shops where we were at. We'd hang out at their shops and they'd say, "Boy, go do this" or "Boy, go do that." It was just neat to see that. We'd go early to the garage area. Well, it wasn't a garage area as much as a place where they kept all the cars.

You got to piddle around and do stuff with them. You got to see the lifestyle these guys lived, which in those days was pretty wild and carefree. I'd say, "Man, these guys are my heroes." I decided at that point, I wanted to be a race driver. They started a claiming division at Bowman-Gray Stadium and I had a job at that time. So I went out and bought an old '47 Plymouth and paid $20 for it. A friend of mine named Jerry Cooper and I flipped coins to see who got to drive it first. He drove it the first week. I drove it the second. And it was so much fun that I said, "We need to buy another car." So we bought a '54 Plymouth. We had to borrow money for that and it was $40. So at that time, we were a two-car team. I just had a lot of fun.

Q: You made your Cup debut in a very unusual fashion. How did that come about?

Childress: In 1969, I was working for a battery plant, doing a lot of other things on the side. And building wrecked cars. Anything I could do to make a buck. By that time, I had moved up, started running modifieds at Bowman-Gray Stadium and went on to running dirt around home. Then they started a division in 1968 called the Grand American touring division. I said, "I need to build me one of them." So I went and bought a wrecked '68 Camaro and put it together and carried it to Daytona and ran and qualified sixth, I think it was, right outside Lloyd Ruby. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was having to ball.

We went to Talladega to run the road course down there. That's when the [Professional Drivers Association] boycotted. I almost forgot about that. When they boycotted, Petty and those guys tried to get us to not run the race the next day. So Bill France Sr. came along, and he had driven a car around there and he was going to race it. He ended up letting Tiny Lund run the car, I think. But he was willing to pay us, $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 -- I don't remember exactly what it was -- but I left there with $10,000 and I didn't think I'd have to work again. Little did I know.

But that was the most money I'd ever seen at the time, so I came back, bought some land, built a shop, quit working at the battery plant. I had quit working there in February because they told me if I left, I couldn't come back. So I decided I was going to race for a living, even if I had to run the short tracks. So that opened a lot of doors for me. A lot of it is about breaks. I got a big break there, getting to run that race, getting that extra money. I ran my first Cup race in 1971 and it was at South Boston, Va., and Benny Parsons won the race.

That was the first Cup car. We bought a burned-up '70 or '71 Chevelle and rebuilt it. That's what we made that race car out of. Then I was racing up in Islip, N.Y., in 1972 and I got to know these guys with L.C. Newton Trucking. Tom Garn's regular driver got all strung out on something, he fired him and put me in his car. So I let my brother start my car for the "start and park" money back then. So I know what these guys are going through. And I ran second to Bobby Allison, I think, that night. So he gave me a job.

That was another big break, being at the right place at the right time. Then we ran for him for a year. He had partners in his business who told him he had to get out, so he sold the team to me and financed it. I had to Daytona Beach and SunTrust and financed it and took so much of the plan money back in those days. That's how we'd make it through the winter, they'd loan us enough money. We got through all that, and kept building, building inventory and getting better cars. I had some good years. I think the best I finished in the points was fifth in 1975. It wasn't a great driving career but it was a fun driving career. We didn't have the money them other guys had.

Q: You stepped away from the cockpit in 1981 and found a young driver named Dale Earnhardt to replace you. How did that come about?

Childress: When the money started coming into the sport about 1978, when M.C. Anderson, Warner Hodgdon, Rod Osterlund, all these money people started coming in, where I could run in the top 10, now I was running 15th, 17th. That wasn't any fun, so I said I was going to get out of the car if I could find the right person. Well, the people at R.J. Reynolds, they kind of hooked me up with Dale. Dale and I got together at Talladega that evening, put our plan together. The story didn't come out like it was in that one movie, I can tell you. We went through some s--- over that, too.

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At Talladega, Dale and I put a plan together to run the rest of the season, because he wanted to get away from J.D. Stacy. We ran 10 races. We were pretty decent, but I knew I didn't have the money to run an ex-champion and he was better than the equipment that we had. We still had some real good runs with him. We knew we had something special. I had been hunting with Dale in South Carolina, knew the people, the taxidermists and stuff. We were at Darlington, got us a six-pack of beer, drove back and sit in the parking lot.

He told me his options were to go back and drive for Stacy at Harry Rainier's, and I said, "Well, you left there because you didn't want to have nothing to do with them." Or go to Bud Moore, or stay with me. I told him, "I can't run you like we are." So he left and went to Bud Moore. I hooked up with Ricky Rudd and Piedmont Airlines. We were talking about me getting back in the car and driving. They wanted a young and up-and-coming driver. They were a young and up-and-coming airline, so we ended up hiring Ricky Rudd.

I never will forget, we had two or three chances to win, but in late '82, we went to Texas World Speedway down there and he won, and I said, "Now you see that you can win in a stock car." So we came out the next year and won four poles, a couple of races I think it was. Dale and I were talking that whole time, we were still friends and we'd always talk about getting back together. So we got back together and 1984, and I like to say, from that point on, the rest of it was history.

Q: What would you say was your greatest thrill in this sport?

Childress: I've had so many. Great would be thinking back on winning your first race with Ricky Rudd at Riverside. Thinking about winning your first race with Dale at Talladega. Winning the championship in '86 was probably one of the biggest thrills. You always got to count the Daytona 500 in '98. Winning Indy in '95. There's so many great thrills, I couldn't narrow it down to one, but those are just a few of the highlights. The championships, the hunting trips, the fishing trips, all of the things Dale and I did together. Winning Indy with Kevin was a special day. Winning the Nationwide championships. It's hard to pinpoint one.

Probably the three most pleasurable ones was to win our first race, win the championship in '86 and win the 500 with Dale. Those would be the highlights.

Q: What's your favorite Dale Earnhardt story?

Childress: There's so many. I've never been able to narrow it down to one, because there's so many great hunting stories, so many great racing stories, so many great fishing stories. And personal stories. There's so many fun things that we did, and in our racing side, we were very serious at what we did. Seeing the look in his face after winning the 500. Enjoying the celebration in New York after winning the championship. Shooting a big elk out from under him in Arizona and seeing how upset and mad he got at me. That was just one way of getting back at him. Some of tricks he'd play on me.

We were just friends. We had a lot of fun together. We had so many of them, I couldn't narrow it down to one. I could sit here all day long and tell Dale Earnhardt stories, but it's hard to narrow it down to one story. I can remember sitting there in an old four-wheel drive Ford pickup farm truck, before he built his big shop over there. He had it leveled off and he had a well there. And he said, "This is what I want to do." And we sat there for probably two hours, he and I in that truck, and talked about what he wanted to do with his business, and creating DEI.

Q: I would guess the most difficult day would have been at Daytona in 2001.

Childress: It was. This sport gives you highs and lows, and you will always have highs and lows in this sport. And that was the lowest of low that day. The highest of high was winning the championships and the Daytona 500s. But that was a hard one to get over. I'd been over at Mike Helton's house the day afterwards, trying to decide really what we were going to do and what we needed to do. We were standing out on the dock, talking with the guys at the shop, telling them that I was thinking about closing down. I got to thinking about it and thought back on what Dale and I talked about when we crashed on the mountain with them horses that time, and I said, "We've got to keep this thing going. We've got too many jobs, too many people, depending on us."

So I came home that night and I had been talking back and forth on the phone with the people in the shop, and we decided to put Kevin in the car. We bought him over that night and talked to him, and he said he was up to the challenge. I said it was going to change his life and it did, from that day on.

Q: What will be your legacy?

Childress: I've been asked that before. I know how I'd like to be remembered, that I treated everybody fair and tried to be as fair to everybody as I could be, and as honest as I could be. I'd soon as rather be remembered for that as winning races.

Q: If you could vote on the first five members of Hall of Fame, who would you choose?

Childress: Without having the complete list in front of me, there's so many greats there. It was just such an honor to have me be picked in that group. I mean, it's a huge honor to be named in the group with the great, great pioneers of the sport. Some of the people who took the sport to where it is today, that helped make it to where we can do what we're doing with it. We have to be able to leave the sport ourselves for the younger generation, to where they can carry it on to the next level.

I think that's very important. A lot of people sort of overlook that. You want to leave the sport better, when you do have to go, than it was when you were here. And leave it there for other people to carry on.

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