Return TO HIS Roots : After Growing Up Around Fast Cars and Giving Them Up for Football, Joe Gibbs Is Back in Racing With His Own Team

When Joe Gibbs was a teen-ager in Southern California, it was uncertain whether he would become a professional drag racer or a football coach.

On the drag strips, he progressed to top fuel, the top of the line in hot rods, when he was offered his first coaching job at Florida State.

“If I’d got a job in the West, I’d probably have stuck with racing, and who knows what might have happened?” the coach of the Super Bowl-champion Washington Redskins said in a quiet moment during practice for today’s Daytona 500. “But when I had to go more than 2,000 miles away, I decided to sell the dragster and concentrate on coaching.”

Last summer, in the midst of the Redskins’ drive to their third Super Bowl title under Gibbs, he announced that he was putting together a stock car team for the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit.

Dale Jarrett, son of former NASCAR champion Ned Jarrett, is his driver in the green and black No. 18 Chevrolet Lumina. Gibbs’ car will start 35th today after Jarrett was involved in an accident during one of Thursday’s qualifying races.

“When I see that car--even if it is our backup--going through the first turn at the Daytona 500 and coming around to the finish line, it will be one of the most exciting moments in my life,” Gibbs said. “I feel bad for Dale and the crew (because of the accident), but we’ve tested the backup car and it’s ready to go.

“One thing I’m having difficulty with is that we’re starting the season with the Super Bowl (Daytona 500), instead of having it at the end. I’m as anxious and as nervous waiting for the race as I ever was before a football game.

“This is something very special for me because I will be living the second of two childhood dreams. Not many guys even get to live one dream, and now I’ll be living two.”

Gibbs was 15, living in Santa Fe Springs, when he started hanging around with street rodders at the popular drive-in hangouts of the 1950s.

“My first car was an old ’37 Chevy, and I’d take it to Scot’s hamburger joint at the corner of Imperial and Paramount, or to Clocks’ drive-ins. There was one in Whittier and another one in Downey that were the hot places to meet and go racing.

“I was taking part in sports in school, but cars and racing were my hobby, almost my passion. I worked my way through a lot of cars. I was always switching around. I put a Corvette engine in my ’37 Chevy, and I had a ’32 Ford and a ’27 Model T with a Cadillac engine.

“After street rods, I built a gas coupe, then a gas dragster and finally Rennie (Simmons) and I built a top fueler. I got a lot of help from Gary Gabelich (former land speed record-holder and top fuel driver) and the Sandoval brothers in Los Angeles. I did most of my work on the car in the Sandoval’s garage, and Gabelich drove for them.”

Gibbs raced for nearly seven years while attending Santa Fe Springs High, Cerritos College and San Diego State. He drove at drag strips long since closed, such as Long Beach Lions, San Fernando, Fontana, Famoso and Pomona, between 1957 and 1964.

“Don Prudhomme was starting to make a name for himself then, and he was the driver I wanted to emulate. TV Tommy Ivo and Tom McEwen were around at the same time, too.”

How fast did Gibbs run?

“I really don’t remember,” he said. “We won a few races. I know that. I probably ran about 140 to 150 in the gas dragster. The top fuelers were running about 180 then, but we never really got ours going.

“We only ran it twice: once out at San Fernando and then Fontana, where we blew the motor on our first run. Before we

could get the car ready again, I got an offer to join Bill Peterson’s staff at Florida State.

“After I interviewed for the job and decided to go to Tallahassee, I called Rennie and told him to sell the dragster. That was the end of my racing career until this year. Rennie and I stayed together, though. He is still with me on my Redskins’ staff.”

When Gibbs decided to put together a race team, he went about it as precisely as he would a football team.

“The most important thing is a quarterback, so that was my first priority,” he said. “The driver is the quarterback in racing. I started out the same way I would in recruiting a quarterback out of high school or drafting one out of college. I called people I thought would know--crew chiefs, car owners, other drivers, especially drivers.

“When I started, I had a long list. I didn’t know who might be available, but I had them on the list anyway. Gradually I worked it down to a couple of guys, and then I got real serious about my decision. I wanted a driver who had grown up in it, who had worked his way up through the ranks and who had common interests with mine about winning.

“Dale Jarrett fit all those criteria, so I called him. I knew he had a solid ride with the Wood Brothers team, but I wanted him and I was very pleased when he accepted our offer.”

Jarrett, starting his sixth year in Winston Cup racing, has the proper background--in football. He was a quarterback in high school in Conover, N.C., and also was one of the finest junior golfers in the state.

“I like Gibbs calling me his quarterback, but I’d like to get as much (money) as Mark Rypien is going to get,” Jarrett said. Rypien, the Super Bowl’s most valuable player, is expected to negotiate a multimillion dollar contract before the 1992 season.

Gibbs acknowledges he got Jarrett for less than he might have had he waited a little longer.

“Five weeks after we signed Dale, he won his first Winston Cup race (Champion 400 at Michigan),” Gibbs said. “Some of the guys were kidding me after the race, telling me if he’d won earlier, his negotiation price would have been a lot higher.”

Gibbs’ next position to fill was that of coach.

“It was sort of a role reversal for me, going from coach to owner. The way I look at it, the crew chief is the coach, and he is going to be very important on this team because he will be running things for me when football season starts in July.

“I used the same method of selecting my coach as I did my quarterback, and it seemed as if everyone I talked with mentioned Jimmy Makar as the best chassis man around. But they all told me he’d never leave Rusty Wallace and the new Penske team. I didn’t even know it at the time, but he was Dale’s brother-in-law.

“Dale said he didn’t think he would leave, either, but he called him. They had been wanting to work together for some years, and fortunately for me, Jimmy decided this was the opportunity they’d been waiting for.

“I’m continually amazed at the correlation between putting together a football team and racing team. I asked Jimmy how many men he’d need for a full crew and he said 12. That’s exactly the number I have on my Redskins staff.”

Makar was NASCAR’s mechanic of the year in 1988 and the following year helped Wallace win the Winston Cup championship.

“Dale and I had talked about working together, but what really sold me on making the move was Joe Gibbs,” Makar said. “There’s something special about the man. He impressed me with his organizational skills and his drive.”

Gibbs said he never lost his dream of being a racer during his quarter-century of coaching, but didn’t begin to revive serious interest until a couple of years ago when a couple of his old drag racing buddies, Kenny Bernstein and Raymond Beadle, talked with him. Both had become involved in stock car racing as owners. Beadle was the owner of Wallace’s championship car.

“Bernstein and Beadle were the guys who got me crossed over into stock cars,” Gibbs said. “They got me with Jimmy Johnson, who manages Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolet team, and he coached us through the formative stages. He got us in Hendrick’s motor program and helped us get a Chevrolet racing car. Having a Chevy seemed the natural thing for me because I’d been a Chevy man when I was hot-rodding.”

Gibbs, 51, insists he has no aspirations to drive himself, as Coach Jerry Glanville of the Atlanta Falcons plans to do in the Busch Grand National series.

“My wife’s biggest concern when I told her about my plan was that I might want to drive,” Gibbs said. “When I told her that wasn’t my idea, she said OK to my team. She’s lived life as a coach’s wife and that’s tough enough.”

Gibbs, however, is looking at his race team as a long-range family project involving his two sons.

“One of these days, not in the near future I’m sure, I will give up coaching and settle down with my race team. When you reach that stage in life, you like to have your children around you and this gives us that opportunity.

“Neither of the boys wants to be a coach, and the older one, J. D., will join the team in June after he graduates from William & Mary. He was a quarterback and defensive corner, but he’s always loved racing. He raced motocross and is looking forward to working with Jimmy and Dale on the car.

“Our youngest, Coy, is at Stanford. He started 10 games as a true freshman last year at linebacker. We don’t know where his career will lead, but he’s planning to work summers with the team. They’re both here for the race.”

Gibbs said the two biggest surprises in putting together a team were logistics and finances.

“The logistics of moving the team here from Charlotte and keeping things moving was more than I had anticipated, and so was the need for money,” he said. “They tell a story around the NFL about George Allen. When he was asked about a budget, he said he didn’t have any. The owner told him he’d exceeded it. Well, Jimmy Makar has some of the same tendencies.

“I told the guys I’d second-guess them every second of the way, but Jimmy told me he had one rule, that I could listen in over the radio but that I couldn’t say anything.”

Gibbs will be in the pits, as close to the action as he can get.

“I’m hoping for good results,” he said. “I hope to win, I expect to win, but I’m realistic enough to know it can take time. If I get too anxious, I can look back to when I started with the Redskins.

“I went 0-5 before we won our first game.”