A New Champion - and One from NASCAR's Infancy
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There is indeed so much to celebrate in Martin Truex’s
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship.
The champ seems a genuinely nice guy. He earned his place
at the top by building a solid track record in lower racing series. His dad
also was a racer, but that probably opened fewer doors for him than it did for
Richard Petty (for one thing, Dad was from New Jersey). He has a longtime
girlfriend who is fighting cancer, and they’ve stuck together through thick and
thin.
Then there’s his car owner, who built a team from scratch
where many others tried and failed. They’re based in Denver, Colorado (not
Denver, N.C., where former Lowes/Charlotte Motor Speedway boss Richard Howard
lived), which is about as distant from NASCAR’s core as any owner in recent
memory, yet - with a good bit of help from Joe Gibbs - Furniture Row Racing has
become a power, and that, too, is a good story.
In fact, Furniture Row and owner Barney Visser is the
first owner in this century other than Rick Hendrick (8 championships), Joe
Gibbs (4), Jack Roush (2), Stewart-Haas (2) and Roger Penske (1). To find
another “little guy” championship team, you need to go back to Robert Yates and
Dale Jarrett in 1999 or - if you don’t think Yates was little enough - Alan
Kulwicki in 1992.
Barney Visser - the
2017 Championship Car Owner
The last championship owner who seemed to adopt the kind
of “my way” approach of Visser, at least in my opinion, was Billy Hagan, who
won the Winston Cup Championship with Terry Labonte in 1984.
That gives you some idea of what Visser, Truex and
company have accomplished. This kind of thing doesn’t happen often.
I did some rummaging through the statistics at Racing-Reference.info
to look for other links between Barney Visser and championship owners from the
past, and I don’t know if this one really fits or not, but it interested me
enough that I decided to explore the story a bit. Like Visser, this owner came
from outside of NASCAR’s core area, but in his case the direction was north,
not west. My owner of interest is Julian Buesink (1921-1998) of Findley Park,
N.Y., car owner for NASCAR’s second-ever Grand National (Monster/Cup) Champion
(1950), fellow New Yorker Bill Rexford.
1950 Championship
Owner Julian Buesink
One of Buesink’s auto sales businesses. There also were new car
dealerships, but it was a far cry from Rick Hendrick’s
empire.
There are great stories about Buesink at the Chautauqua
Sports Hall of Fame website - both he and Rexford have been inducted there -
and at Legends of NASCAR. Both had been largely forgotten until NASCAR’s rise
in the 1990s, when they briefly saw new limelight before their deaths. Rexford
ran most of the GN circuit again in 1951 but switched to what is now ARCA after
that and competed there until an early retirement (the drivers who replaced him
in two different rides were killed soon after those changes, and he had
suffered injuries in a 1951 NASCAR crash; all of that seems to have led him to
leave for the business world).
Bill Rexford,
right, and Lloyd Moore, Julian Buesink teammates
Buesink likewise eventually switched allegiance to ARCA
and local tracks, but while he was in NASCAR, he was a pretty good story.
Long before Hendrick, Gibbs, Stewart-Haas or the other
multi-car teams, Buesink was entering multiple cars in NASCAR Grand National
events. There were 19 races in 1950, 15 on dirt, 3 on asphalt, and the Daytona
Beach-Road Course, which included both. Rexford won the championship with one
victory, five top-5 finishes and 11 top-10s in 17 starts, and his teammate
Lloyd Moore finished fourth with a win, seven top-5s and 10 top-10s in 16
starts. Another teammate, George Hartley, started eight races, and Jim Paschal
made a single start.
Jim Paschal in the
#60 Julian Buesink Ford at Macon, Ga., in 1951, where he finished third - kinda
dusty, ya think?
The next year, ten different drivers would make a
total of 60 starts in Buesink cars.
But here’s the part that’s really weird, at least to us
today. Buesink used multiple makes of cars in his stable. When Rexford won the
“Poor Man’s 500” on Memorial Day Weekend 1950 in Canfield, Ohio, in a ‘50
Oldsmobile, teammate Moore was third in a Ford. At Hamburg, N.Y., Moore
finished fourth driving a Lincoln, Rexford was sixth in the Oldsmobile, and
Hartley finished at the back of the field in the Ford. Moore’s single victory
came in a Mercury.
It is said that Buesink studied the characteristics of
each track and decided what kind of car would run best there. He was “making
picks” similar to a horse racing better studying the Daily Racing Form.
Try that in today’s corporate-dominated world of NASCAR.
After his somewhat unusual approach to racing produced
less satisfactory results in 1951, Buesink cut back his NASCAR schedule, but
with the exception of 1954, he entered at least one race each year until 1963,
finishing up by giving an upcoming young South Carolina racer a shot in his
Fords. In Buesink’s final NASCAR start, his #52 Ford
finished 11th in the Rebel 300 at Darlington, driven by Cale Yarborough.
Cale Yarborough
with Julian Buesink’s 1961 Ford
He continued to own cars for another decade, though,
including regular front-runners at Stateline Speedway in New York and Eriez Speedway in Pennsylvania, as well as on the ARCA
circuit. Western Pennsylvania short track legend Blackie Watt made Buesink’s final superspeedway appearance at Daytona in
1973.
While Yarborough’s car above looks pretty decent by the
standards of the early ‘60s, you can’t help but notice something else about Buesink’s earlier racers: they ain’t pretty.
The white #60 is
the car Rexford crashed at Canfield in 1951. Note the strap on the door post
holding the door closed. Almost looks like Buesink was pulling cars off his
lots, painting numbers on the doors, and taking on all NASCAR comers.
Julian Buesink and Barney Visser obviously didn’t go into
racing with quite the same visions and goals, but the competitive fire
certainly seems to have burned similarly in both. Now each is a champion.
You saw the Monster
Energy NASCAR Cup Series Championship Trophy in Martin Truex’s hands in the
first photo with this article. Things have changed a bit since 1950, when this
is what Bill Rexford received for his title.
Frank’s Loose Lug Nuts
I’ve always liked Elliott Sadler, but I like him a lot
less after his crybaby performance at the end of the Homestead-Miami Xfinity
race. Elliott, you’re a race driver - what would you do if you were battling
for a top-5 finish in the last race of the year and trying to impress a car
owner who’s giving you a big chance? Would you move over for somebody else and
give up your position because of points? When did the competitive fire in your
gut turn into a toaster with a short?
Kyle Busch, you’re about as bad.
When I mentioned Alan Kulwicki earlier, I didn’t add then
that he was one of the few the NASCAR champion owner-drivers (and the last
until Tony Stewart’s title in 2011). That’s been a rare achievement - other
than for Petty Enterprises, where Papa Lee won three championships and Richard
collected seven. The only others in this select club are Buck Baker in 1957
(when he drove for Hugh Babb in nearly 40% of the races) and Herb Thomas, the
only driver to collect two owner-driver championships (1951
& ‘53). Today, with the sort-of exception of Carl Long, there are no
owner-drivers on the Monster/Cup circuit.
More than 30 different drivers have been NASCAR Grand
National/Winston/Nextel/Sprint/Monster Cup champions since 1949, and Martin
Truex is the first since Bill Rexford in 1950 to hail from the Northeast.
Congratulations
again, Martin.