A tale of three men: Robby, Bobby and James....

  Robby Gordon: a season up-in-the-air (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   LOUDON, N.H.
   Remember Alan Kulwicki?
   Remember Alan Kulwicki.
   If NASCAR racing is all about dreams and making dreams come true, then consider this week Robby Gordon and Bobby Labonte and James Finch.
   Mild-mannered Labonte in rowdy Robby's car here this weekend? Labonte still recalls dodging Gordon's helmet thrown in anger here a few races back....
   Ought to be interesting.
   It could lead to more, Gordon says, perhaps a Labonte run in his cars at the Brickyard in a few weeks too. Perhaps even a job as teammate.
   The future for all three men is quite flexible, it seems.
   Already Labonte is working a second part-time deal with Finch to run his cars at Daytona and Chicago in the next two weeks. And Finch himself is also trying to put together his own package, after losing a top sponsor at the start of the season.
  "This sport is full of challenges," Labonte says slowly. "The challenges I have today might feel like the worst challenges...but you don't know.
   "It's the passion that wants you to keep doing this. It's the passion I have for this sport."
  
   So what might look like on the surface as a simple 'driver moving on' scenario, or a story about two struggling stock car drivers and a struggling team owner each trying to figure out the next step, is in fact much deeper – this is a revealing portrait of what NASCAR life is like at the 'other end' of the stock car garage.
   Where some haulers arrive Thursdays and disappear without a trace Friday evening. DNQ.
   Where quarterpanels on the stockers are frequently blank.
   Where a $1600 set of tires – and top teams will use maybe 16 sets a weekend – is a considerable expense for those men struggling to make it from week to week.
   Where, because testing at tour tracks has been banned by NASCAR, top teams gain big advantages by using high-tech computer simulation programs and platoons of engineers....and small teams are simply pushed to the ditch.
   If you're on the deal, life can be fat city.
   If not, engines, cars themselves, crewmen, travel....it all mounts up.

   A good, top-notch, championship-caliber Sprint Cup team will cost around $30 million a year. And that's just operating expenses.
   For comparison, a good ARCA team will run $1.5 million a year, Frank Kimmel says. A good NASCAR Truck team twice that.
   And a good Nationwide team? Well, that's a horse of another color. When Dale Earnhardt Jr. a while back, when he was hot stuff, got a $10 million Nationwide deal, it should have sounded warning sirens.
   Now a top Nationwide team? Well, to begin with, you have to be a Sprint Cup team owner to really make it happen. Roger Penske's Brad Keselowski and Jack Roush's Carl Edwards are the top two in the Saturday series. Even Richard Childress and Kevin Harvick are scrambling to keep their deals running smoothly.
  
  

  Bobby Labonte: Another crossroads (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   So here we have Robby Gordon, owner-driver, one of that rare breed....and Bobby Labonte, the one-time champ trying to keep his career going, or jump-start it again....and James Finch, a 20-year Nationwide team owner, and part-time Cup owner, pondering his own future in the sport. 
   Back when, Alan Kulwicki won the NASCAR championship on a razer-thin budget of $1.8 million, in one of this sport's most marvelous seasons.

   Now consider Robby Gordon himself.
   A regular MacGyver.
   One of the most talented drivers, and versatile, in the sport, a veteran of the Dakar Rally, and a Baja racer for more than 20 years, Gordon had the world on a string a few years back when he was driving for Richard Childress and winning races. Loudon 2001. Watkins Glen. Sonoma.
    "The guy is as serious and emotional as you can be in a race car about making it happen," Labonte says. "This guy is one of the most intelligent guys around, who knows the sport and wants to make it work."
   But then Gordon decided he could do a NASCAR Cup team himself, just as successfully as he's done his off-road operation.
   Now if anyone could make something like this work as owner-driver, it ought to be Robby Gordon.
   Check out his off-road shop in Orange, Calif., and how he does more with less, and succeeds, on an international level.
   However now, five years after expanding into a full NASCAR Cup operation, Gordon, at 40, is realizing this is a tougher deal than it first looked.
   And he's struggling to hang in there. Sponsorships – and Gordon is a great closer – simply aren't there any more. Even Jeff Gordon is finding that out.
  
  

  The benchmark for Underdogs: the late Alan Kulwicki (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   "When I went Cup racing, I probably underestimated the challenge," Robby Gordon says.
    "When we did our Nationwide deal, I think we went to Daytona for the very first race and we finished third. We won races about 10 races in and were like 'Oh, this Nationwide is easy.'
    "And that's when we were racing a lot of Cup teams (on the Saturday tour), and we thought we could take this challenge and move up to Cup.
    "It's been a challenge -- the hardest thing we've done as a race team."
   And it's been getting much tougher.

   Which makes Gordon's second-place finish Sunday at Sonoma such a big event. It's the best finish he's had since becoming an owner-driver.
   At Phoenix in the spring, when Gordon finished 14th, rivals said that was almost like a victory, considering the competition.

   Let Bobby Labonte himself explain. Labonte, the 2000 Cup tour champ, hasn't won since 2003 either. And his career has been stuck in neutral for a while.
   The team he just left two days ago is a top sports car operation that owner Kevin Buckler is taking up to the Cup level....but Bucker too is finding sponsorship hard to come by, and this sport too expensive by a large margin, in this era of multi-car giants.
   "This sport is not the same for me as it was five years ago, or eight years ago, or 10 years ago," Labonte says. "You just make the best of what you have. And we didn't have a teammate to lean on.
    "The best of the best are four to six-car operations, or more; when you add it all up, there are 28 of those.
    "When you are 29th, well, you're next in that line. On a bad day it was 35th, a good day 20th.
    "It takes a lot of money to race this series. Robby can attest to that.
    "We started off the year with high hopes, with (crew chief) Doug Randolph and Kevin. Worked real hard to get our program up and running.
    "We didn't have the success we wanted...and it got to the point where Kevin was in a position that we were going to have to do some start-and-park races."
    Labonte said he wasn't going to settle for being a field-filler: "I needed to find different opportunities that would allow me to race."

    Team owner James Finch (black shirt) made it happen last spring at Talladega with Brad Keselowski. Can he make it happen now with Bobby Labonte? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
    
   

   
Gordon too has been having second thoughts about his little corner of this world, how make it work: "Well, I thought I might race for someone else," he concedes. "At a one-off here and there.
    "But I am not going to drive for anyone else.
     "I've made the commitment that this is what we are going to do, and we are going to figure it out."

    That's Robby. Hard-headed and determined.
    Can he make it work? Can he even hang in as a full-time operation this season?
    Gordon is trying to do anything that sponsor Monster wants.....even Monster trucks.
    He tried to get an Indy 500 game plan going, but Monster didn't go for it.
    So he's doing whatever it takes to keep his dream alive.
    "When you take that step, to go race against Childress, Hendrick, Gibbs, you are racing against the hardest teams in America...and that challenge is what we're up for," Gordon vows. "And we will continue to work day and night to gain momentum and try to catch these guys.
    "We haven't won a race yet. That was our second 2nd-place finish with my team...and I have no interest in giving up."
    But the game plan now is almost guerilla warfare, pick and choice your spots.
   And the business side of all this is front-and-center.
   Gordon insists he's still game for the fight, though the odds seem longer than ever.
   A two-car team perhaps...."I would be very interested in running Bobby at Indianapolis (July 25th). By that time I think we would be prepared to run two cars," Gordon says.
   "We have enough equipment, enough guys, and we've got the facility.
   "Hopefully he has a good weekend. Let's take it one step at a time and see how the weekend goes with Bobby.
    "If it goes good, I'd love to have Bobby as a teammate. I think it would help my team, and maybe help Bobby too. When you have two-car teams, you can definitely play off each other."
   
   

   Uh, Robby, I think NASCAR's John Darby would like to take this thing back to the Charlotte R&D tech center and check some specs......(Photo: Robby Gordon)
   

    If nothing else, Labonte in the car, Gordon says, should give him "a good evaluation of my team."
    Technologically Gordon is supremely confident he can compete at this level against the mega-teams.
    And he figures he's able to do it at bargain prices.
    But first he's got to get back in the game out on the track.
    He's languished this season, with mediocre runs (except for that impressive 14th at Phoenix).
    And he suffers at times it would seem from being too much in NASCAR's doghouse. He doesn't play the game the way Daytona might like. (Remember his reaction to that controversial call at Montreal in 2007 that cost him a shot at the win?)
    Gordon, like others in the sport, is struggling with sponsorships. "We have open races -- a few deals we had contracts on fall through.
   "But that's just the nature of the industry today.
   "My race team is getting better, and we are only in our fifth year.
    "This Cup deal is a bit of a roller-coaster. You may be up one week, and the next week it's a reality check.
    "I think we make some of the finest cars in the garage...and we just lack a little bit in the info chain. If we were to run two cars, that would be a big boost for our team."

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    Good reading here. The inside story. Maybe it should be required reading for some in the NASCAR garage....(Photo: Father Dale Grubba)