Marcos Ambrose sits down at the dining room table inside his motor home and glances at his two daughters, 4-year-old Tabitha and 2-year-old Adelaide. It's a typical family meal, with mom Sonja keeping watch over the children, and everyone laughing and sharing stories about the day. The only difference is that Marcos is eating dinner, while the rest of his family is eating breakfast -- 10,000 miles away.

For nearly three months each year, Ambrose and his family live the very definition of a long-distance relationship, one that spans not only miles but whole oceans and continents. In early November, Sonja and the children leave the United States for summertime in their native Australia, where grandparents and the extended family still live. They won't be back until early March. The rigors of the NASCAR schedule keep Marcos, the driver of the No. 47 car for JTG Daugherty Racing, busy until late November, when he'll catch the first flight he can after the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and join his family for eight weeks until it's time to get ready for Daytona.

Marcos Ambrose cherishes every moment he gets with his two daughters -- because they are few and far between.

Technology helps fill the gaps. In his motor home as well as his house in Kannapolis, N.C., Ambrose has a large-screen television connected to a computer running the video-conferencing program Skype. A world away in wild and unspoiled Tasmania, his wife and children have the same setup -- thanks to his father-in-law's high-speed wireless network, relayed off a backyard transmitter and bounced off a few hills to the townhome a mile away where the Ambrose family spends their time in Australia. Ambrose essentially leaves the system up and running all the time, so he can share meals with his family (albeit it different ones, given the 15-hour time gap), and talk to his wife and daughters like they're in the next room.

"It does help greatly, it really does," Sonja said. "It really closes the gap. We're not so far away from each other, really. We can hop on there and chat freely and see each other and carry on and make jokes and do all those fun things together. That makes things a lot easier."

And yet, it's essentially a way of making the best of a difficult situation, the separation that's all too common to the men and women who are raising families and chasing careers in NASCAR's national divisions at the same time. The Ambroses are an extreme example, juggling 27-hour flights, week-long cases of jet lag, and the International Date Line so Marcos can pursue his Sprint Cup dream in the United States while still keeping his family tied to their homeland. But winnow down the distance, and the story is a similar one among the many drivers who forged their way through NASCAR with wives and children in tow. The sport is in the midst of a baby boom, with a number of top competitors expecting or recently welcoming little bundles of joy. They're in for a balancing act that can play on their emotions and pull their heartstrings tight.

"It's not easy in racing. Racing is tough on marriages and families and everything else," said David Gilliland, married 13 years to wife Michelle, and father of children Todd and Taylor. "I'm gone four days a week. The father-daughter dance for my daughter who's 6 years old, my princess basically, was [in March] and I couldn't go. We were in Atlanta. Everybody else in her class is saying, 'My dad and I went and got my dress, and this and that.' It's hard. It's a balance. The next Wednesday I was home I took her out by myself and took her on a date. You just do what you can do, you know?"

Some may be wealthy, traveling in private aircraft and sleeping on race weekends in million-dollar motor homes, but they are all as captive to the limits of time and space as everyone else. Even at its lowest levels, stock-car racing is an endeavor that demands certain sacrifices, whether in the form of long nights spent in the shop or days spent away from home. When drivers make it big, the conveniences may change, but the difficult goodbyes do not. Travel and separation are constant companions, even for race winners on the Cup tour.

"It never gets any easier, not ever, not from the day she was born until now," reigning Coca-Cola 600 champion David Reutimann said in reference to his daughter Emilia, now 8. "It never gets any easier. It never will. It's difficult every time you end up walking away. It's very difficult."

Marcos Ambrose, whose family returned to the United States the week after the Atlanta race, would agree. "It's a hard slog," the 33-year-old said. "It's not for everybody. The rewards are big, the prestige is big, but it comes with baggage."

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David Gilliland had to leave his wife Michelle and their two kids in California while he started his NASCAR career in North Carolina.

Worlds apart

The year after his son was born Gilliland practically lived in his race shop in Riverside, Calif., trying to keep his self-owned team afloat. He'd work 10 hours at his regular job, and then spend all night with his head under the hood. Eventually he and his family moved to another house with a shop on the property, allowing him to spend more time at home. That was until his big break arrived, in the form of an opportunity to compete in the then-Busch Series.

Doing so, though, meant relocating to North Carolina. "When are we moving?" his wife asked him.

"I'm moving in two weeks," was her husband's reply.

They were apart for three months, as Gilliland chased his racing career and Michelle sold the house, packed up the kids, and said goodbye to all their family and friends in their native Southern California. It was a trying introduction to NASCAR's national divisions, but one virtually every driver scaling the career ladder with a family has faced. They all have stories about that moment when they had to pick up everything and move to the sport's heartland of Charlotte, where the vast majority of major race shops are based. It's essentially a prerequisite of the job, and a harbinger of other periods of separation to come.

Kenny Wallace's came in 1988, when he and brother Rusty put together a team that would allow the younger of the siblings to compete in what's now called the Nationwide Series. Wallace sold his American Speed Association car, and packed all his family's furniture into the enclosed trailer that once housed the vehicle. His oldest daughter Brooke was just a baby. His wife Kim was pregnant with their next child. They loaded up and hit the road, leaving their native St. Louis for a new opportunity.

"We came down the road with my truck and trailer, with an ironing board and furniture in my trailer," said Wallace, who has three grown daughters. "I had sold my race car. We came down like the Beverly Hillbillies. In the hauler with us were me, my wife, and my baby Brooke. Kim was pregnant with Brandy when we moved to North Carolina. It was a big turning point in my life. A lot of people, they wait to get their careers successful and then they have a baby. We didn't do that. We had a family while the most important part of my career was happening."

Like the Gillilands, the Wallaces left everything they had known to move east. Kenny and Kim met in high school photography class in 1980, six years before Kenny started his racing career. Kim worked in a St. Louis cafeteria, helping to make ends meet while Kenny toured the Midwest in his ASA car. Before the big family move to North Carolina, they were separated for two months while Kenny chased another opportunity. Last year, the former high-school sweethearts celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary by renewing their vows under the Gateway Arch.

"My wife and I have deep love," Wallace said. "What I mean is, we met, and then I became a race car driver. She was part of that quest. And when you have that love, you do what you've got to do. I went to Speedweeks once without her. I came down and made some money with Rusty and was there for a full month without her. Those are things you just do. You have to have a good support system. I was self-centered and I was selfish. I went racing. Racing was my deal. But I supplied really good for my family, and there's a lot of love in our house."

Perhaps no one took a bigger leap than Ambrose, the former Australian V8 Supercar champion who first journeyed to the United States to test the NASCAR waters in 2005. Soon after he and Sonja married they were in Daytona Beach, where Marcos met with some Ford executives and participated in the 24-hour race as part of an all-Australian team called Aussie Assault.

"She knew what I was trying to do," he said of his wife. "I don't think she really understood the consequences at the time, I don't think any of us did. But you only live once. You might as well do something and try to make the most of it."

Those consequences eventually led Ambrose to the Ford hospitality tent at O'Reilly Raceway Park in the late summer of 2005, when manufacturer reps introduced the driver to a car owner named Tad Geschickter, and then walked away. The two spent an hour and a half talking and watching the U.S. Auto Club silver crown race. Ambrose had just had his first child, and traveled 10,000 miles to shake hands with no guarantee of a ride. All of it told Geschickter one thing: this guy really wants to do this.

"He had a brand new baby when he came over here, and I found that a bit surprising," said Geschickter, who owns Ambrose's Toyota. "I guess as a car owner I was looking for somebody who personally had the commitment and was willing to learn the craft, and to me that was indicative of how much a student of the game he was going to be, that a few months after having his first child he was ready to move them across and start this adventure. To me, it just showed the kind of commitment he was going to have to the process to make it work."

And so it began, the commuting back and forth between nations a world apart, the 27 consecutive, sleep-deprived hours of air travel from Tasmania to the Australian mainland to Los Angeles to Charlotte, the months of separation and the video-conferencing that leads Ambrose's two girls to think "daddy lives in their TV screen for a little while," Marcos said with a smile. By any definition, it's a grueling endeavor. And yet, the Ambroses know they haven't reached the most challenging part yet. That comes when their daughters get a little older, and their carefully-constructed intercontinental living arrangements have to change.

Kenny Wallace's win in 2001 was special because he was able to share the victory with his wife and three daughters, who were all in attendance.

Growing pains

Despite their age, the girls have become expert travelers. "They're naturals," Sonja Ambrose said. "They fly beautifully, they go on public transportation beautifully, and they adapt very well." Racing has become such a part of their young lives, Marcos added, that they think every father lives in a motor home, wears a driving suit, and has cardboard promotional cutouts of himself in the grocery store. Yet as they get older, they find it a little more difficult to leave one place for another.

You could probably say the same about their father, who works hard to clear his calendar for the offseason by taking care of the usual winter details -- like shooting sponsor photos and designing next year's race suits and car paint schemes -- while the current campaign is still going on. The instant the final race at Homestead is over, he's hoofing it to the airport for a long flight home. The only thing that could change that would be a Chase berth, which would mandate an appearance at one of the events surrounding the postseason awards ceremony in Las Vegas.

"My team owner and everybody are very understanding of the fact that, straight up after that last race, I'm gone," Ambrose said. "We work hard for the two or three months before that to do all the photos we need to do for sponsor wraps and race suits. We get everything wrapped up before I leave, because I book that time. That time is not to be messed with. They can ring me if they want, but I'm not going to answer the phones. I'm 10,000 miles away, and it's the middle of the night."

The video conferencing setup clearly helps ease the pain of separation, but it's no substitute for the real thing. Ambrose is a driver who's quick with a smile, and whose disposition is often as sunny as the weather back home in Australia. But there are times when being apart from his family plainly wear on him, and Geschickter can see it.

"Marcos is the ultimate family man, so I think he really, really misses them when they're apart," the car owner said. "But by the same token, I think it's really important for his extended family that the Australian culture be part of their lives in their [daughters'] formative years. I think he does a nice job of using Skype and all that, but I think he does think it's important that they spend as much time around their grandparents and their Australian culture as they can, and they're exposed to that."

“

My team owner and everybody are very understanding of the fact that, straight up after that last race, I'm gone. We get everything wrapped up before I leave, because I book that time. That time is not to be messed with. They can ring me if they want, but I'm not going to answer the phones.

”

MARCOS AMBROSE

For now, they've found a balance. But as the girls get older, things will have to change. School will intervene. Outside interests will arise. Suddenly they won't be as able or as willing to go to the race track, and then the real challenge will begin.

"When we first started our kids were young enough that they could come to the races, and my wife could come," said Gilliland, who drives for Front Row Motorsports. "Then they started school, and they can't come with me. They've got to wait until Friday night or Saturday morning. Some of the races are far, and you get back late and you can't be gone for school. And then they started playing sports and soccer and different things on their own, and suddenly they're not coming at all. It's hard. It's definitely challenging. It's something you've got to be constantly working on. It's like these guys who are having babies now in the Cup Series, their wives can come, and they can bring the baby, and everything's fine. But when school starts, and they start playing sports, that's when it really got challenging for us."

Wallace fondly remembers bounding through the Indianapolis airport with daughters aged 2, 4, and 6 in tow. In the days before motor homes, his wife Kim would park a minivan inside one of the corners of the race track, roll down the windows, and she and her daughters would watch Kenny race. One of Wallace's most prized memories is having all three of his daughters in Victory Lane with him after his last win in the now-Nationwide Series, at North Carolina Speedway in 2001. Because the older kids get, the less likely they are to be at the race track.

"The kids grew up around racing," said Wallace, who competes on the Nationwide tour for Jay Robinson Racing and does television work for SPEED. "Now what I'm happy about is, they want nothing to do with racing. They love the sport, but it's dad's sport. That makes it easy on me. They don't want to go into the garage area, they don't even want to go to the race track. Because they all have their lives, you know?"

Reutimann can see it coming. Like the Ambrose girls and the Wallace sisters, his daughter has grown up around race tracks, and come to see the NASCAR lifestyle as her nascent definition of normal. But she's 8 now, and she likes to ride horses, and each year brings with it a little less time at the track.

"Emilia's got her own life," said Reutimann, who drives for Michael Waltrip Racing. "It's at the point now where she's 8 years old and likes to do other things, and doesn't necessarily want to be at the race track all the time. She has other interests, and I'm glad she has other interests. I hope that way maybe she'll stay away from race car drivers and crewmembers. That's my ultimate goal."

But for Reutimann, a trip home means a relatively quick flight to the outskirts of Charlotte. For the Ambrose family, it's something else entirely. As of now Ambrose's family accompanies him to roughly 18 events each season, most races east of Texas when they're in the United States. But very soon the girls will approach school age, and everything will have to change. Do they go home to Australia during the U.S. summertime? Do they make two trips each year, at summer and Christmas break? How many 27-hour trips in one year are too much? "We've got to balance what's better and what's worse," Ambrose said.

"If you probably speak to me in another two year's time, I'll probably be telling you a different story," Sonja said. "Because we've really had the luxury of traveling with the children, and them being young enough and not being tied down to school. Whereas that will start to be changed, and we will be tied down to school, and we will therefore probably have much tougher decisions to make about when we travel. We will definitely need to sit down and plan that better."

For now, though, those plans can wait. For now, Ambrose's wife and children are still free to join him most weeks in that most unique of NASCAR creations -- the motor home lot.

MRO helps keep the children entertained with a rolling trailer full of toys and games -- giving the dads and chance to drive without worrying about their children.

House on wheels

They sit behind a fence, sometimes draped in an opaque fabric to deter onlookers, and always guarded by security personnel. Within are the motor homes, some with extendable awning or decks, most with a big grill off to the side and a souped-up golf cart out front. At larger tracks there's usually a children's playground, a sliding board and swing set on an island of artificial turf. But often, the driver-owner lot seems a quiet, deserted place -- whatever is going on is happening inside, in the comfort of air conditioning and big-screen televisions, and away from any prying eyes.

Raise a family in NASCAR, and this becomes home away from home, this line of customized, motorized behemoths than can cost anywhere from $250,000 to more than $1 million each, and thousands more a year to maintain. To fans and track promoters, the motor home lot is often seen as a scourge, an impenetrable barrier separating competitors from paying customers. Former Charlotte track president Humpy Wheeler once playfully proposed that motor homes be backed up to team transporters, with an air-locked tunnel between the two, so drivers could go about their business without once ever being bothered for an autograph.

For competitors, though, especially those with wives and children that accompany them on the road, the place is something of a sanctuary.

"That's the best thing," Gilliland said. "I tell people all the time, no matter how bad a day you have at the race track, when you walk into your motor home and your daughter and your son and your wife are there, big picture, that's what it's all about. That kind of keeps it in check. I'm really glad and blessed that I've had my family with me through the highs and lows. Because that's what racing is."

Perhaps nothing better crystallizes the differences between old and new NASCAR more than motor homes, which despite their seeming permanence on the sport's landscape are a fairly recent development. Felix Sabates, now a minority owner of Earnhardt Ganassi Racing but formerly a full team owner in his own right, is credited with having the first modern motor home in the mid-1990s. In a follow-the-leader sport, the idea took off. The arrival of motor homes allowed drivers to stay at the track, to avoid traffic, and to bring their families on the road in what quickly became a rolling neighborhood.

“

If it weren't for Motor Racing Outreach, my kids would have been bored to death. My kids grew up with great relationships with some of these other drivers' kids. They would all play until damn 10 o'clock at night. We'd have to call them in.

”

KENNY WALLACE

"I couldn't do this without the motor home lot," Ambrose said, and a lot of drivers would likely concur. Back in the days when drivers stayed in hotels, families rarely came on the road. They might pay a visit to a track close to home like Darlington or Martinsville, bringing a picnic lunch on race day, or sitting in a van full of kids with the windows rolled down like Kim Wallace once did. There were a few innovators out there -- legendary crew chief Dale Inman remembers Maurice Petty arriving at the race track in a fiberglass camper in the 1970s, and Wheeler recalls having meetings in a Winnebago a decade later. But it wasn't until Sabates showed up in a full-fledged motor home that the idea really took off.

"Felix Sabates was the first one, and then everybody just started getting them," Kenny Wallace remembered. "We used to park in lots that had no electricity in the late '90s. There was no electricity, nowhere to dump your waste, you were trying to find water. [Dale] Earnhardt would park next to us at Richmond, and my wife would make Dale Earnhardt a plate of spaghetti because at the time, Teresa Earnhardt wouldn't come up until Sunday. Back then it was like camping out -- everybody would stay out and talk to each other. Now, everybody goes into their motor homes and hides. Ten years ago, the RV lot was like camping out. My kids loved it."

It started with the top Cup drivers and owners, Wheeler said. Then top crew chiefs started getting motor homes. Then everybody started getting them. Reutimann's first came when he was racing in the Truck Series. "It was relatively small," he said. "Sometimes we got parked in the Cup lot, and you could always tell where mine was, because when you looked down the row, and it looked like there was an open space, that's where mine was. It was a lot smaller and shorter than everybody else's was."

Of course, with more motor homes came more questions about where to put them, and pecking orders in parking. Wallace said drivers used to send their motor home drivers -- competitors don't pilot their own, although Kyle Busch and Matt Crafton did just that for last weekend's races at Nashville -- out as early as Tuesday or Wednesday to try and snag a good space. For track promoters, the headaches mounted.

"Even today, if you ask any general manager what one of his biggest pains in the rear is, it's going to be the motor home lot," Wheeler said in between signing copies of his new book, Growing Up NASCAR: Racing's Most Outrageous Promoter Tells All. "Because everybody wants in it now, and everybody wants the prime position, and they don't want to be next to somebody else, because their wife doesn't like being next to somebody else's wife, or whatever it is. When I was at Speedway Motorsports, I know our guys who ran the tracks, I would sometimes have to think about sending them a 55-gallon drum of liquid valium to just calm them down on the motor home problem."

For kids, the experience is often quite different. To the child of a driver or car owner, the motor home lot means one thing -- a trip to the 28-foot-long mobile community center operated by the religious nonprofit Motor Racing Outreach. For 10 years now Monty and Melanie Self have driven to race tracks in the vehicle, which is stocked with toys and video game systems, and hosts everything from hayrides in the fall to swimming in the summertime. The trailer travels to 26 Sprint Cup events, opens at 5 p.m. on Thursday, and even provides child care on qualifying and race days so wives can be with their husbands.

"Anything your local community center does, we provide those same things to try and create a sense of normal," Melanie Self said. She can recall kids nearly jumping out of moving vehicles, they were so excited to get to the trailer. Wallace said his daughters essentially grew up at the MRO community center, playing with the children of Steve Grissom or Larry McReynolds or Bobby Labonte. Sonja Ambrose likely sums up the feelings of a lot of racing parents: "We love MRO," she said simply.

"If it weren't for Motor Racing Outreach, my kids would have been bored to death," Wallace added. "My kids grew up with great relationships with some of these other drivers' kids. They would all play until damn 10 o'clock at night. We'd have to call them in."

David Reutimann and Marcos Ambrose share in the struggles of being away from the family to pursue a career in racing, but both know they are lucky to leave the lives they have.

Homeward bound

These days, Wallace said, things are a little different. The sport has gotten much younger, and many top drivers are without wives or children. Rather than making the slog up the career ladder together, many husbands and wives in NASCAR met after the driver had already become successful. The motor home lot can feel less like a family campground, and more like a corporate retreat.

But the challenges of raising a family in racing remain, the ability to deal with separation and distance still as much a job requirement as skill behind the wheel. "I think everybody around you knows that's how it is," Reutimann said. "It's not even something that you have to discuss. It just kind of happens. Because if you're going to do it, you really don't have a choice. There are no other options. You can go and get a regular 9-to-5 job, or you can go travel and go race and do what you've always set out to do anyway."

Ambrose knows that he chose this life, and that it's not without its rewards, and that he's lucky compared to military families who watch loved ones go off to Iraq or Afghanistan for a year or longer. Nevertheless, it's clearly trying, juggling a family and a racing career separated by 10,000 miles of land and ocean. Without question, he's relishing his NASCAR experience. But there's also a part of him that misses home, that big, pristine island of Tasmania, a natural paradise known for its bays, waterfalls, and rugged topography.

"Five minutes' walk," he said, "and you're in the middle of nowhere."

Someday, he's going back for good. Someday, after his driving career is complete, the days of 27-hour flights and using video conferencing to check up on his wife and kids will be over. Someday, there will be no more hand-wringing about how to manage school, or how much time his daughters will spend in Australia versus the United States. Someday Marcos Ambrose is going to retire, and he and his family will go home to stay.

"I feel temporary here," he said. "I've been welcomed in America and I love it. But when the racing all winds down, I'm going to be heading home."