Q: What do you enjoy most about racing?

WJ: Everybody knows that driving the car is the least most important part to me. Figuring out the combination on what it takes to go quicker and faster than anybody else is the challenge for me. It's just like when they have cooking contests, where they have different chefs with the same ingredients, and they try to decide who ends up with the better dish out of the deal. That's what were in. We've all have the same parts. GM provides the same parts to everybody, and to me the challenge is to come up with the most amount of reliable horsepower to get the job done.

The driving part of it just comes with the territory. Sooner or later, preferably sooner, we will find someone that can drive the way I want it driven. There's a lot of people out there that think they're racecar drivers but they don't have a clue. They can let the clutch out, but they will probably smack both walls before they're at the eighth-mile. At the same time today's arena is completely different than it was five or ten years ago.

Driving the racecar is probably the least important part of it. Media coverage, ability to transfer information to the team, along with other things are stuff that people don't think about when it comes to being a driver.

Q: How would you grade yourself as a driver?

WJ: It all depends on what part of the racetrack people are talking about. Everybody thinks that if you let the clutch out first that makes you the premium driver out there. In some cases that's applicable, but at the same time there's another 1,319 feet that needs to be negotiated. Under those conditions I seem to have an advantage and maybe that's from experience. It may be that I learned how to race at some of the most marginal racetracks out there - I learned how to race at non-national event racetracks and maybe that's a part of the equation. I don't rate myself as a racecar driver in relation to everyone else. The only thing I can look at is the win/loss record and the amount of wins we have. That's the only yardstick I go by, and maybe that's pretty crude but it's the only thing I can go by.

Q: As a racer what do you want to accomplish before you end your career?

WJ: I guess (Vince) Lombardi said it best when he said "Winning isn't a sometimes thing, it's the only thing." That's what it amounts to as far as my standpoint as a racer. We're there to win, not to be social butterflies. It's our job and what we're being paid to do. Our focus is to win the races and if we don't, then we haven't completed our mission.

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