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| | Friday, December 3 Parrott grows into role of champion crew chief | |||||
| NEW YORK -- While Dale Jarrett is acclaimed this week as the Winston Cup champion, the man who played perhaps the biggest part in getting him there is mostly enjoying it with a quiet smile.
Todd Parrott, the crew chief on Jarrett's No. 88 Ford Quality Care Taurus, has won NASCAR's biggest honor before, but not as a crew chief. He was a chassis specialist in 1989 for Rusty Wallace's championship team.
"I learned a lot of lessons from that championship," Parrott said Thursday as he stood only a few yards from Jarrett, who was surrounded by members of the media. "I know how hard it is to keep the momentum going.
"We had a championship team and we really had it rolling and then the owner sold the team the next year and everything changed," he said. "Right now, our team has chemistry. It has continuity. We need to keep that going if we want to win more
championships -- and we all want to win more championships."
Parrott, 35, just finished his fourth year as a crew chief, all of them at Robert Yates Racing with Jarrett.
"Robert took a chance on a young guy who had never been a crew chief before," Parrott said. "He put me with a driver who had ability but hadn't won a lot, yet, and we put together a group of people that we could really make a team out of.
"Now, four years later, all of those guys except one are going to be on the stage of the Waldorf-Astoria at the banquet as winners."
Like Jarrett, whose father, Ned, was a stock car star, Parrott has racing in his background. Buddy Parrott, Todd's father, is a longtime crew chief and team manager.
Until recent years, a crew chief was mostly a glorified mechanic. Nowadays he is far more.
"It's a challenge to trying to get these guys to work hard, to keep them together and keep everybody happy," Todd said. "I'm a babysitter, a psychologist and sometimes even a divorce lawyer. But I do what I have to do. I'm very strong minded and I've got a lot of confidence in what I do and in the guys who work for me."
Parrott said the No. 88 may actually be a little behind some of the other teams in preparations for 2000 because he was so dedicated to making sure they won this championship after leading for two-thirds of the season.
"I wanted to make sure we got that Winston Cup trophy in our hands," he said. "If we'd have messed up and let that thing slip away, I'd of been kicking myself all winter."
With four wins and 24 top-10 finishes in 34 races, there was no way the trophy was going to get away. Now Jarrett, Parrott and the rest of the team can celebrate, and collect big checks, Friday night during the annual awards banquet.
Good timing for Metcalfe Morris Metcalfe, longtime chief of timing and scoring for NASCAR, was picked Thursday to receive the Buddy Shuman Award. The award, named for a NASCAR racing pioneer and official who died in a hotel fire in Hickory, N.C., in 1955, has been given annually since 1957 to a person or organization who have gone above the call of duty in service to the stock car sport. Metcalfe, 72, has scored more than 3,100 races in a number of divisions. When he took over as NASCAR's chief scorer in November of 1955, the scoring was all done by hand. Now, it is done in three ways, utilizing transponders in the car, a backup button pushed by the car's scorer and the old manual method as a final fall-back. The native of Morristown, Tenn., will retire following the Daytona 500 in February. "I would have retired at the end of this year, but I wanted to be able to say I was doing my job in six decades," Metcalfe said. The Shuman Award is voted on by a panel of manufacturers representatives and is presented by Federal-Mogul. State of NASCAR Mike Helton, chief operating officer of NASCAR, pronounced NASCAR is great health Friday in his annual "State of the Sport" speech. Helton was instrumental in keep the sport strong, helping to negotiate the new television contract announced several weeks ago which will bring at least $2.9 million into the sport over eight years beginning in 2001. He pointed out that NASCAR has 17 of the top 20 sports crowds in 1999 and that its license merchandise topped $1.2 billion this year, up 1,000 percent from the beginning of the decade. Among the plans for the near future is an animated series, "NASCAR Racers," which will debut on the Fox Kids Network in February. "We have to think about where the fans of the future are coming from," Helton said. "Right now, our Web site, NASCAR Online, is second only to Disney in attracting users 11 and under. We want to keep reaching that audience and build on it." | ALSO SEE Winston Cup at home in Big Apple
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