Jimmy Gross is the happily married 37 year old owner of Liberty Printing, the father of two boys and a devout Christian. Last season he was a rookie on the NASCAR Goody’s Dash Series.

What’s your record?

finished 19th in the points last year and I ran 12 races, so I Had a really really good record, 19th out of about 60.

Can we catch you on tv?

Oh yeah. About 12 of the races will be televised this year.

You qualified at Daytona this year. How’d you do?

Not too good. I qualified 17th out of 63 cars, which is excellent, but we got into an early race accident, and its the worst finish I’ve ever had, 37th out of 42 cars.

Anyone else from Bowling Green running the same circuit?

No one from Bowling Green has ever raced what I race. Last year Iran Bristol and Charlotte, big name tracks. I know that I’m the only one that’s ever done that.

Can your circuit lead to bigger, better things?

Oh yeah. Mark and David Greene, and Jeff Greene are in the Busch series. And of course, Michael and Darrell Walthrup, and Davie Allison, Morgan Sheppard, big, big name Winston Cup drivers went through the series that I’m going through to get to Winston Cup.

What are some of the difficulties you’ve faced?

Well, just like in any racing, it’s real hard to compete with just one car. We had a backup car last season, but it wasn’t finished until the end of the season. This year we’ve got three cars, which is one of the reasons we were so competitive at Daytona. We ran 9th fastest the day before the race. We had a top five car. The guys who started behind us finished second and third. So we had areal fast car, but it just wasn’t our day.

NASCAR is a pretty expensive sport to participate in.

Absolutely. To run competitively this series requires about $500,000 Our sponsors last year contributed about half that, so we were on a real, real tight budget. But we did real well, and we were real conservative. We bought a couple of more cars and a car hauler and some motors. All we really need is some sponsorship and we could really be a contender for the championship this year.

How many people are required to run a NASCAR team?

We’ve got a shop down in North Carolina where we do all our fabrication and our chasis building. We’ve got our crew chief down there and three full time employees. Then we’ve got two part timers from Bowling Green who are with us on race day, plus the driver. So race day takes six people plus me.

Who’s your crew chief?

Eric Wilson. He worked year before last for Darrell Waltrip, and he’s got five years of fabrication experience. And last year our crew chief won the Goody’s National Championship 11 times. So we got a lot of good experience, a lot of good exposure.

What’s it like to drive in a NASCAR race at 160 mph?

The first time I ever went to a Winston Cup race I fell in love in it and went to evey race I could go to. Then I went to a class given by Richard Petty and ran in a Winston Cup in Charlotte. I was top speed in my little class there and ran 176 mph. You only have to run 8 or 9 mph to qualify at Charlotte, so I was hooked. Then I hooked up with some buddies and we ran on an NMCA series, muscle cars. I kinda got my feet wet on that, and I ran that for a year, and I think I finished 7th in the world in MNCA. That was in 1993.

Why did you switch from drag racing to NASCAR?

Well, you take off in a drag car and you go from a dead stop and you run for a quarter mile and then it’s over. Then you work on the car for 10 hours and you go another 9 seconds. It’s a whole lot of work for very little fun. So I got burned out on that pretty quick.

What did you do next?

Then I ran on the Brooke’s and Dunn Metal Rodeo Series. I ran on the Legend Car Series, that’s the old timey looking cars. It’s good, NASCAR sanctioned racing. They’re real fast cars and real controllable, but I just decided that it wasn’t what I really wanted. So I just got this wild idea and found out who won the 1995 Goody’s Dash Championship. I knew he’d be moving up to Winston Cup or something else, so I flew down there the next day and bought his car and truck and a lot of other things. Then I found a good crew chief, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to work for another rookie. So he set the car up and said “I’ll meet you at Nashville Motor Speedway on such and such day and see what you can do.” I was so new I didn’t even know how to start the car, but within about 10 or 12 laps I broke last year’s record on that track for the Goody’s Dash that they ran. I broke their record. My crew chief brought a couple of his helpers over to watch and they were just blown away with me. So they decided to go with me, and we ran a bunch of races and we’d go to, like, Bristol Motor Speedway, and I’d never seen that track before, much less drove a full size stock car on it. I’d get in it and qualify 12th, and drivers with 20 years experience were going home. So, I guess I just took to it like a duck to water.

So is racing easy for you?

I wouldn’t say that. I took a good amount of licks against the wall and a lot of hard knocks, but I feel like I matured last year, and when I ran Daytona this year, I just had a whole different perspective on it. I went out there and kicked butt all week, but we just had bad luck.

What happened?

I spun out to avoid a wreck pulled out an ignition wire beneath the engine. I didn’t even wreck the car, but my crew couldn’t get it fixed in time.

That must have hurt.

Oh man, I was about ready to cry. It about killed me, ‘cause this was Daytona, the biggest, and I always wanted to run Daytona. But I love racing. I’d give anything to do it full time, but you gotta have sponsorship. There have been a lot of fortunes spent on racing, and I’ve got maybe 80 people depending on me for jobs, so I’ve limited in what I can do. Those are working people who have trusted me for 15 years, so I do what I can do.

How important is teamwork in auto racing?

Very important. You can have the best set-up man, the best car, the best driver, but if you don’t have the best crew chief, it ain’t gonna happen.

So it’s more of a team sport?

Oh yeah, absolutely. It has nothing to do with just one guy. It has all in the world to do with the car and the crew, everything. When you’re driving on Daytona, you’re like a gnat on a freeway. You can’t see very much in front of you, so you just go where your spotter tells you to go.

You supported racing before you became a driver.

I was sponsoring race car drivers out at Beech Bend 20 years ago, when racing wasn’t nearly as important as it is today. If I had the money, and was producing an internationally important product the way some businesses are in Bowling Green, then not for very much money, they could have a home town boy on the tracks in the Winston circuit with their company’s name on the hood of a winning car. You don’t get much better advertising than that.

What goes on in your mind when you’re out there on the track?

It is the most relaxing experience you can imagine. I work 14 hours a day, and when I leave there I’m just kicked in the butt. When I’m on the race track, all I’m focusing on is how to get past the guy in front of me. It just drives everything else out of your mind. It’s physically taxing, because the temperature in the car is around 145 degrees, but you got a cool-suit and water, but it’s still real physical. Racing will really take it out of you.

Had any close calls?

Oh yeah. At Bristol, I was starting my qualifying lap, and I’d been running in the top 8 all day, so I was going for the pole. Bristol is a 5/8th of a mile track with 38 degree banking so you run the same amount of speed on the corners as you do on the straight of way. I was really mashing on the car, and coming out of the fourth turn the car came unloaded, spun around, and went up on two wheels. And there’s been a lot of people killed at Bristol ’cause people don’t take it serious enough. So it came up on two wheels, and I was going backwards on two wheels, hit the wall, spun around, hit on the wall on this side, spun around and crossed the finish line backwards, and qualified 12th.

Did you get hurt?

Yeah. I knocked both my knees out of socket and broke my ankle. But the car was tore up. It threw the motor out of it, and threw the rear end out of it, and my crew jumped on it and in about two hours they put it back together and we raced and finished 12th.

With a broken ankle?

With a broken ankle.

So what’s next?

Well, on my circuit, there’s one guy going ARCA, and one guy going Busch, and one guy going Super Truck, and one guy going Slim Jim All Pro, so this is the stepping stone to the big time. All you need is a sponsor. All I need is a sponsor.