Sam's Town 300 - Stanton Barrett Notes

Locked Out Of The ‘Locked-In’ Positions
DCT, Barrett must get in races on speed With change in determining top 30 points spots

SPARTANBURG, S.C. – In years past, focus on the NASCAR Busch Series national points tended to concentrate on the last third of the season.

Those days are over.

“You have to pay attention to the points every single week, especially when you are in the position we are in,” said John McGill, who, along with his wife Nancy, owns DCT Motorsports, which fields the #36 Chevrolet driven by Stanton Barrett.

The main reason, McGill pointed out, is the top 30 in the series’ car owner standings will automatically have starting spots in each NASCAR Busch Series race. That begins with the fifth race of the season – the Mar. 16 race at Atlanta (Ga.) Motor Speedway. For now, the top 30 from the end of last season are locked in each week, with the stipulation announced in mid-January that only teams who ran full 2004 schedules would be eligible.

“That new stipulation really threw us a curve,” McGill said. “We had been told anybody in the top 30 of the points in 2004 would be locked in for starting positions the first five races of this season. We worked the entire off-season under that, preparing our cars and determining our schedule along those lines.

“In mid-January, we were told that only those teams who ran full 2004 schedules would be eligible. Well, I can kind of see where they are coming from there – they wanted to keep the big Cup teams from taking those spots. But we’re not a Cup team – we are a full-time Busch team,” he added.

“We ran the last portion of the 2004 season towards making that top 30. Even though we ran 25 events, we were pretty proud of the fact we were able to finish in the top 30.”

McGill noted DCT Motorsports’ plan all along has been followed – a few races in 2003, 25 races in 2004 and a full schedule in 2005.

“But the finances really comes into play,” he said. “For example, by the time we found out they had decided we weren’t going to get one of the locked in spots for the top 30, we had already committed to the race at Mexico. We had gone too far to back out – purchased cars, purchased insurance, made all of the plans and put money down. Where we are sponsorship-wise, I’m not sure we would have ended up going last week if I had known from the start we didn’t have a guaranteed starting position like all of the other 2004 top 30 Busch teams.”

The emphasis changed because of that, McGill said. Now it is on making the field each week. Running well is still important but it has to be a secondary goal.

“We have to qualify well. It doesn’t matter how good our car is for the race if we’re not in it,” McGill said. “I think that has hampered us somewhat in regards to the 2005 points. Now our goal is to be in the top 30 by the time of the Atlanta race. Hopefully, at that point we can spend less time worrying about qualifying and more time worrying about racing well.”

“We’re going self-funded. We’re not sponsored. That makes things pretty tough from the start,” McGill continued. “I’ve put a lot of my personal money into this team, more than I’d think most Busch Series car owners would. But I’ve done that because we want to race, we want to be competitive and I believe in what we are doing.

“This is going to be a good race team but there have been obstacles to overcome. Some obstacles you expect. They are part of the sport. Losing our place and our reward for finishing in the top 30 last year, especially as late as we were told, was another obstacle, but one that didn’t have to be there.”

At Mexico, Barrett and the DCT Motorsports Chevrolet gave the field a run for its pesos, leading a portion of the race and apparently headed for a top-five finish before Barrett was spun by another car late in the race, and he finished 19th. As a car owner, McGill slid into 25th in the standings – within the top-30 area that is protected for starting positions after the fifth race of the season.

McGill is a Cleveland, Ohio, businessman who develops major real estate developments in the eastern United States. He is the first car owner from the Cleveland area involved with one of NASCAR’s top two series.

An award-winning stunt man from Hollywood, Barrett has appeared in well over 100 movies – including the soon-to-be-released Dukes Of Hazzard, Spiderman II and others – as well as hundreds of television shows and commercials. Barrett, who is also running some NASCAR Nextel Cup Series events again this season, has been driving since he was 16 years old, and has competed on the highest levels of NASCAR racing. He is a native of Bishop, Calif., and is well known not just in Hollywood but also in motorsports.