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Sprint Cup
CUP: Former Champs Find Ownership Road Tough
Rusty Wallace is the latest Sprint Cup champion to detour from team ownership…
Rusty Wallace is the 1989 Sprint Cup champion. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
The shuttering of a racing team is never a good thing.
Employees with families lose their livelihoods. Drivers must look for new rides in an increasingly difficult landscape. The respective race fields suffer as competition loses another element.
It happened again in the Nationwide Series Friday as former Cup champion Rusty Wallace, battling sponsorship woes, announced the closing – at least temporarily – of his Rusty Wallace Racing team.
Impacted were about three dozen employees, drivers Steve Wallace (Rusty’s son) and Michael Annett and the series, which Wallace had been a very visible part of for 15 years.
A skeletal staff will remain at RWR in search of sponsorship support for Steve Wallace, but it will be difficult to ignite the team again after a period of inactivity.
Unfortunately, Wallace is not the first former champion of NASCAR’s lead series to find the going difficult in the team ownership arena. Obviously, racing is an expensive endeavor in the best of times; in difficult economic seasons it can bleed the best of competitors.
Among the former series champions who tried the ownership route for a while and then retreated are Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Darrell Waltrip – all either in the NASCAR Hall of Fame or about to be.
Yarborough, one of the toughest and most successful Cup drivers of all time, started a team in 1987 both to build cars for himself during the closing years of his driving career and to have a base of operations after his retirement.
The team operated for a dozen years and had a list of drivers that included Dale Jarrett, Dick Trickle, Lake Speed, Derrike Cope, Jeremy Mayfield and John Andretti.
Andretti scored the team’s only victory – at Daytona in 1997 – in 371 races.
Allison, who won races in his own cars in the 1970s but built his driving reputation primarily with other teams, returned to ownership in 1985 as his driving career was on the downhill side.
Allison’s team lasted until 1996 and scored no victories with a series of drivers that included Hut Stricklin, Jeff Purvis, Jimmy Spencer and Derrike Cope.
Pearson ran a Cup and Nationwide team from the garage adjacent to his home near Spartanburg, S.C. from 1982 to 1989, primarily to provide rides for his oldest son, Larry, a Nationwide champion. The team had 14 Nationwide wins (13 by Larry) from 1982 to 1989 but was winless in 47 Cup races before shuttering.
Waltrip started his own team in 1991 after winning three Cup titles with Junior Johnson. He scored a total of five wins in 1991 and ’92 but was winless from there through the 1998 season before closing the operation.
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
Employees with families lose their livelihoods. Drivers must look for new rides in an increasingly difficult landscape. The respective race fields suffer as competition loses another element.
It happened again in the Nationwide Series Friday as former Cup champion Rusty Wallace, battling sponsorship woes, announced the closing – at least temporarily – of his Rusty Wallace Racing team.
Impacted were about three dozen employees, drivers Steve Wallace (Rusty’s son) and Michael Annett and the series, which Wallace had been a very visible part of for 15 years.
A skeletal staff will remain at RWR in search of sponsorship support for Steve Wallace, but it will be difficult to ignite the team again after a period of inactivity.
Unfortunately, Wallace is not the first former champion of NASCAR’s lead series to find the going difficult in the team ownership arena. Obviously, racing is an expensive endeavor in the best of times; in difficult economic seasons it can bleed the best of competitors.
Among the former series champions who tried the ownership route for a while and then retreated are Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Darrell Waltrip – all either in the NASCAR Hall of Fame or about to be.
Yarborough, one of the toughest and most successful Cup drivers of all time, started a team in 1987 both to build cars for himself during the closing years of his driving career and to have a base of operations after his retirement.
The team operated for a dozen years and had a list of drivers that included Dale Jarrett, Dick Trickle, Lake Speed, Derrike Cope, Jeremy Mayfield and John Andretti.
Andretti scored the team’s only victory – at Daytona in 1997 – in 371 races.
Allison, who won races in his own cars in the 1970s but built his driving reputation primarily with other teams, returned to ownership in 1985 as his driving career was on the downhill side.
Allison’s team lasted until 1996 and scored no victories with a series of drivers that included Hut Stricklin, Jeff Purvis, Jimmy Spencer and Derrike Cope.
Pearson ran a Cup and Nationwide team from the garage adjacent to his home near Spartanburg, S.C. from 1982 to 1989, primarily to provide rides for his oldest son, Larry, a Nationwide champion. The team had 14 Nationwide wins (13 by Larry) from 1982 to 1989 but was winless in 47 Cup races before shuttering.
Waltrip started his own team in 1991 after winning three Cup titles with Junior Johnson. He scored a total of five wins in 1991 and ’92 but was winless from there through the 1998 season before closing the operation.
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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