Michael Waltrip has won the Daytona 500 twice, in 2001 and 2003. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

The Ownership Step

The 2007 season brought Toyota into the sport, and Waltrip stood front and center as one of the manufacturer’s debut team owners. He had bought a movie theater complex in Cornelius, N.C., with plans to turn it into a race shop and a spectacular racing-themed “world” for tourists and race fans, and work proceeded toward Toyota’s inaugural race – the Daytona 500.

It seemed that the whole world was watching. Waltrip arrived in Daytona with sparkling new cars – with the chrome wheels, of course, and emblazoned with the neat, swirling logo of Michael Waltrip Racing, a design he obsessed over and modified for months, doodling on it even during sponsorship sales presentations – before finally making a decision.

Then, disaster. NASCAR officials discovered an illegal additive in the fuel in Waltrip’s car, and a period of accusations and rumors began. It was embarrassing for all concerned, and Waltrip took the full force of the heat in a dramatic press conference, one in which he talked about telling Macy, who didn’t quite understand what had happened, that he was not a bad man, despite what she had heard.

On yet another grim stage at Daytona, it seemed that Waltrip was again explaining a death. It was not the start anyone associated with the effort had imagined. But Waltrip took the darts, shielding grim-faced Toyota executives from the worst of it. “I spent three and a half hours in the NASCAR hauler that day,” says Toyota executive Lee White. “But Michael took the responsibility for all that. He took that off us. We didn’t do it. Someone on his team did. But he stepped up and shielded us from all that.

“From the beginning, Michael has helped make us what we are here. He helped erase the stigma of, ‘They don’t belong; they don’t have a place here.’ He did that for us.”

But the racing beginning would continue to be difficult.

“When we left the test in Miami [late in 2006], we were as white as ghosts,” Norris says of MWR’s preparations for 2007. “We knew what was around the corner. We knew we couldn’t make up the gap between then and Daytona and California. We were in trouble. We started throwing everything we had at it – money, people, everything. We couldn’t make up the time. We got way behind and it hurt us.”

Humiliation and penalties followed the violation at Daytona, and they turned out to be harbingers of more bad times at MWR.

Waltrip failed to qualify for a string of races, and he battled through trying to put a foundation under his team and work through problems trying to launch his showplace in Cornelius. The team was on the rocks and was saved only when Kauffman, who showed up with ideas and money the next season, bought a co-owner’s share in MWR and enabled it to begin upward acceleration.

The team steadily began to show its strengths, and Waltrip was not afraid to call on Toyota for extra help. Toyota field manager Andy Graves spent extra time at the shop helping the team get up to speed.

The shop, including the fan showplace, was completed, and it is perhaps the most fan-friendly facility of the long list of racing headquarters in the Charlotte area.

Now MWR seems to have established itself as a solid young team. David Reutimann scored MWR’s first Cup victory this season at Charlotte and is 16th in the Sprint Cup standings.

And Waltrip the driver? What will be his legacy with only four wins in more than 700 starts, despite the big moments?

Says Waltrip: “When you hear somebody say, ‘Well, what’s he ever done?’ Well, first of all, I survived because I was passionate and I did whatever it took to race. That’s lasted for 25 years now. Secondly, I won the Daytona 500 twice. There are only eight men walking on the face of the Earth that have done that. F--- you on that, too.

Thirdly, I won the all-star race. Now I’ve won the Coca-Cola 600 as an owner.

“I understand it [criticism]. It doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. I laugh at it because I understand it’s just perception. Ignorance is bliss. I just get up and go get in my car and race it like I have every other time I’ve showed up – with my heart. If it doesn’t work out on that day, I’m pretty dejected for that night and Monday, and then after that I’m thinking what can we do to do it better next weekend.”

As the driver moves toward retirement, the search for a certain kind of stability will continue, even within the unstable story that has been Michael Waltrip’s.

This story originally appeared in the Nov. 19, 2009 issue of NASCAR Scene.

SceneDaily.com•Jimmie Johnson, Mark Martin take different paths toward winning 2009 Cup title


The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel