Most people couldn’t quantify the exact duration of the moment that forever changed their lives. For NASCAR driver Matt Kenseth, the payoff for half a lifetime spent beneath the hood of a car would be decided in less than a tenth of a second — .092 seconds, to be precise.
It could have gone either way. By mid-February of 1998, things were looking down for Robbie Reiser’s Busch Series race team and Kenseth, the virtually unknown driver Reiser had hired to replace another virtually unknown, more crash-prone driver who’d been injured. Without an official sponsor to pay the bills, the team lacked the equipment and manpower of other teams in the series and had yet to win a single Busch race.
At the time, a sponsorship deal with the Family Channel had just fallen through, along with other proposals that never seemed to materialize. The team had landed backing from internet-search engine company Lycos for a single race at Daytona earlier that month, but Kenseth’s sixth-place finish in that race, while impressive for a team only predicted to finish somewhere in the top 20, hadn’t been enough to impress the company.
When the team showed up for the Goodwrench 200 at the Rockingham, NC, racetrack on February 21, the Lycos logo they hadn’t bothered to remove was still emblazoned on their sponsorless car. The members of the pit crew, none of whom had ever been part of a team that had won at this level, lacked uniforms. It was doubtful the Reiser team could afford to keep racing for more than a few weeks.
But they did have one thing going for them that hadn’t cost them a thing to acquire. Every day the previous winter, the crew, who doubled as mechanics during the week, had carved out time to practice pit stops, whittling their time down for that all-important, make-or-break pit stop that, given the team’s finances, might or might not ever happen.
Their work finally paid off at Rockingham. Kenseth, who’d started the 197-lap Goodwrench 200 race in 27th position, spent most of the race cautiously passing drivers one by one, eventually working his way up to fifth place. Winston Cup driver Jeff Burton dominated the race until lap 152, when a problem with his left rear tire during a pit stop left him in ninth place. In the meantime, the flawless pit stop by the Reiser crew that was months in the making pushed Kenseth to third place. By lap 175, Kenseth had slid into second place, several car lengths behind then up-and-coming driver Tony Stewart, who, like Kenseth, had yet to win a race in the Busch series.
With just two laps to go, Kenseth made a decision that would shape the rest of his career. Because of heavy lap traffic, to get around Stewart, he’d have to push him out of the way. Were Kenseth to lose control or crash in the process, he’d risk a back-of-the-pack finish or no finish at all, which would almost certainly spell the end for his team.
Kenseth, known today for his cautious driving style, went for it. In the process, he bet the endless hours he’d spent beneath the hood of a car, most of his father’s life savings spent getting him here, his own career and the careers of his crew and team owner on one thing — his ability to control his race car.
With just two laps to go, Kenseth pulled even with Stewart on the backstretch, slamming his car into Stewart’s. It wasn’t enough. Kenseth regrouped to make his final assault. Turns two and three flew by as the two battled for position. Then in the last turn of the last lap, Kenseth bumped Stewart again from behind, blasting past him on the inside as Stewart let up on the gas for an instant to regain control of the car. The margin of victory was a mere .092 of a second.
“I didn’t want to crash, but I wanted to win the race,” Kenseth told the Associated Press afterward. An understatement, which is typical of Kenseth.
Today, the 31-year-old driver is the current points leader in the Winston Cup Series. He says he doesn’t know what would have happened to him and the crew if they hadn’t won that race.
“We couldn’t have raced more than another week or two,” Kenseth told Creative Loafing in an interview last week. “We might never have gotten the opportunities we have today, that’s for sure.”
At the time, it was a good race between two little known, unproven Busch drivers. In hindsight, it’s enough to send chills down a die-hard NASCAR fan’s spine. But if what happened that day at Rockingham was remarkable, what happened later that year was even more so. Within three weeks of Kenseth’s Goodwrench 200 victory, Lycos had signed on as the team’s sponsor. By the end of that year, the Madison, WI, native who’d started the year as a virtual unknown in racing circles had racked up three wins and a slew of top-five finishes, leaving him second only to Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the Busch points standings, where Kenseth trailed by just 48 points.
By December, Dewalt had signed on with the Reiser team as a primary sponsor, and Luxaire and Kraft as associate sponsors. And then, two years after that make-or-break race at Rockingham, Kenseth moved up to the Winston Cup Series.
To many, it must have seemed that Kenseth had come out of nowhere. But the story of the rise of a small-town auto enthusiast to the ranks of American racing’s elite was anything but.
Few people beside Kenseth himself know that in 1996, just two years before the race that launched his career, he was forced to move back home to Wisconsin after an attempt to race in the Hooters Cup series didn’t pan out. “I didn’t really have a job, I really didn’t have a ride and I couldn’t find anybody to give me a chance to drive their cars,” said Kenseth. “If I moved back to Wisconsin, I thought I could at least race an ASA (American Speed Association) car. There were some guys who owned ASA cars who would give me a chance to do that. I thought that I wouldn’t have a chance to race down here, that I wouldn’t be able to race for a profession.”
Kenseth got his start in racing much later than most. When he was 13, his father Roy made him a deal. Roy Kenseth bought a racecar and would drive it if Matt would work on it. Then, when Matt turned 16, he could get behind the wheel. Kenseth’s career began in 1988 on Wisconsin’s short tracks, some of the most competitive in the nation. Success came quickly at first. He won the third race he entered against older veterans who’d been racing for years.
Though some who cover racing have referred to him as a prodigy, Kenseth credits his finesse behind the wheel to experience and gut instinct. Before he drove, he’d been a mechanic, crew chief and pit crew for his father. By the time he began winning, his love of working on cars equaled his love of racing.
Kenseth says his familiarity with cars has always given him an edge over other drivers who are less handy under the hood.
“I think that helped me, not just think about the driving, but about how I can make my car faster than the next guy,” said Kenseth.
By the time he was 19, he’d moved up to the ultra-competitive Wisconsin late-model ranks, where he was the youngest winner ever in ARTGO Challenge Series history, shattering the old record set by his friend and Roush Racing teammate Mark Martin.
While others went to college or got “real jobs,” Kenseth worked on cars to pay the bills. And on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights he’d race his father’s car or drive for other local owners.
“I raced for next to nothing for the other people,” said Kenseth. “I made a little bit of money on it to eat.”
Initially, Kenseth’s dad used much of his life savings to keep the two racing.
“We just raced at local short tracks,” said Kenseth. “It was expensive. Then, as we started running good, there were people who had more money that owned cars that raced certain touring series or raced at different tracks we couldn’t afford to race at who gave me opportunities to start driving their cars.”
Kenseth says he doesn’t regret the struggles along the way.
“It might have been a little bit harder for me to get an opportunity,” said Kenseth. “I probably started a little later in the Busch series and was probably a little bit older when I started racing, maybe because of the route I went, but I feel like all the different series I had to race in gave me experience. I think it helped me to be a better driver.”
With six weeks left to go, Kenseth is on track to win the Winston Championship with a solid points lead, although that lead has gotten slimmer the past couple of weeks. And despite all his victories on the track, the guy who shies away from the cameras is still not as well known as many of the other top young NASCAR drivers like Stewart, Earnhardt Jr. Jeff Gordon or Jimmy Johnson.
But that’s fine by him.
“I’ve never been a really big camera hound,” said Kenseth. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll take however much or however little attention that I get that goes along with what we do.”
That attitude and Kenseth’s low-key, almost bland nature hasn’t held much interest for the reporters whose attention Kenseth truly doesn’t seem to need. On the day CL interviewed him, Kenseth wandered away from the group of reporters waiting to interview him, distracted by something going on under the hood of one of the cars he’s scheduled to drive in an upcoming race.
The big, goofy grin that had been missing moments before during interviews in which he described himself as “boring” was in full view now as he and crew members bent over the engine. His public relations guy had to drag him back to the waiting reporters.
Kenseth’s lack of interest in publicity may be why his points lead went largely unnoticed for the first half of the year, a phenomenon that might not have occurred had another of NASCAR’s young drivers been leading the points charge.
“We’ve been leading the points since week three and until probably July we never got a lot of questions about it and I really enjoyed that,” said Kenseth. “There weren’t any outside distractions and nobody really thought about us, which was great. They were thinking about Dale Jr. and Jeff Gordon and Jimmy Johnson and everybody and they weren’t really even talking about us being up there. It was less distracting for our team; it was less distracting for me.”
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2003.
