They Find Time for Fun and Games

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 is reporting 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.

It’s race day, and when Pete Wright crawled out of his hotel bed, his team was still starting 37th in a 43-car field.

At the end of qualifying the day before, he’d muttered, “You’d think we had never been here before.”

In fact, there are many ups and downs in Nextel Cup racing. There’s one winner, and 42 losers -- not counting those who fail to make the show.

Qualifying day seemed particularly frustrating for Wright. First, he broke his dentures. Then, during horseplay with driver Jerry Nadeau, who hasn’t driven the U.S. Army Chevrolet since suffering a serious head injury last year, Wright broke a nose pad on his glasses.

All before 9 a.m.

If ever a guy needed a laugh, Wright did.

So he got it at crew chief Ryan Pemberton’s expense.

During technical inspection, NASCAR official John Drager beckoned Pemberton to the back of the car. A template was measuring the deck lid, and Pemberton looked at what was seemingly a vast impropriety.

“I’ve never seen anyone fix something that bad at the track,” Drager told Pemberton, the man with the fixing responsibility.

Pemberton’s hands trembled.

“That’s a huge mistake,” he said later. “It’s that feeling you get when you just miss having an accident in your car.”

But then Wright pulled his hand from the template and it settled into position. Wright and Drager and some of the MB2 crew got their laughs as Pemberton stormed off, yelling, “That stuff ain’t even funny.” he

It was funny, though, and everyone knew it -- even Pemberton.

“It’s the equivalent of putting a snake in somebody’s desk drawer,” he said.

During days that, on the short side, are 13 hours long, moments of levity are appreciated. And everyone is fair game.

Engine tuner Brian Herlocker is celebrating his one-year anniversary with the team and Mark Bieberich, co-car chief -- and Herlocker’s mentor -- was taking note of it.

“He’s come a long way,” Bieberich said. “He couldn’t get the hood open last year. He was looking under the dash for the cable.”

Of course, that wasn’t true -- no one gets to the big leagues right off the turnip truck -- but everyone appreciates a good giggle at someone’s expense. It’s serious business in the garage, and there is no messing around when it comes to the car. But a few light moments during downtime go a long way toward making the NASCAR life tolerable.

When he worked for Junior Johnson, Wright once got the best of a crewman who smoked like a chimney.

“I siliconed his windows shut, and he finally tried so hard to open the window when he lit his cigarette, he stripped the gears out of his door handle,” Wright said.”You know, you can put a headlight decal on a car and you get halfway down the road and realize you don’t have any lights.”

The ultimate giggle-maker for the U.S. Army team is the van. It is rigged to shoot a jet spray that can reach someone standing 10 feet away as it drives past, giving the impression of cleaning the windshield.

“We re-jetted them, just like you would a carburetor,” said Clayt Spruell, who tows the van behind Pemberton’s motor coach from race to race, and uses it to drive the team from the hotel to the track.

“I shot a couple hundred people last week in Michigan. NASCAR fans love it.”

They got an early start this weekend. Driving through Boone, N.C., on the way to Bristol, the team fired on a couple walking on the road. Laughter abounded as a startled woman leaped in the air.

But the van reached a long stoplight in heavy traffic. The couple walked past, and if looks could have killed, Spruell would be a dead man. Of course, everyone else in the van laughed for miles. One of them was Wright.

“It don’t take much to keep us entertained,” he said.