Daytona Or Bust

   It's presently pre-season testing time for NASCAR's Nextel Cup teams at Daytona International Speedway.

   Within only three weeks or so they'll be headed back to Florida for the real thing, the Daytona 500 and the start of the 2006 tour.

   Many of the drivers will be traveling in their private planes, including some relatively large, very expensive jets.  Once at the track, they'll reside in a special compound, living in posh motorhomes that amount to palaces on wheels.

   By no means has it always been this way.  Not even close.

   In contrast, I offer the tale of driver Dave Marcis and his journey to enter the Daytona 500 in 1968.

   

   Although he'd never started a race on a super layout like the high-banked, 2.5-mile Daytona track, Marcis, then 26, was determined to experience the thrill of high speed and break into the NASCAR big-time in the process.

   He headed to Florida from his native Wisconsin, driving a jalopy of a truck and pulling his race car on an open trailer.  The car was a '66 Chevrolet.

   Somewhere in Kentucky, the truck's engine burned a rod bearing, a very serious failure.

   Most guys would have had the truck towed to a garage, paid for the engine to be repaired and returned home to Wausau.

   Not Dave.

   He made his way to a rest area and right there started working on that engine.  It amounted to major surgery.

   First, Marcis removed the oil pan.  Then he used a torch to cut the connecting rod off in the cylinder bore.  He wrapped duct tape around the crankshaft to seal the oil hole.  Next he cut the stem on the connecting rod and bolted that back around the tape onto the crankshaft.

   Dave then put the oil pan back on and hit the road again.

   He only could run a maximum of 40 miles an hour because the engine was vibrating so badly.  And Daytona Beach was almost a thousand miles away.

   Marcis had a lot of STP in the truck and he kept pouring that into the engine as a substitute for oil in order to get to the race track.

   When Dave came through the tunnel into the speedway the truck was shaking so violently it looked as if it would fall apart.  And it was trailing more smoke than a crop duster.

   Marcis worked on his race car during the day and on the truck afterward.  He was getting about two hours sleep a night.

   The truck work took place at the garage of storied engineer/crew chief Smokey Yunick, who had offered his facilities after seeing Marcis' struggles at the speedway.

  Other competitors and fans admired Dave's fortitude, but viewed his effort as a lost cause.  It seemed doubtful that he would make the field for the Daytona 500.  Or that he'd get the truck running well enough to drive it all the way back to Wisconsin.

   In a storybook development, he accomplished both.

   Marcis qualified 35th and won $2,015 for finishing 20th in the 500 won by Cale Yarborough, who was driving a Mercury for the Wood Brothers.

   In starting the '68 Daytona 500, Marcis began a streak of taking the green flag in his sport's biggest event 32 straight years, a record that very likely never will be broken.

   Before he retired at the end of the 2002 season, Marcis, who mainly competed in cars he owned and maintained, started 881 races at NASCAR's top level.  That total is second alltime only to King Richard Petty, who had 1,177 starts.

   Although Dave seldom had rich corporations as sponsors nor dozens of specialists working on his cars like other drivers, he won five races.  And in 1975 he finished second to Petty in the point standings.

   How did he do it?

   Perhaps a motto Dave adopted after moving to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina near Asheville in 1969 provides the most insightful answer.

   A copy of the motto is framed and hangs from a wall in Marcis'  shop.  It reads: "I have done so much with so little for so long that now I can do anything with nothing."

   Marcis now uses the shop to build custom hot rods on special order.  He's currently constructing a 1934 Chevrolet sedan for an old friend in Wausau, and he has other orders that will keep him busy well into the future.

   Additionally, Marcis used part of his career winnings of approximately $7.5 million to purchase Camp 28, a lodge/restaurant he now operates at Rib Lake, Wisconsin, catering to hunters and fishermen in an area 75 miles north of Wausau.

   All these accomplishments resulted from Dave Marcis' steadfast refusal to give up, turn around and return home after his old truck's engine conked out in Kentucky.

   And to think that a few drivers nowadays feel they have it tough if their parking spot in the motorhome compound isn't the most convenient to the garage area.