Daytona via Perris

David Gilliland prides himself on his tenacity and persistence. But two years ago, even he figured his goal of reaching the pinnacle of stock car racing, NASCAR’s Nextel Cup Series, would go unfulfilled.

“At that point I was 28 and I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ” he said. The Riverside native had a winning record in NASCAR’s western minor leagues, but a Cup ride had eluded him.

“I was probably going to quit racing,” he said, even though being a Cup driver “had been a dream of mine forever.”

But Gilliland is, well, persistent. He kept driving, landed a ride in NASCAR’s second-tier Busch Series and then pulled off a stunning upset in a Busch race last June.

That prompted the Robert Yates Racing team to hire him to pilot the No. 38 M&Ms; Ford Fusion in the Cup series, and Gilliland drove the final 14 races last season against Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and the other stars of NASCAR.

It was only the beginning.

Gilliland is suddenly the hottest driver at the cathedral of NASCAR, Daytona International Speedway, as stock car racing prepares for its most celebrated race, the Daytona 500 on Sunday.

In the Budweiser Shootout, a 70-lap exhibition race Saturday night, Gilliland finished a close second to winner Tony Stewart -- even though it was the first time Gilliland had raced on the 2.5-mile, high-banked Daytona oval.

The next day Gilliland won the pole position for the 500 with a qualifying speed of 186.320 mph, faster than 60 other drivers. His teammate and mentor, veteran Ricky Rudd, qualified second and will start next to Gilliland on the front row in the 500.

Rudd marvels at how quickly Gilliland adapted to the Cup series in general and to Daytona in particular.

“You’ve got to remember, this guy came here to test” in January “and had never seen the racetrack,” Rudd said. “He couldn’t find his way to the [infield] tunnel, and that was what, a month ago?”

Qualifying well and winning a long Cup race are different matters. But after Gilliland nearly won the Shootout, Stewart -- who seldom minces words -- said, “David is a pretty talented guy. He was running a real smooth line.”

Gilliland says his goal for Sunday is “to bring home a good, solid finish.” Plus, he wants to prove he deserves to stay at the Cup level, and believes his age -- he’s now 30 -- and maturity help him handle the pressure.

“The team has confidence in me that I can perform,” he said in a recent interview in Riverside, where he was visiting friends and relatives. “I honestly feel I’ll win.”

In the meantime, Gilliland -- a little-known driver a year ago -- is busy with media interviews, sponsor appearances and signing autographs.

And he has given renewed hope to every struggling driver racing short tracks on Saturday nights with dreams of eventually rubbing fenders with Kevin Harvick or Kasey Kahne.

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Gilliland is 5 feet 9, with thinning black hair, a youthful face and a broad smile. Now living in Mooresville, N.C., with his wife and two children, Gilliland was born in Torrance and also lived in Chino Hills after his parents divorced.

But he considers Riverside his home because that’s where he launched his racing career.

His father is Butch Gilliland, who drove mostly in NASCAR’s western regional races in the 1990s and won the series championship in 1997, with David as his crew chief.

David, too, climbed the ranks of NASCAR’s West Coast series, winning at tracks such as Irwindale, Perris, Bakersfield and Sonoma.

He drove cars he’d built with veteran stock car racers, car builders and friends in the Riverside area -- Jerry Dodd, his son Luke Dodd and Dennis Butts.

They recalled how Gilliland spent countless hours in the garages behind their houses, building chassis and tweaking engines with visions of one day reaching the Cup level.

“Work and ambition, that’s what separates David,” said Jerry Dodd, a former West Coast driver whom Gilliland considers a second father. “We knew if anyone was going to make it, it was going to be David. He just had the will.”

Butts, who owns a shop where Gilliland built his first engines, said Gilliland made the Nextel Cup Series with “persistence, persistence and persistence.”

Gilliland got his break a year ago, when he began driving Busch Series races for a part-time team, Clay Andrews Racing. Then he pulled off what some called the biggest upset in series history, beating several Cup drivers and the rest of the field in a Busch race at Sparta, Ky.

The next morning, “I fired up the motor home, got about two miles out of the track and [Richard] Childress called me and expressed a lot of interest,” Gilliland said, referring to the car owner whose drivers have included the late Dale Earnhardt.

“After that, it was just phone call after phone call” from other teams, he said.

Gilliland initially struggled in the Cup series -- “In the first five races, nobody would give me an inch,” he said -- but steadily adapted. He won the pole for the fall race on the 2.6-mile superspeedway at Talladega, Ala., NASCAR’S biggest track, and completed all but one of the 14 races.

His best finishes were 15ths at Talladega and again at Atlanta. In the season’s final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Gilliland ran in the top five for much of the day until a brush with the wall left him several laps down.

“What we’ve seen so far with David is outstanding,” said Doug Yates, Robert Yates’ son and team co-owner. After watching Gilliland win the Busch race, he said, “I called my dad at midnight and said, ‘We have our driver.’ ”

Rudd, with 23 Cup victories, said he was impressed “that right off the truck, [Gilliland is] up to speed. He’s able to go fast.”

But, he added, Gilliland “needs to learn how to race a 500-mile race. He’s got some ways to go ... but I think he’s definitely going to come into his own this season.”

Gilliland agreed that he’s “had to work on his patience.”

“The races are just so much longer,” he said. “But I feel much more comfortable ... at the races now. I feel like I belong there.”

Yates needs him to excel because the once-proud team is coming off a terrible 2006. Drivers Dale Jarrett and Elliott Sadler were seldom competitive and then left, two crew chiefs were fired and rumors abounded that the team might be sold.

Instead, Gilliland was hired, longtime Yates crew chief Todd Parrott was rehired and assigned to Gilliland’s car, then Rudd returned to racing after a year away from the track.

Gilliland “is a breath of fresh air” for the team, Doug Yates said. “We’re going to have some tough times, but it will all be worth it when it pays off and we win together.”

Gilliland said he chose Yates partly because the team was on the rebound.

“I felt if I could be part of getting them back to the top, or back up running good, it would do the most for me and my career,” he said. “And I’m happy that it didn’t come easier than it did for me, because now I appreciate it much more.” He added, “That’s the advantage of being 30. At 18, it would have been overwhelming. But I’m married, I have a family. I think that’s where it’s different.”

james.peltz@latimes.com