Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
he treated me
people ask me how i got my start
in racing it wasn't fuel funny cars
you have to go back a lot of years after the sixties
when you grow up in that little trailer house you've seen
that you grew up in your brothers and sisters
you don't have your own room
you sleep on the couch or on a bunk bed
so when i was fourteen i had a car i had so many traffic tickets you wouldn't
believe it i was down at the dmv every week cause
a car was my life
every time i could sneak it out of the driveway i did because in that car
i had my football helmet
schoolbooks
had girlfriends picture on the dash
because that was your room
all the other kids lived in houses with their own room or maybe they shared
it with her brother or sister
that car was my room
so i found my days riding around in a car
didn't want to go home late at night cuz mom and dad the brothers were watching t_v_
and
if you didn't sit down to watch tv
you stood a corner so ya lived in your car a car become a way of life
also i'm a gypsy
my dad and mom trucked up and down
all over picking berries login haulin' cows doing everything
so if i stay on the move
i feel like i'm okay
i was standing one day with my daughter and i was staring at a railroad train
going by she said
dad you look like you almost want to jump on that railroad train
and i said
britney i said
the reason is there something about that train going by
takes away the anxiety inside of me
it takes away the pain
she said i don't understand that
you will one day
it takes you somewhere down that track it gets you away from the problems that
you have it's mental
it it's really a true thing
that gypsies wanna continue to keep moving
and that's what they do
so
racing only made sense
that i would
travel continually i was an innovator during those times
i was a guy that had the fire at orange county
and the roof on the car melted down flat the pictures on the wall
melted down flat
i couldn't get out the windows and i couldn't get out the roof and cut a hole
of the in the roof so i can make an exit
i don't really care about credit
but i was in safety in the early days
we start looking around not that i was smart i didn't have any education
and what we had this car that was a moving billboard
two hundred fifty miles an hour back then
and you could put signs on it
john learned over the years
that you could - if you can't win a race
that thin time that thin line between spectacle and spectacular
is the difference in what the people that
that that that want to put their name on their cars was all about
and its called exposure
he invented the word signage
he figured out that if you can't win you have the biggest fire
and verdone use to get mad at him
this is a God true story get mad at him and say you son of a buck i won indy
and you got the front page because he was a ball of fire
and if he couldn't win
he would go to the ditch well i didn't really set it on fire on purpose no
but he would let it get out of control
nineteen seventy eight
i went out for my first nhra national event
and i was a total leaker i was a nobody
to qualify for that race you'd have felt
that i just stole the world
it's a feeling you can explain to be with the names
like the blue maps
jungle gym don pardo tom the mongoose mcewin shirley mo downy
big daddy darn garletts
these people are legends
there are like gods like icons
and i think that i was able to walk amongst them
and trust me i went everywhere tellin em i qualified
and perdone laughed who is that guy
but it didn't matter
it was unbelievable
here's my big shot i'm gonna go out and race
you know what i mean get to do the burn outs
you know uh... the promoter fairgrounds were packed that day
big ole smoky burnouts
i was raised as a kid they called two forty gordy bonnet
he drove the bubble up car out of canada
and it was unbelievable
and then he smoked me off
beat me probably by ten cars but it didn't matter
when i got out the other end
they're all there try interview him because he won i was screaming so loud
the camera guys
got confused they thought i won and they all ran over to me in the producer
yellin wrong driver they said what the hell is this guy yelling about he got beat
that's how i was just to be there just to be a part of it
and then i walked around
bragging to my sponsors
yeah i got beat at the nationals last week by ten forty gordy cuz everybody knew who he
was
so that's the way
i lived it that's the way i dreamed it my wife used to say john sometimes you're embarrassing
shouldn't brag about getting beat
it proved i was there
i couldn't brag about winnin'
but it was the best time of our life then my kids were starting to get born and
they went to the races
indy in the summer the biggest race you know and we won indy at the bud shoot
out that year is the babies were getting new shoes
louie's gettin new shoes
life was good
and we would eat and when broke we didn't eat that's how we left
how we lived we ate alot of bologna though
when john got castrol
suddenly was a good sponsorship that was you know going to be behind him
and when he had the money he was able to
hire a good crew chief actually have a real team behind him
and of course he had a few years of
learning how to drive on his own so he gradually became a better driver
so i think everything kinda fell together
um...
mid uh... eighties and it's still took him a few years to get his first
win i think it took nine runner ups until he got his first win
and then you know once he got a taste of that well there was no stopping him
the fans are the ones that buy the castrol product
therefore the fans are also our boss as well as castrol
and that's why you'll notice whenever he stands in line signing autographs
he will never ever rush anybody
he'll stand there and talk to that person make eye contact with them
ask them personal questions about themselves
he when they walk away they will think john was their best friend
he'll never rush them
i've seen john take off his hat
and put it on their heads seen pickup handicapped kids carry them around to
the trailer or through the pits and give them a personal tour
never seen anybody else do that
john did that because
had a real connection with people they're handicapped because of this
his polio that he had
and he always identified with him and he spend as much time as he could
the best thing about him has always been his willingness to do whatever it takes
to satisfy the customer and in our case customers the media
the fan and the sponsor
when i started with castrol back in eighty five
uh... actually my first year
was
i'd lost the oil company i was with
and they gave me like five thousand dollars in oil
and right off the bat i really liked the oil because it had bearing life
and so we saw that as a positive
and we had five thousand bucks a week so we could eat
but understand my sponsorship back then was forty thousand dollars with coca-cola
wendy's
we were starving
we were just existing
and when you look back
it wasn't
fifteen years later
that my payroll was forty thousand a week
now my payrolls a hundred thousand a week
tell me what's wrong with this picture
but as we evolved what i got was a guarantee
and a contract
that said imma be here this year next year and the next year
we got three year contracts
they gave me stability for the first time in
my life we were running from race to race existing borrow money from my dad
any friend that i could castrol gave me a hundred and ten thousand dollars
i ran around the day that check showed up i would run around i just looked like
i lost
my mind
that i was doing that i didn't get the hundred upfront
but i had a check
that i had a sponsor
because no matter how they draw the contract until the check shows up
you don't know if you got a deal
but then i had stability i had austin coil i'd just hired him the year before
he found out i had no money and i just sold the castrol deal
and um
now i knew if i ran out of budget i could continue to run for the
championship because i could take it out of next year's budget
until i found more money
and boy it snowballed
it was a drought
there was no water
there was nothing and then it snows
and then it's snowball
and the world went crazy
sixteen championships later
god bless you castrol for what you did for me
every sponsor he's ever had
has gotten far more than they bargained for far more than a contract for
and uh...
that's been his business plans
give the customer more than more than they expect you to give
and that is i think is is the
the crux of his relationships with castrol
there are very few sponsorships in motorsports that they've extended longer
than johns relationship with castrol
the only one in drag racing is kenny bernstein and budweiser which went off for
thirty years and i think john has his eye on breaking that record at some
point time with castrol
even in those early days
back before i joined castrol
twenty five years ago they knew i had a fan following and i knew how to preach the
gospel
but let me tell you they came in
from day one with a plan
from the day we painted the trucks and trailers to the day we designed the cars
to the day that we put the decals on 'em
to when we went out to our first photo shoot
to everything that we did from commercials
movement of the game plan
it was just amazing
how they orchestrated with the sponsorship from castrol things really
changed we were able to
were able to pay our bills
on time we were able to and we were actually able to grow our company
i started in eighty eight
the castrol came on in eighty five eighty six
from i remember still in high school
and um
i just remember my dad talking about oh my gosh i can fly now
uh... couple years into the deal things we're starting to work
pretty good and uh... we won our first race
back in 1987