Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 17, 1992 TAG: 9201170079
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTE, N.C. LENGTH: Medium
GIBBS SKIPS RACING TOUR FOR OTHER TEAM
Joe Gibbs, the world's hardest-working football coach, has a little game to play in nine days, so he was too busy Thursday to fly to Charlotte to talk about his new Winston Cup team.He was planning to jet down for a one-hour visit, but at 1 a.m. Thursday, he realized he had too much to do. The upcoming game is, after all, the Super Bowl.
So he made a bunch of phone calls, woke up a bunch of people and managed to arrange a television satellite hook-up from the locker room of Redskins Park outside Washington to the Joe Gibbs Racing shop for a televised news conference as part of Charlotte Motor Speedway's preseason media visit.
Gibbs thinks nothing of a flurry of midnight calls. He works endlessly during the football season, often going to bed around the time most people hear their alarm clocks.
Naturally, then, you would expect Gibbs' new NASCAR team, headed by driver Dale Jarrett and crew chief Jimmy Makar, to work something close to 24 hours a day as they prepare for their first race, the Daytona 500 on Feb. 16.
Not so.
Compared to many Winston Cup teams, they have been working banker's hours - 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week. They have a basketball goal erected outside the shop for leisure activity. Gibbs is trying to arrange to get the whole crew into the Super Bowl on Jan. 26 in Minneapolis to see the Redskins battle the Buffalo Bills.
The Gibbs racing team took four days off at Thanksgiving, eight days at Christmas. Richard Petty's crew took a week off at Christmas, but it was the first time in anyone's memory that they'd done that.
So what gives?
"We're making these guys feel like they are first," Jarrett said. "You can make this job 365 days a year if you want to, but we're going to try to give them enough time off so their families don't forget who they are when they walk through the door at home."
The idea is that a happy team is a better team.
Gibbs, Makar said, "expressed to me that his big thing was to take care of his guys. Don't use them up."
These guys are happy. They say (with a smile) that they are all caught up with their shop work and ready for Daytona.
And if Gibbs can win his third Super Bowl, this team would like nothing more than to give him a unique accomplishment in the annals of sport - victory three weeks later in stock car racing's Super Bowl, the Daytona 500.
"Do I dream about it?" Gibbs asked rhetorically. "Yeah, I dream about it, but it's just a dream. That's being kind of unrealistic. It's just a thrill to be a part of it."
"I guarantee you one thing." Jarrett said. "We're the only team that has a chance to do that."
Gibbs said he doesn't know what to expect in his first season as a stock car team owner.
"I've never made a prediction in my life and I'm not going to make a prediction on this," Gibbs said. "I realize we're not kidding ourselves. I know we're getting into a very competitive thing."
Gibbs is leaving almost all of the supervising to Makar. After all, his multimillion dollar, state-of-the-art race shop has been open for five months now, and the coach has been able to spare enough time from football to visit it only once.
"It's really pretty much his show," Gibbs said. "He and Dale are going to be responsible for making this thing go."
But the coach, reveling in his new role as an owner, also said, "I'm going to second guess their socks off."
\ In Daytona Beach, Fla., on Thursday, Bill Elliott led the third day of Ford testing with a lap of 193.009 mph around the 2.5-mile oval at Daytona International Speedway, which means Junior Johnson now has the two fastest cars so far in winter practice.
Sterling Marlin, who had the fastest winter lap Wednesday at 193.092 mph, reached only 190.275 mph Thursday.
Other drivers and speeds included Morgan Shepherd (191.408 mph), Rick Wilson, Mark Martin and Phil Parsons (all at 191.286 mph), Davey Allison and Brett Bodine (both at 190.638 mph), Dorsey Schroeder and Wally Dallenbach (both at 190.235 mph), Alan Kulwicki (189.235 mph) and Geoff Bodine (187.071 mph).
Keywords:
AUTO RACING