Haul A** and Turn Left Read Free

Nah.”
    Stock car racing has seldom seen a hero less affected by success than Gant, who still lives in his hometown, Taylorsville, North Carolina. Gant used to run a steakhouse there, and he is also a cattleman and an accomplished woodworker. When Gant retired, other drivers asked him if he was still going to be around at the track.
    “Heavens, no,” he replied. “You ever seen the traffic around these places? I built myself a piece of furniture for my television set. I can roll the set right out on my deck and watch the race right out there in the fresh air if I see fit.”

    “Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, but it … wouldn’t have been worth what I had to do to get it.”
    —DALE EARNHARDT JR.
    explaining why he resisted the temptation to spin out Ryan Newman in the 2002 all-star race, the Winston

    “I bumped him; that’s part of it. I think we needed a yellow so we could put on a good show there at the end.”
    —KURT BUSCH
    after not resisting the temptation to spin Robby Gordon out in the same race

    “Lowe’s Motor Speedway is one of those tracks where the sun usually sets in the west.”
    —Motor Racing Network’s
    BARNEY HALL

    “Maybe if Jeff Gordon had been a little braver, he might’ve won.”
    —KEVIN HARVICK
    after being told that Gordon, who finished second at Chicagoland Speedway in 2002, had called his driving through the grass “a stupid move”

K urt Busch, the 2004 Nextel Cup champion, is fond of big words, of which there are some that he actually knows the meaning. Busch is kind of like the kid who went off to college for a year and came home thinking he knew everything. In fact, he did attend the University of Arizona for a year.
    The owner of Busch’s number 97 Ford, Jack Roush, also likes stringing syllables together, but Roush’s use of the language is far more authoritative than that of his young driver. The truth is that Roush is probably a bad influence, linguistically, on Busch. Busch, if prompted, would probably say Roush was a bad influence “vocabularically.”
    After a qualifying run, Busch once said he had “circumferenced the track.” After Ryan Newman’s first pole of 2005, Busch called Newman’s Dodge “ludicrous fast.”
    During Daytona Speedweeks in 2003, he said rival team DEI (Dale Earnhardt Incorporated) had “a threshold on the front of the competition.” He added that “the DEI cars have some sort of wrath that nobody else has.” He said of own his team, “It’s real solidifying to know that the group is solid.”
    Hard to argue with that.
    Referring to his spectacular sophomore season (in NASCAR, not college) which included three victories in the final five 2003 races, Busch said, “It’s been somewhat of a tailspin and somewhat more of a comfort level to know what I’m capable of and to know where the team is at right now.”

    “Sorry teams don’t usually win the Brickyard, or anywhere else, if you think about it.”
    —MARK MARTIN

    “I’ve got some really good words for him. Unfortunately, I can’t say them on TV. I wish I had something I could’ve shot at him.”
    —WARD BURTON
    angry at Dale Earnhardt Jr. after a crash at Bristol in August 2002

    “The Chevrolet has had more nose jobs than Michael Jackson.”
    —STERLING MARLIN
    complaining about a NASCAR rules change

N o one ever outran Ernie Irvan, who retired in 1999, in a race of verbal blunders. The best example occurred in a telephone press conference in 1997, shortly after Irvan had been told by Robert Yates that he would no longer drive Yates’s number 28 Ford after that season.
    With an army of journalists listening in, Irvan said, “You know what they say: When the going gets tough, the tough get happening.”
    When asked if Yates had given him a reason for his dismissal, Irvan said, “Well, you know, I went to Robert, and he didn’t really give me a reason. He just hee-hawed around the subject.”
    Then a reporter asked Irvan if he was