Martinsville, Va. — Jack Roush is looking for a few good men. And when Jack’s looking for talent that can only mean one thing—the crew is getting the gong ready for anther edition of The Gong Show.
Roush has held a couple of these open mic style editions in the past, and culled one driver out of the process who is showing some hope of talent. You might have heard of him, Chase for the Championship leader Kurt Busch.
This edition of the now famous Roush gong show will take place this week, at the now mothballed North Wilkesboro Speedway.
Joining Roush in review of the 24 hopefuls will be some of Roush Racing’s other premier talent—Mark Martin, Carl Edwards and Jon Wood—who’ll be doing far more than watching this contest of speed. Then a few of the behind the scene’s marketing types will be there to watch for each participant’s marketability angles.
The official name of the program is Race for the Ride.
Mega Ford car owner Roush explains the culling process that took quite a number of hopefuls and forged them into 24 drivers who stand of a chance of following in Busch’s footsteps. “We anticipate needing at least one, potentially two drivers, for our truck program next year. As we’ve done in the past when we haven’t had someone standing right in front of us that was a clear choice we cast a seine and did a survey and collected initially 400 names. From there we made some enquires, did some interviews over the phone and reduced the list to less than 100.”
Continuing Roush added, “Then we got the crew chiefs together and Mark and Matt had some opinions and Kurt. Then we reduced that number to 50.
“Then I sat down with Mark and Kurt and all the crew chiefs and the marketing people and reduced that number to 24.”
Giving specifics for the Race for the Ride Roush says, “We’re going over to Wilkesboro on the 25th, 26th, 27th—Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday—with three trucks and a couple of tractor trailer loads of tires. We got some of last years IROC soft tires that should all be the same.”
Whether it’s Roush’s exposure to NASCAR parity or a sense of fairness, Roush wants all of the test vehicles to be as identically prepared as he can make them and is going to great lengths.
“Jon Wood is going to drive the trucks to get them all set up,” Roush says of leveling the tools he needs to explore pure, but untested, talent. “They’ll be as close as we can make them. They’re middle of the road trucks, but they won’t be the best stuff that that we could put out for a championship. But there’s not a truck there that will have a problem.
“We’ll look at how fast Jon goes with the trucks and consider that a baseline. Then we’ll consider how they [the gong show participants] do with those same trucks.”
“We’ve got the trucks ready and each driver will get at least two sets of tires,” Roush explains. If the weather holds for us we’ll know more about a couple of dozen drivers, including a number of diversity candidates.”
So what is it that Roush is looking for? Everything that makes a commercially viable driver these days. “There will be marketing people there. There will be some media people there. There will be some videotaping. We’ll look at the interaction between crew chief and team.”
But Roush shows some concerns regarding weather, and whether he’ll be able to charge through the 24 drivers who hope to make it into NASCAR’s big leagues. “I enjoy looking at young talent, but the task of trying to be fair and give them a good opportunity for 24 participants in three days—that’s eight per day—and that’s a big job.”
Roush, sitting in the hauler of Martin’s Viagra Ford, broke from his explanation for a moment to share a great story on his previous Gong Show entrants.
“Kurt Busch, when we did it with him …he didn’t make the list of consolation prizes for the first day,” Roush said grinning. “Then when we got ready for the second test one of the guys couldn’t make it and Kurt got added. Except for that he wouldn’t of been in the trucks or where he is today.”
Roush then grinned and added, “The system is far from perfect and at the time we were only evaluating eight at a time.”
North Wilkesboro was a logical choice as Jack explains. “We wanted something that was close and wouldn’t be something the drivers had ever seen,” Roush offers matter of factly. “If you have a driver run where he’s raced before, well that’s an advantage.
“We talked to Bruton Smith, and he called Bob Bahre, I reckon,” Roush says of his agreement to use the track. “He agreed that if we’d take our own porta-john and if we availed ourselves of all the necessary track equipment, which there’s nothing up there. So we’ve got to take our own broom for sweeping the track and getting down some oil dry if we put some oil down.”
Www.teamfordracing.com has learned a bit about a couple of the drivers. From New Zealand, Michael Pickens had never turned a lap on asphalt and has all of his seat time been behind the wheel of a dirt sprint car. Another is Jason Boyd, who got noticed down in Florida by Martin after the Boyd Brothers helped Matt Martin with a few little things with his racing program on the local tracks in the area.
No matter the outcome of the Race for the Ride, 24 drivers will be noticed and get some valuable exposure under the watchful eyes of some of the sport’s greats. And perhaps two of them will literally follow in Busch’s footsteps—chasing down Cup championships for the Cat in the Hat.
