Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406190122
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
DATELINE: BROOKLYN, MICH. LENGTH: Medium
But no one told Jeremy Mayfield and Billy Standridge there wasn't room for them.
So they crashed the party.
With no fanfare, and with no fear of the odds against them, these all-but-unknown drivers have been arriving at the tracks week after week, doggedly maintaining their fingerholds in the major league of stock car racing.
Both have met with limited success, but their belief is that by simply being here, they've won a big part of the battle.
Mayfield, 25, who lives in Nashville, entered Winston Cup after only seven years of professional racing, six of those on Kentucky and Tennessee short tracks. He has qualified for only six races this year, but his time trial performances have turned heads.
"I'll tell you one thing, that Jeremy Mayfield is one qualifying son-of-a-gun," Bill Davis, the car owner of Bobby Labonte's Ford Thunderbird, said at North Wilkesboro after Mayfield qualified 11th.
Mayfield starts 18th in today's Miller 400. He qualified 18th at Richmond and was 19th on the Coca-Cola 600 grid at Charlotte. He also ran in the Daytona 500 and the Winston 500. His best finish was 21st at Charlotte.
"I know if you become really involved with a group of people like this, you're going to succeed somewhere down the line," said Mayfield. "To me, I feel like I'm in the clique as much as anybody.
"I can go right now and ask Bill Ingle [Ricky Rudd's crew chief] or Buddy Parrott [Rusty Wallace's crew chief] or any of them, even Darrell Waltrip, and say the car is doing this and this and this, and I can get correct answers out of any of them."
Although he started racing professionally in 1987, Mayfield's path to Winston Cup began in 1990 when he moved to Nashville to become a mechanic for car owner Earl Sadler. He also started racing a Sadler-owned Late Model Stock Car at the local tracks.
In 1993, he moved into the ARCA series, won a race and was rookie of the year. At the end of the season, "we decided that to run ARCA one more year probably wouldn't give us any more experience, so we decided to go on ahead and move into Winston Cup," Mayfield said. "We could have run the Busch [Grand National] series, but we chose ARCA because it would give me and the team better experience with these type of cars."
After four races with Sadler, Mayfield was hired by car owner T.W. Taylor to drive his Ford Thunderbird for the rest of the year.
"To be honest with you, this rookie thing is not really even in my mind," Mayfield said. "I would rather let all the rookies this year take all the media coverage and get pumped up and be blown up real big. And I'd rather start right here at the bottom and do it the hard way.
"If you look at all the good race car drivers - if you look at Earnhardt and Darrell and Ernie Irvan, they came up as hard as they could come up. If I become Winston Cup champion one day, it wasn't because it was given to me."
Standridge, 40, a salvage yard owner who lives in Shelby, N.C., with his wife and three daughters, has qualified for only three of the nine Winston Cup races he has entered in 1994.
He raced at Rockingham, Charlotte and Dover in a Ford he co-owns with Buck Johnson of Burke, Va.
He ran the NASCAR Dash series from 1982 through 1986, then moved up to the Grand National series. He ran the full series in 1988 and 1989, then a half-season in 1990, four races in 1992 and two last year.
Although it would appear he was headed in the wrong direction, with fewer races every year, Standridge decided the time was right to move into Winston Cup.
"We needed new cars and new engines, so we decided to build a Winston Cup car instead of a new Busch car," he said. "There's really not that much difference in the cars and there's no difference in the cost.
"And we have had more people throw money at us here than in Busch," he said. "It's not much - a thousand or two thousand dollars - but it buys some tires. And we're looking for anything. Like any other business, it takes money to make money. You gotta spend it to make it."
Standridge did not qualify for today's race.
"It's frustrating on days like this," he said. "But if we can get a little help here and there, I know we can finish the season."
by CNB