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Marcos Ambrose's NASCAR Whirlwind
by Stefan Bartholomaeus
pic: NASCAR Media
Marcos Ambrose started season 2008 as a Ford driver in the Nationwide Series, and ended it racing Toyotas in the Sprint Cup.
As Ambrose will no doubt attest, a year is a very long time in NASCAR. The Tasmanian’s season consisted of an incredible 46 races (35 in Nationwide, 11 in Cup), including a maiden NASCAR victory at Watkins Glen in August, and a second consecutive top 10 finish in the Nationwide points standings.
Ambrose has now returned to Australia for the off-season, where he’ll reflect on a hectic year of racing, and prepare himself for his ‘make or break’ year in the 2009 Sprint Cup.
“It’s been a whirlwind this year,” Ambrose told the press at his recent visit to the Symmons Plains V8 Supercar round. “I feel like I’m always fighting time and sleep. It’s nice to get away from the NASCAR circuit for a while, come home and spend time with my family and friends. It’s going to be great and I’m really going to use this time to reinvent myself.
“It’s really going to be my make or break year, 2009, to make it stick. I’ve got in some quality gear for the first time over there. I’ve paid my dues and I have enough experience. I’ve had over 100 starts now so there are no excuses left really, I’ve got to get it done.
“I’m looking forward to that challenge. Everything is poised to be something special. All I’ve asked of myself and the people that have worked with me over there is to give me the opportunity to prove or disprove whether I’ve got it and whether I can do it.
“The 11 races I’ve done at the Cup level have been an eye opener for me. I’ve realised that to last five hours out there is not an easy thing. The races are long, they’re aggressive. The drivers are as good and competitive as I’ve seen anywhere and the depth of talent is amazing. There are 43 (drivers) that start every week and there are about 42 and a half of them that are really, really good. Sometimes I feel like I’m the point five that’s missing (laughs).”
Next season, Ambrose will complete the full schedule of 36 Sprint Cup races aboard a JTG Daugherty Toyota Camry, prepared by Michael Waltrip Racing. Whilst it’s expected that’ll he’ll also compete in up to 20 Nationwide Series races for JTG, his schedule will be such that he won’t have the race the Nationwide car on weekends when the two series run in different states, as he did in 2008.
“The double race formats have been difficult for me,” he says. “The travel between the tracks, because I’m racing against guys … I call it the two-tenths rule. I’m two tenths of a second a lap away from flying my own jet and unfortunately I’m flying around commercial doing it the hard way.
“So we’re not going to do that. We’re going to focus on the Cup series but the Nationwide Series racing is fun if you do it the right way and it can help your Cup program too.”
Unfortunately for Ambrose, an incident in the final 2008 Cup race at Homestead cost the Australian a guaranteed start in the first five races of next season. Frustratingly, he’d entered the Homestead race with his #47 car inside the top 35 in the owner’s points standings, only to drop out at the last hurdle.
However, with the current state of the US economy, and many teams finding it difficult to put sponsorship programs together for next year, it appears that qualifying for a Sprint Cup event may not be as difficult as it has been in the past.
Explains Ambrose: “With the restructuring of some race teams and the economic crisis over there it looks like there are some guys in front of us that are going to drop back, so we should be locked in for the entire series.
“If not, we have to qualify in on our speed for the first five races, including the Daytona 500, which is not easy.”
The Daytona 500 is of course one of the world’s most famous motor races, and the jewel in the NASCAR crown. Whilst having raced Nationwide cars there in the past, Ambrose is somewhat anxious about his first attempt to qualify for the main show.
“I’m already pretty nervous about Daytona. You know, it’s a really tough race track. They run a restrictor plate there, so the cars are always really close. You’ve got to run those cars really loose, where the rear end moves around a lot. NASCARs inherently handle badly. They don’t turn well and they don’t handle the speeds well, so you’ve got to set them up so they’re always sliding so you don’t overload the tyres. Daytona is probably the meanest and ‘baddest’ of all the race tracks as far as having to run the car loose with guys all around you in the pack.
“I’m anxious about it. I’m really keen to be locked into that race, if the stars align and luck’s on our side I won’t have to qualify in on speed. Because we have to race our way in on that race track. They have what they call the Gatorade Duels where you have to race your way in through a heat race, the week before the big one, to get in. And I’m not looking forward to doing that.
“But it’s what I do. I’ve got to handle the pressure of racing over there. It is difficult to keep calm under that much pressure but it’s what I do.”
Thankfully for Australian race fans, Ambrose’s team structure for next year is going to be a lot simpler to follow than it has been in the past.
“I’ve driven for four teams all up this year, across the two series,” he says. “So I’ve got a lot of seats out there and a lot of steering wheels that I’ve been driving and using. And that’s been difficult to adapt.
“The team that has driven everything has been JTG Daugherty Racing. They have a marketing company that draws in the money to make it work and they on-sell that to race teams with a driver attached, which is me, by twisting their arm enough to make me the driver.
“Originally they merged with Wood Brothers, then they separated, it didn’t work out, and they had a sponsorship that crossed over with Wood Brothers so I drove the #21 a few times this year and then they (JTG) had the money together to go Cup racing. It’s a lot of money to run a Cup program. It costs about $15 to $20 million to run a car – and that’s US dollars.
“Basically, we didn’t have the money to ‘gear up’ to run a Cup program. We had the money to run but we didn’t really have the money to put everything together, to buy cars, transporters, people, infrastructure, testing time and all of that. So the smartest thing to do was to package that up and then try and deliver that to another team that was already running and that’s how the Michael Waltrip Racing link worked for us.
“It’s a great fit. They are a team that is really on the up. They’ve got a fleet of Toyotas and they are spending good money and they have done already. They’ve got over 30 full-time engineers on an engineering program that is first class. They’ve got good facilities and basically we are going to plug ourselves in there with myself and the sponsorship and a few key guys and hopefully make it work.
“I feel like that’s what I needed to do to put myself in quality machinery, to give myself a chance and for the team to give themselves a chance to really deliver on what they have promised their sponsors. I think it’s going to work out well, but time will tell how well it does work. I might be home next year driving with you guys again or I could be there for another 10 years. It just depends what happens (laughs).”
Whilst many have focussed on Ambrose’s on-track efforts in the USA, his off-track work has been arguably the more impressive. Amid doubts about whether American companies and race fans would accept an ‘outsider’ into the fold, JTG has been able to build a sponsorship base around Ambrose that is now the envy of many on pit-road.
“The Cup thing has really got me out there,” says Ambrose. “Little Debbie, which is a snack food company – they sell over $1 billion of snack cakes a year, which is unbelievable – they did a really big marketing campaign this year around me and my … I call it my ‘Australiana’.
“We did a national TV ad campaign with a koala on my shoulder, either sitting in the car with me talking smack about how bad I was driving, or sitting on my shoulder and chatting up some women walking down the supermarket aisle. So there’s been some really good stuff and we’ve used my point of difference, which is my Australian background and my accent, even though you guys will claim that I’ve got some US tweaks getting in.
“I really am proud of who I am and what I am all about over there. I feel like I got a little tainted over here, where I’d won and maybe said the wrong thing a time or two and got painted with the wrong brush. So I had a chance to really restart and reload over there and do it the right way and I think just my approach to life and to NASCAR and the fans, they’ve enjoyed that, so I’ve got a lot of mileage out of that and it’s been really good.
“The biggest concern I had when I went over there was ‘how was I going to be accepted?’, and I’m fortunate to say that it’s been the least of my problems. Success has been the biggest problem for me on the race track. Just actually getting it done.
“You look at the guys that have come in that haven’t been oval racing all their lives – there’s something like 40 or 50 NASCAR series running around the country at any one time and when you first get there you don’t realise how many guys are competing on a weekly basis on short tracks, big tracks, all around the country.
“So to get in there and mix it with guys from Formula 1 and IndyCar and all these other categories and make it stick compared to most of them – most of them have gone now. Dario Franchitti’s gone, AJ Allmendinger is out of a ride, Jacques Villeneuve lasted five minutes. These are pedigree drivers that didn’t last very long, so I feel proud of what I’ve done and the big part of that has been the leveraging of my Australian accent and being able to feel privileged to be there and I think that rubs off on how I look over there and how I’m accepted.”
Not surprisingly, Ambrose is quick to play down his move from Ford to Toyota.
“Unfortunately, Ford just didn’t have the opportunity for me to get to the Cup level like we needed to do. It wasn’t any goal to drive a Toyota but it was the best opportunity I had over there and I feel like it’s a progression. I feel like you need to keep moving forward in life and it’s clear that Toyota are winning in the showroom and on the race track and in NASCAR they had the most success and they’ve got a lot of progression.
“So I looked at the opportunities and my hands were tied to a certain extent. You’ve got the sponsors and the team and myself and we’re all making this decision together. It was the best opportunity on the table at the time to do what I needed to do to get the job done over there in America.”
With the testing ban recently announced by NASCAR enforced for 2009, his experience with Toyotas this year now becomes all the more valuable.
“I’m fortunate enough that I’ve done enough races that I know what I really need to do and should do to make it work. It’s not guaranteed and testing would be nice for everybody, but I think it’s a smart thing for the series to do.
“It’s not hard to spend millions of dollars to go testing. I mean, the manufacturers were renting race tracks … Ford, for instance, rented Kentucky Speedway every Tuesday of every week of the year for the last five years. You just turned up and it might be 15 grand a day to rent that track for the Ford teams. It’s a crazy expense.
“So I think NASCAR really want to stamp down on the testing and try and keep the teams viable to run quality races, because at the end of the day NASCAR just wants a good race. They want to put on a good show and they want teams to have enough money to do that. I think it’s smart for them.
“As a rookie coming into the sport on the Cup side, it would be nice to be at the top of the pile and have a lot of testing, but unfortunately I missed it by a year. But that’s the way it goes.”
Despite his impressive rise through the ranks of NASCAR, Ambrose insists that “there was no master plan” to go NASCAR racing when he was starting his career in Australia.
“There was no innate understanding that I was going to get to this point. I’ve just really fallen into it. Just with passion and commitment and enthusiasm, you know.
“I don’t believe – and I still to this day don’t believe – that I’ve got any more talent than anyone else out there. It’s just that I love the sport, I love racing cars and I love the challenge of it and I commit myself to it and take every day as day-by-day and minute-by-minute.
“I just really try to do the best I can and I pinch myself everyday that I’ve gotten this far. I feel like I’ve really achieved something, really by just surviving over there in the US and making it to the Cup level. It’s something that not everybody gets to do and gets to achieve in their lives so I feel like I’m really proud of what I’ve done and I had no idea that I was ever going to get this far. There was no vision of it. I just took it day by day.”
When pressed further about what sparked his passion for NASCAR, he continues:
“I’m a big fan of racing and I’m a bit of a historian. I love the old stuff and it always intrigued me when I looked back. I used to read all the old Autosport magazines from the 1970s that my Dad used to keep in boxes at our house.
“I’d look through these magazines and see the stories on Richard Petty winning and see the grandstands and there was hundreds of thousands of people watching and you see the numbers and they’re winning hundreds of thousands of dollars way back in the 1970s. As I grew older I thought ‘what is this sport?’ It was just massive, bigger than Formula 1 ever was and it’s just a localised series.
“It just intrigued me, so I’ve always had an interest in it, didn’t really understand it and then as my career blossomed and grew I really looked at it as a place to go. And that’s why I went.
“Is it really because of the money or the competitive deal? Yeah, it is, but what really got me going was that I remember that I was intrigued by it from a very early age, not really understanding what the sport was all about.”
Thanks to the efforts of Marcos Ambrose, a whole lot more Australians race fans are becoming intrigued by this American phenomenon too.
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