Sundays Will Never Be the Same by Darrell Waltrip

Author:Darrell Waltrip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

One day in the early 1980s, Stevie received a phone call from Grover Adkins, who worked on the 21 team. Grover was a friend of Jack Billmyer, a sales executive at Honda, and he was calling to ask whether Stevie would like to have a Honda to drive. Our financial situation was improving—my share of winnings had gone from $41,085 in 1975 to $341,045 in 1982—but Stevie naturally said yes to the offer of a free car, and soon there was a Honda Accord parked in our driveway.

Honda dealerships were appearing here and there at the time, usually in converted gas stations. The dealerships were small, and the cars were tiny little things. I hadn’t paid much attention to them.

Stevie loved her little Honda. She raved and raved about the way it drove, but I never even bothered to get inside it. Why should I, when I had a big, comfortable American car to drive? Finally, after a year or so, she convinced me to take her little sedan for a spin, and I was amazed to discover what a sweet car it was. Sure the Honda was small, but it drove well, handled tight, and ran good. I was really impressed.

At that time the Honda people were trying to change their company image in America. They had opened their first American auto assembly plant in Marysville, Ohio, in 1982, and they wanted Americans to start thinking of the Honda as a domestic product, a car an American would drive. Jack Billmyer, a former Ford dealer from Danville, Virginia, was a huge race fan, and he came up with an idea for gaining credibility with the red-blooded American car-buying public: get respected NASCAR drivers to open dealerships. As the story was relayed to me, Jack was offering dealerships to Cale Yarborough, Neil Bonnett, Dick Brooks, and me. Would I be interested? I had always loved cars, and I’d grown up around the car business, so I said yes, I’d be interested.

A few days later one of Honda’s regional sales executives from Atlanta came to see me. I drove him around Franklin and pointed out a couple of old gas stations I thought we might be able to convert to a Honda dealership. Within days I received a call from Jim Cardiges, the head of sales for Honda, asking me to come to Los Angeles. I flew to California and sat down with Jim, and he gave me a letter of intent. I was going to be in the car business!

Before I knew it, though, the project started to snowball. The next time the Honda executive from Atlanta came to see me, he was carrying plans for a gigantic building they were expecting me to build. The cost of my “free” dealership had escalated to $2 or $3 million, and the enterprise was growing more complex by the day. I didn’t know what to do. One of my friends advised me that I could sell the letter of intent for $1 million, and I seriously considered doing it.

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