Busch Racing’s Fastest Improving Team Builds on Success, Heads to Homestead

CLEVELAND, Ohio – What is arguably the fastest-improving up-and-coming team in NASCAR Busch Grand National racing makes its fifth start of the season this week at the 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami Speedway in South Florida.

Led by championship driver Steve Grissom and crew chief Ricky Pearson, the team – the first NASCAR team with Cleveland owners – has come together quickly, yet successfully.

“Four weeks before the July race at Daytona, we started putting this together,” said John McGill, the Cleveland developer who owns the team with Carl Natale, a major earthwork contractor. “We have run four races – two short tracks and two superspeedways – and we’ve shown we’re capable of some great things.”

Indeed, four weeks after McGill and Natale began their team, they saw Grissom and Pearson start dead-last but move through the field at Daytona International Speedway to a 29th-place finish.

“That was incredible. To see a team come together that quickly and run that well was a fantastic feeling, not just for Carl and myself, but for everyone involved with the team,” McGill said. “Even better, we kept running well.”

DCT Motorsports’ next outing came at Bristol, Tenn., where a probable top 15 run ended early because of electrical problems, though they were able to fight back to finish 26th. They followed that up with a very solid 14th-place finish at Richmond, Va., and a 28th-place finish at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

“When you look at what we’ve pieced together, you have to be amazed. We bought seven cars from Ed Whitaker, did some modifications on some other cars and now have eight. We bought his shop equipment but added a great deal of new equipment too. We have done a lot very quickly.

“It shows an ability to sustain, to be there,” he added. “We have the potential to run at the front. We just need some additional sponsorship to get there.”

The team’s future, McGill said, was a nearly-complete schedule in 2004, followed by a championship run in 2005.

“What we really want to do is run competitively. Whatever we do, whether it’s five races or 30 races, is to be competitive,” he said. “But because of that, we’d love to run about 20-24 races next year. We want to give sponsors a major bang for the buck, and that sort of schedule – hitting all of the major races and all of the major markets – enables us to do that.

“We want to give sponsors what they want and need. Just a nice paint job is not enough. We want to do a good job for them on the race track but we want to do a good job for them off of it too,” he added. “We’re structuring things so that a sponsor gets a complete package, not a Chinese menu of ‘one from column A, one from column B.’ We want to give a sponsor appearances, show cars, a good publicity program, hospitality . . . all of the things they need to make their program successful.

“We’ve been looking at a business-to-business relationship, generating value-added through our development and earthwork contracting businesses,” McGill said. “The response so far has been very good.

“It all boils down to making the sponsorship work for them. If their program is successful, then so is ours.”