At the Austin family dinner table in Eudora, Kan., nothing but positive conversation is allowed.
So his mother, Marianne, said, “We assume that one day, Chase will be the next Jeff Gordon.”
But he would be so much more than that.
If Chase Austin becomes the next Jeff Gordon, he also will be NASCAR’s Tiger Woods.
“There’s going to be a minority [winner] soon,” Chase said of the Nextel Cup series. “I don’t know if it’s going to be me. Me being the first? I’d really like to. I don’t expect myself to. I’m not pressuring myself about it, but if it happens, I’ll accept it.”
How good, at age 15, is Chase Austin?
He’s good enough that the team owner who discovered Gordon has signed him.
Rick Hendrick even had to beat the fervent bidding of two other juggernaut NASCAR teams, Roush Racing and Richard Childress Racing, to get a long-term developmental contract.
Why Austin?
He already has won more than 100 feature races in go-karts, full-bodied stock cars and powerful open-wheel sprint cars in the Midwest.
He has done it with an uncanny feel for race cars and racetracks, his mechanic father is certain.
“I did good just to get the basic setup under him,” Steve Austin said. “He had to adapt to whatever the track conditions were. . . . He learned to get into the corner in different spots to get the car to handle.
“And he would still take an ill-handling car and make it fast. He just had a knack for it. I didn’t teach him. We didn’t know anything about going out racing. He basically just jumped into it and did it.”
As NASCAR tries to break out of its notoriety for all-white drivers and mostly white audiences, the fact that Austin is black “is a bonus,” Hendrick said.
He also has been able to attract sponsorship. At a recent race, Hendrick got him together with corporate chieftains who represented more than $50 million a year in sponsorship for the team.
“He was up in the [VIP hospitality] suite, talking to the executives of Lowe’s, DuPont and CarQuest,” Hendrick said. “And I was blown away. I mean, 15 years old?”
Shared tragedy
When one of Hendrick’s planes crashed on Oct. 24, killing all 10 people aboard, the Austin family in Kansas shared the devastation of the Hendrick family in North Carolina. All along, the Austins had been drawn to the Hendrick team more than the others, “because Hendrick is family,” Chase said of the entire 460-person operation and the way it operates.
Just the week before the crash, the Hendricks and the Austins had bonded during the race weekend in Concord, N.C.
“Here’s this little 15-year-old kid who’s only in the driver development program,” Marianne said, “and every individual in that organization reached out to him, reached out to us, made us feel we were as important as Jeff Gordon.
“In the pit area, if Jeff passed Chase, he would stop and pat him and say, `Hey, buddy.’
“Joe Jackson (the sponsorship liaison from DuPont who was killed in the plane crash) sat next to Chase most of the weekend in the suite,” Marianne said. “They teased each other. They threw M&M’s at each other. Joe almost incited Chase to misbehave. I kind of had to keep an eye on both of them. Chase was supposed to be on his best behavior.”
They got to know Ricky Hendrick, 24, Rick Hendrick’s only son, who also died in the crash.
“[We got] to see the constant smile you read about in all the newspapers, feel the firm handshake, see the passion in the guy,” Marianne said.
“Jeff Turner (the team general manager who was killed) was our primary contact–everything we’ve done was through him. Chase was hit pretty hard, losing Jeff.”
But Hendrick Motorsports is renowned for pressing on through tragedies. Even this one. The race team keeps on winning, keeps on bringing up bright young talent.
Bid for diversity
NASCAR’s minimum age for drivers is 18, so the big time is at least three years away for Austin. He will come up through the Hendrick developmental system, first in late models on short tracks.
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NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity program already has placed five minority drivers in rides in the entry-level Weekly Racing Series. More are being evaluated in formal, regularly scheduled tryouts. African-American driver Bill Lester is a regular in the Craftsman Truck Series, though he has yet to win.
Ramsey Poston, the organization’s chief publicist, said that from the starting grids to the grandstands, “We want to make NASCAR look more like America.”
Yet through the flurry of activity, Austin may have the best chance to break through as NASCAR’s first minority winner because of the combination of his ability and maturity combined with Hendrick’s wherewithal.
African-American drivers are not new to NASCAR. The late Wendell Scott competed at the highest level from 1961-73, winning only once, on a dirt track in ’64–and he had to protest a scoring error hours after a white driver had been flagged the winner even to get that one.
In NASCAR’s first proactive attempt at diversity, in 1978, sports-car standout Willy T. Ribbs was groomed briefly to be the first major black star but left in a dispute with promoters. His designated ride was filled by a struggling young white dirt-tracker of the time named Dale Earnhardt–and the rest is more blue-collar, white-Southern history.
What NASCAR never has had is a minority Jeff Gordon, a consistent threat to win races, week in, week out.
Race not an issue
Although conventional wisdom is that motor racing just isn’t very popular in minority communities–largely because of the lack of minority drivers–Steve Austin said, “We didn’t take that into account when we got into racing.
“When I was a kid, my dad took me to the races, but as for other minorities showing interest in racing, it’s kind of tough because their fathers never showed them they could actually race. That’s probably why there’s not a lot of interest in the minority market.
“[So race] has never been an issue with Chase,” Steve said. “He has been racing the backwoods dirt tracks for quite a while, and he has been well-accepted.
“We don’t walk around with a chip on our shoulders, and we’re nice to everybody, and everybody’s nice to us, and we just haven’t had a problem.”
“Sometimes,” Chase said with a hint of a sigh, “I wish I was a regular kid who just got to go outside and play basketball and go home and do my chores, and that would be it.
“But this is the lifestyle that I have, and I accept it.”
Getting his schooling in hasn’t been an insurmountable problem, so far.
“We pulled him out of school for several months at a time last year to travel to race in the Carolinas and some places where he might get on the radar screen,” Marianne said. “But we’re fortunate because we live in a small town, and the school is 100 percent behind him. In fact, we met with the entire staff, counselors and principal to work out a plan to get us through this year.”
That might mean hiring private tutors for the road. It’s one of many unknowns in the uncharted path of a 15-year-old professional racing driver.
Yet the path is brightly, warmly lit, because that’s the way the Austin family always sees it.
“We never pushed him. We always let it be his choice,” Marianne said. “But the conversation in our house, about everything we do in our lives, is very positive. And so we talk about when he’s a Cup racer. And, `One day when we live there . . . ‘ And, `One day when we do this . . . ‘ It’s just a given.
“We believe the joy is in the journey, so we will enjoy each step that we take. . . . We assume one day, Chase will be the next Jeff Gordon, but if that doesn’t happen, we will have had a great time along the way.
“What we’re doing here is so cutting edge that no one really knows how to make predictions,” Marianne said. “And when you start to make predictions, you put pressure on people. Our focus is seat time–taking a driver with raw talent and developing that.
“Who knows? No one has ever been down this path before.”