After 85 races and nearly three full seasons Alan Kulwicki won his first NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Phoenix International Raceway. (Photo: Ford Motor Co.)
Sixteen years after his untimely death, the memory of Alan Kulwicki still burns as brightly in the Sonoran Desert as the noonday sun over the vast, bleak and hardscrabble terrain around Phoenix International Raceway.
NASCAR came to PIR and the Valley of the Sun for the first time in 1988, a move that at the time was as bold and audacious as Kulwicki's decision to relocate from Wisconsin to Concord, N.C., where starting in 1985 he would pursue his improbable dream of one day becoming a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion.
It was a very different world then. NASCAR wasn't the most popular form of racing in the United States at the time, open-wheel Indy-style racing was, with Championship Auto Racing Teams dominating the headlines.
At that time, NASCAR was very much of a regional sport, still locked in the Deep South and populated by racers with names like Junior and Chocolate and Bud.
Phoenix was a great racing town in the late 1980s, and had been ever since native son Jimmy Bryan's heydey 30 years earlier. But Phoenix was an open-wheel town built around names like Foyt, Andretti and Unser, not around guys like Earnhardt and Labonte. There hadn't been a big-time stock-car race in the 24 years PIR had been open since a USAC race in 1968. It's safe to say a lot was riding on the 1988 Checker 500, the first NASCAR Sprint Cup race ever at PIR.
“NASCAR made it a big deal, because it was one of the first forays into the open-wheel market,” said former Penske Racing President Don Miller. “The open-wheel stuff had been there for years and years and years, and to bring a stock-car group in there it was almost like sacrilege.”
You could have said the same thing about Kulwicki coming to NASCAR from the Midwest. He was everything the good old boys back in the day weren't: College-educated, an engineer and someone not troubled by the social niceties of the day in the then-collegial NASCAR circuit. Being a Midwesterner with a college degree meant Kulwicki had two strikes against him already. Being a maverick pretty much meant he had few friends starting out.
“The biggest problem with Alan was he was misunderstood,” said Peter Jellen, who for years was Kulwicki's truck driver and a team mechanic. “Everybody thought he was a little strange, because he dressed a little different and he thought a little different. Two and two is four, but to add up to four your way and his way was two different ways. You still got the same result. He just thought different. That's what made him hard to understand. People got frustrated with him. He was intense, no doubt.”
“He was kind of a loner,” said Miller. “Real quiet, very studious. But he was a good engineer and a good racer. He had a lot of experience and a lot of practice doing what he was doing. And he was so organized all the time, he made the rest of the short-track guys look like they didn't belong there.”
Steve Waid, a longtime motorsports journalist and a close friend of Kulwicki's, said what a lot of people perceived to be an aloofness on Kulwicki's part was nothing more than a burning desire to succeed against exceptionally long odds. “He knew what it was going to take and he knew it would take everything he had,” said Waid, who is now vice president for editorial development at Street & Smith's Sports Group, publishers of NASCAR Scene and NASCAR Illustrated.
According to Waid, Kulwicki began every day at the shop by reading a different motivational quote. He also was very, very funny for those in his inner circle. “If you got to know him, he had a great sense of humor.”
He was also hands-on to the point of being a control freak, at least until he could trust you to do your job with the excellence he demanded. He did not suffer mistakes gladly and folks who got sideways with him sometimes felt the wrath of his temper. “I walked into the trailer one day and Mark Brooks (son of the team's sponsor) was just crying like a little kid because Alan had screamed at him about something,” said Tom Roberts, Kulwicki's former right-hand man, who is now Kurt Busch’s public relations representative. “Mark said, ‘He can't do that to me! My dad pays the bills!’”
Kulwicki, of course, made a career of doing things others said he couldn't do. One of the biggest challenges he faced throughout most of his racing career was money. He simply didn't have any. When he moved to North Carolina, he rented a small, one-bedroom apartment in Concord and a tiny shop behind what today is known as Lowe's Motor Speedway.
