ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, August 14, 1996 TAG: 9608140027
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: FLOYD
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
THE FOUR-TIME CHAMP has accomplished a lot with a little at the track.
Jeff Agnew could write a book and conduct a lecture tour on the art of racing Late Model Stock cars on the cheap.
Agnew, his No. 05 Chevy Monte Carlo and his support team of wrench turners, fluid checkers and clock watchers are ruling their own little New River Valley Speedway empire right now, although the pretenders to the throne are numerous and increasing.
Being The Man at the track has its pleasures and its spoils, and Agnew accepts them with humility. Long ago, shortly after Agnew and his guys slapped together their first official race car, they learned the business has a way of making a big head go flatter than a cut tire.
Agnew's current season at the Radford speedway has been more fat than lean. The first four races of the year at New River, the 30-year-old driver all but sucked the painted numbers off the other cars' doors. In all, he's won six of the 18 races and sat on four poles. He's won more Late Model races than anybody at the track and is tied for the lead in poles.
Agnew hasn't been running as well lately, which may have something to do with several on-track incidents he's had in the past month. One of the more recent fender benders, in which Agnew's car was tagged from behind by Tony McGuire on July 20, left him furious and frustrated. The next week, there was more frustration as Agnew finished 17th, three laps off the pace, after breaking a throttle cable in the $25,000 Kroger/WDBJ 7 250.
Still, Agnew maintains his lead in the points and is seeking his fifth season championship at the speedway to go with the ones he earned in 1991, 1992, 1994 and 1995. Additionally, he won the season's title at Lonesome Pine in Coeburn in 1991 and 1992.
Agnew leads McGuire by 52 points and Chad Harris by 60 in the New River Valley Speedway standings.
Rodney Cundiff, a rival driver, may have voiced the thoughts of many when he said of Agnew earlier this year, ``He's awesome.''
Agnew and his crew of Oden Bishop, Sammy Hale, Tracy Thompson, Larry Black, Johnny Sheppard and Dale Moran and chief Doug Weddle remember the days when the team was somewhat less than awesome.
Agnew learned the racing business from the bottom up, so to speak. This is a fellow who launched a career from the heart of a junkyard.
Jim Agnew, Jeff's father, once had a used parts compound between Floyd and Christiansburg. It was the mother lode of components for Jeff and the boys to get a car built and launch a racing operation.
The first ride they came up with was a Camaro, which they'd load on the truck and drive down the mountain to Franklin County Speedway in Callaway. Agnew raced six or seven times in that car before the team went back to the spare parts heap for another. The next set of wheels they came up with was a Monte Carlo a woman had traded in with 150,000 miles on it.
``We won 15 of 17 in that thing,'' Agnew said. ``We thought it was going to be easy.''
Not exactly, as they learned after they bought their first Late Model car the next season.
``We sat on the pole a bunch, but something was always going wrong,'' Agnew said. ``Flat tires, something would break, stupid stuff. Four times in a row we broke down on the 68th lap.''
On one occasion, they revisited the junkyard to pull an aging 327-cubic-inch engine out of one of the wrecks, outfitted it with an $85 piston ring kit and installed it in the race car.
``Sat on the pole, mashed down on the gas and blew the motor all to hell,'' Agnew said. ``We didn't even make it back to the start-finish line. Needless to say, that was the last used motor we ran with.''
Another time, the team was so short of money it skirted a requirement to use the high-priced, high-octane racing fuel provided by one of the tracks. When Agnew and Co. stopped at a gas station to fill up the truck, they also filled the race car in tow.
As with almost all teams at this level, the A&N team, as the Agnew gang is called, squeezes pennies hard enough to make Abraham Lincoln leap from his seat on the monument. For one thing, none of the crew members is paid, which irks Agnew, but there is nothing he can do about it.
``I'd love to be able to pay them something,'' he said. ``I've seen times when we needed something at the race track and one of them would pull some money out of his pocket and pay for it and never say a thing about it. That says a lot about them.''
There's enough money to run two cars now, one Friday nights in Kingsport and the other Saturdays at New River.
``The sponsorship money basically gets you to the track,'' Agnew said. ``After that, you operate off what you can win. There's a certain amount of money you spend wisely; the rest you waste trying different things.''
There is fun to be had at this kind of life, which is good, because racing occasionally interferes with a man's love life. Everybody on the team is married, with the exception of 21-year-old Thompson and Agnew, who has a long-term relationship going with Susan Nichols of Check. Weddle, a Floyd County deputy sheriff, works all kinds of odd hours on that job, too.
Hale, who works for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, offered the opinion that all the wives and girlfriends put up with the sacrifices in relatively good spirits.
Agnew dearly would love to ascend one day soon from the low minor leagues of racing. To do so would mean moving beyond the kind of sponsorship money he receives from local mainstays such as Shelor Chevrolet, Cloud's Clothing and Jordan Oil.
``It'd be nice one day if a man came up and said, `Let's go Busch [Grand National] racing,''' Agnew said. ``I don't see any light to go to right now, though. Our location is bad for us, because we are seen only by the local folks. What we need to do is move out of Floyd to the Carolinas and start going to meet people. Right now, we wait.''
Agnew and the boys don't sit still, though
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: headshot of Agnew color KEYWORDS: AUTO RACINGby CNB