Wright’s Time Is Anything but the Pits

It was just after 7 in the morning Tuesday when Pete Wright arrived for his 22nd consecutive day at the office -- that being wherever there’s an MB2 race car to work on.

But he wasn’t complaining. Wright has known for a long time that there are few days off when you work on the NASCAR circuit, a life he chose not too long after he saw his first short-track race at Martinsville, Va. In 1963.

He envisioned the life then; lives it now.

“God put me here to work on race cars,” Wright says, “and not be a pencil-pusher.”

Wright is co-car chief for the U.S. Army-sponsored Chevrolet that Joe Nemechek drives in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series. That title could simply be “gear head” and Wright wouldn’t necessarily disagree.

Basically, he is the team’s lead mechanic -- and Wright has the black-stained fingernails to prove it. He handles the maintenance on the transmission, gears, drive shafts, fuel cells, fuel filters, oil lines, axles and rear-end pumps.

As versatile as he is old-school, Wright gets irked by the idea of pit “specialists” -- crewmen who fly in for race day to ensure the quickest pit stops. He also has little patience for complaints from the young bucks who have caught on with big-money teams without paying dues like he did.

Known for his redneck wit, wisdom and shooting straight from the hip, Wright doesn’t mince words when he talks about the toll for a life spent in NASCAR’s garage.

He was 15 when he first tried to catch on with the circuit -- and he had a job before race officials found out that he hadn’t finished high school. Read the riot act and told not to come back until he could show proof of graduation, Wright went back to Franklin County High in Rocky Mount, Va., where he was a standout football lineman alongside Dwaine Board, who went on to play for the San Francisco 49ers.

But as fast as high school was over, he was back in the pits, and he has worked for such drivers as Terry Labonte, Darrell Waltrip and Bill Elliott in a career that has spanned more than 30 years.

In 1984, when his team won the championship with Labonte driving, it had only 14 members, including truck drivers and secretaries. Nowadays, MB2 has nearly 50 employees -- 16 who are at the track on race day, and that doesn’t include another group that works on the team’s other Chevy, driven by Scott Riggs.

Times have changed on the circuit, though, and lately Wright has pondered what life might be like away from the garage. That’s got him scared.

“I thought I’d be 40 years old the rest of my life working on race cars,” he says. “If I’m lucky, I’ve got 10 more years -- if I’m lucky -- and that’s hard to accept. Makes you break out in a sweat sometimes because this is what I really love doing.

“I hope that when I have to quit racing, not long after that I take my last breath because I don’t think I could live without it.”

If he had it to do over again, Wright says, he would take better care of himself and spend more time with his family and less with the cars.

“My wife left me seven years ago after 17 years,” Wright said. “She said I wasn’t married to her, I was married to these cars.”

He was angry at the time -- he never saw it coming -- but he gave a lot of thought to her words.

“She was right,” he says. “I don’t blame her.”

On Dec. 11, he’ll have a second chance. He is engaged to be married to Cindy Ware, who he met two years ago at a race in Michigan where she was working as a hospitality coordinator. A son, Adam, 20, started working at the shop two months ago.

A renown storyteller, Wright could fill a vault with tales that aren’t supposed to leave the garage. He went to work for Junior Johnson in 1985 when the legendary owner doubled his pay to join him as a jack man.

Wright’s conversations never stray far from telling of the old days and the times he spent with Johnson, who hauled moonshine for Wright’s father, Warren, who earlier had been a bodyguard for President Eisenhower.

Johnson is a NASCAR legend, having raced against the likes of Fireball Roberts and Lee Petty and Petty’s kid, Richard.

Johnson could be an ornery cuss, but he was fair. “He could curse you like a dog, and then take you to lunch,” Wright says. “You had to respect him.”

Wright operates much the same way. He says what’s on his mind and isn’t short on opinions. Do something stupid and end up in Wright’s Hall of Shame, next to his work space.

There’s a picture of NASCAR’s poster boy on a lunchbox with the words “Dale Jr. First-Aid Burn Kit, $29.95.”

T.J. Majors, who works part-time in the shop, drives a late-model car owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr., and a four-foot trophy he won Saturday night stands on a shelf for his shop mates to see. Written on tape covering the brass plate: “Powder Puff Winner.”

Wright spent Tuesday tinkering with an experimental transmission that Boris Said will use when MB2 runs a third car at California Speedway over Labor Day weekend. He builds a fuel cell, stuffing the Kevlar bladder through a hole inside a 16-gauge steel box.

It’s the kind of work nobody on race day gives a second thought to -- unless something goes wrong.

But Wright is in his element. It’s part of the life.

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Pete Wright, 51, is a NASCAR lifer, a mechanic seemingly riveted to stock cars nearly from the time he saw his first race more than 40 years ago. Martin Henderson will be reporting during the next week his experiences with Wright and the Concord, N.C.-based MB2 Motorsports team as it prepares for the Pop Secret 500 at Fontana on Sept. 5.