Geoffrey Bodine has stood atop one of the grandest stages in NASCAR as champion of the Daytona 500. But not even that experience could prepare the veteran driver for the feeling that swept over him last weekend, when a bobsled he helped design snapped a 62-year gold-medal drought for the United States in the Winter Olympics.

“

... to see them win that gold medal, it just makes you proud. It fills you up.

”

-- GEOFF BODiNE

"In racing, I had my fan base of so many people, and I appreciate every one of them who have cheered for me through my career, which by the way isn't over," said Bodine, winner of 18 races on NASCAR's premier series, including the 1986 Daytona 500. "But in the Olympics, the fan base is just a little bit larger. It's the whole country. It's an overwhelming, incredible feeling to know you're a part of something that big. Very few people get to experience that kind of feeling. To be a part of that is just incredible. It's very, very hard to describe. I'm just proud to be an American and proud to be a part of it."

Bodine's part was not a small one -- along with a Connecticut company called Chassis Dynamics, he reinvented the type of sleds used by the U.S., which once employed second-hand European models. Since the mid-1990s, the nonprofit Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project has produced and donated sleds to the American team, which during that same span has seen a gradual improvement in performance. The culmination occurred at Whistler, British Columbia, where the two-person women's team of Erin Pac and Elana Myers won bronze, and the four-man squad of Steve Holcomb, Curt Tomasevicz, Steve Melser and Justin Olsen won gold for the U.S. in that discipline for the first time since 1948.

Bodine hadn't planned to be there -- the trip to ski area two hours north of Vancouver was an expensive one, and he didn't want to be a burden on those there to compete. But late last week, he received a telephone call from a member of Bo-Dyn's board of directors, telling them that the athletes wanted him on hand. Given that Holcomb's four-man team had been the class of the World Cup circuit, expectations were high. In the end Bodine was swept up in the celebration, and was even pulled up on stage for photos after the team members had received their gold medals.

"To see the athletes do well, and especially to see them win that gold medal, it just makes you proud," Bodine said. "It fills you up."

It was a deserving tribute, given that the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation has 17 Bo-Dyn sleds in its fleet, and used Bo-Dyn models exclusively during the Vancouver Games. What a contrast that was to 1992, when Bodine was watching the Olympics from Albertville, France, on television, and was astounded to hear commentator John Morgan explain that one reason for U.S. struggles was that American sleds were usually castoff models from the European countries that dominated the sport. Bodine investigated further and found out that U.S. bobsledders also had to raise money to buy their own equipment.

After competing in a race at Rockingham, N.C., Bodine visited U.S. bobsledding headquarters in Lake Placid, N.Y., to see how he could help. At first he thought his NASCAR experience might qualify him to serve as a driving coach, but then he took a ride down the 20-turn Lake Placid track, an adventure that "scared the daylights out of me," Bodine admits. "I thought I was going to fall out." The next time down, Bodine drove -- and crashed. He hit the wall so hard that he bent the bobsled's frame 6 inches to the left.

But Bodine could immediately see that the equipment was substandard. "I recognized right away that [the] sled was a piece of junk. It was pretty bad," he remembered. "I thought to myself, 'I know I can build a better bobsled with my eyes closed.' It was just bad. I didn't realize how complicated they were, but I saw the construction, and it was very bad. And then when I found that the athletes had to buy their own equipment, I went back to North Carolina and I figured out a way to build bobsleds."

“

... they tell me if I hadn't come along back in 1992 and put my money where my mouth was, there wouldn't be an American bobsled team. ... And it's because of my success in NASCAR racing that I could afford to do this.

”

-- GEOFF BODINE

Bodine, oldest of a trio of NASCAR-racing brothers from the hamlet of Chemung, N.Y., knew about aerodynamics and chassis fabrication from his days building and engineering his own race cars. The problem was time -- back then Bodine was at the peak of his racing career, in the middle of a five-year span in which he would win 10 times running for Bud Moore and his own team. So he contacted friend Bob Cuneo, owner of the Oxford, Conn., race car-building business Chassis Dynamics, and the Bo-Dyn project was born.

"They'd never seen a bobsled before," Bodine remembered. "They didn't know what they were getting into. They didn't know what I was getting them into. None of us knew. We didn't know how complicated, how hard this was going to be."

Although Bodine and Cuneo examined some of the secondhand sleds being used, they wound up using an original design that placed a much greater emphasis on aerodynamics and produced a quieter ride down the track. The U.S. team improved, and the world noticed. According to a recent Chicago Tribune story, Russian bobsled officials once unsuccessfully offered Cuneo "money and women" to divulge the secrets of the Bo-Dyn. Bodine said the Bo-Dyn's success has led the sport's international governing body to enact some rules changes, something that must seem familiar from his NASCAR experience. Italy, long a bobsledding power, began to incorporate motorsports technology into its sled construction.

Cuneo's team does much of the work, testing bobsleds in wind tunnels, designing them on computers, yet crafting each Bo-Dyn by hand. But it was Bodine's vision, money, and fame that got the project rolling. Many of the sponsors he's courted, companies like Whelen and Lucas Oil, came through his racing connections. The project's biggest fund-raiser is an annual bobsled challenge held in Lake Placid that features many drivers from NASCAR and drag racing. And the effort may be on the brink of expanding into the heart of NASCAR country -- Goodyear is allowing Bo-Dyn to store equipment in its Charlotte, N.C., warehouse, and Bodine has scouted locations in the area for a possible manufacturing operation.

Ultimately, though, Bodine credits his parents and his faith for teaching him how to give. And a U.S. bobsled community once racked by financial irregularities, without corporate sponsorship, and facing the very real prospect of bankruptcy, seems clearly grateful for Bodine's involvement.

"A lot of the folks who have been in bobsledding for a long time, people that know bobsledding, that live in Lake Placid and understand the American side of the sport, they tell me if I hadn't come along back in 1992 and put my money where my mouth was, there wouldn't be an American bobsled team," Bodine said. "They were out of business, they were broke, there were scandals, there were a lot of things going on that I didn't know about then but learned about later. These folks are telling me if I hadn't jumped in, it wouldn't be. And it's because of my success in NASCAR racing that I could afford to do this."

Now, it's back to NASCAR racing. On Saturday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, the 60-year-old Bodine will drive a vehicle in the Camping World Truck Series owned by Danny Gill, an effort Bodine said was planned before the success of Vancouver. Of course, the No. 95 will be painted in red and white Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project colors -- with a little something extra along for the ride.

"We had hoped to be able to put the names of the medal winners on it," Bodine said. "Now we can."