Kulwicki Presumed to Be Dead : Auto racing: Private plane with five aboard crashes in field in Tennessee en route to a weekend stock car race.

In the mid-1980s, Alan Kulwicki left Wisconsin with a pickup truck and memories, prepared to match wits, if not dollars, in the major leagues of stock car racing.

He beat them at their game, earned $5 million over eight seasons and, in 1992, won the Winston Cup championship and its $1-million prize.

On Thursday night, in a field about five miles south of the Tennessee-Virginia border, Kulwicki, a 38-year-old bachelor, apparently was killed when his plane, carrying two pilots, the driver and two members of his sponsoring firm, crashed and burned at about 9:30 p.m. EST.

Within two hours after the crash, four bodies had been found, but none identified. However, “we’ve confirmed he was on the plane when it left Knoxville,” said Mike Bales, owner and president of Appalachian Flying Services at Tri-Cities Airport near Bristol, Tenn. “We know there were five on the plane when it took off.

“While he was in the air, he apparently called some people to meet him at the airport and go to dinner and said he would be there in about 20-25 minutes.”

Bales said there were no survivors of the crash.

Said Sullivan County Sheriff Keith Carr: “Everyone on board the plane was killed upon impact.”

Kulwicki had spent the afternoon in Knoxville for a personal appearance and was flying to Bristol, where qualifying begins today for Sunday’s Food City 500 race.

His plane, a six-seat, twin-engine Merlin, was identified as having crashed by its numbers: N500AK.

“His pilot had called us and said that he was dropping off passengers and requested a quick turnaround,” Bales said. “He had requested an APU (auxiliary power unit, used to start airplanes without a drain on their batteries) and quick fueling.

“There was no idea the plane was in distress. The tower had cleared them for approach, and then suddenly there was a request for the fire equipment at the airport.”

Bales speculated that the crash had activated the aircraft’s electronic locater transmitter.

Driver Rusty Wallace had landed at Tri-Cities Airport a few minutes earlier, and another driver, Dale Earnhardt, had been just ahead of Kulwicki’s plane.

“We don’t know what happened yet,” said Wallace, who added that he had “grown up racing ASA and short tracks with Alan in the Midwest” in the 1970s. “We’re just sitting here (at the airport) hoping.

“My plane had come in (through the clouds) at about 5,000 feet about 20 minutes before he was coming in. Earnhardt was just ahead of him.

“We don’t know nothing. We know the plane’s torn up, that’s all.”

Wanda Lambert, who lives about a quarter of a mile from the crash site, an open field just off Interstate 81 near Blountville, Tenn., called 911 when she heard the crash. “It was just like he was out of gas,” she told the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier. “He ‘goosed’ it twice, and then it went down.”

Lambert said she was told by authorities to check the crash site while rescue personnel responded to her call. “When I got to the top of the hill, it sounded like a gas tank exploding,” she said. “I was scared so bad. I knew what I heard. . . . We used to own a light plane, so I know what it was.”

Kulwicki was considered something of an intellectual among the stock car set because he had a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

The son of a race-car engine builder, he had been a short-track star in the Midwest. He decided to try his hand at Winston Cup racing, but two days before he was to leave his Greenfield, Wis., home, his trailer burned to the ground.

With a short bankroll, he was 1986 Winston Cup rookie of the year and won his first race in 1988 in Phoenix. His 1992 championship was earned in the season’s final race, at Atlanta, by only 10 points over Bill Elliott in the closest competition in NASCAR history.