AVONDALE, Ariz. — Being a backmarker has never felt so good to Larry Gunselman.
That’s not to say the former Snohomish County stock car driver has abandoned dreams of racing in the Daytona 500 or becoming such a success that big-time sponsors and private jets are a part of his lifestyle.
But, at age 47, Gunselman doesn’t let himself get absorbed by those thoughts.
He finished this season driving for a low-budget team on the NASCAR Nationwide Series and seems at peace with his place in the racing world. His last race, early this month at Phoenix International Raceway, resulted in a 36th-place finish and a $26,313 paycheck for the No. 01 car owned by Johnny Davis.
“I’m just thrilled to death to be almost 48 years old and still be driving race cars for a living,” he said. “I’m living my dream, but my dream has changed a little. When I was younger, I was willing to give up anything and everything just to drive race cars for a living. I’m trying to have a little bit of fun, make a living, not put too much pressure on myself and be the best teammate I can be to the organizations I’m involved with.”
It has been a journey of high hopes and hard crashes, physically and emotionally.
Gunselman, a 1979 graduate of North Mason High School, was a refrigeration mechanic at the Boeing plant in Everett when he began driving race cars.
“Working at Boeing paid for my racing habit,” he said. “In the end, I think drugs would have been cheaper.”
He raced Saturday nights at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe, jumped up to the regional touring series and then to the NASCAR Winston West series. He quit Boeing to focus all his attention on racing and won the Winston West’s most popular driver award in 1996.
Still, he wanted to race in NASCAR’s highest level and knew he couldn’t do it living in the Northwest. He moved away in 2000 and now lives in Denver, N.C., about 30 miles outside Charlotte, the epicenter of stock car racing.
Gunselman learned quickly how difficult it would be to gather the sponsorship, equipment and respect needed to run with the big boys.
“I was a big fish in the West Coast pond, but in North Carolina I wasn’t even in the pond,” he said. “Every time I thought I’d get in the pond, a big fish would swat me out and I’d be gasping for air up on the bank.”
He raced in the NASCAR truck and Busch (now Nationwide) series from 2001-2003 and started his own Cup team in 2004 but struggled to qualify for races, falling short twice trying to make the Daytona 500.
Gunselman didn’t race in 2007, but he returned this year when former driver Phil Parsons hired him for his Nationwide Series team. That turned out to be a boost, but also a setback.
Obviously uplifted being behind the wheel again, Gunselman found himself making the wrong turn at the wrong time last April at Talladega, where he became part of an accident that may mark him forever.
Dario Franchitti, the defending Indy 500 champion who had switched to stock cars, hit the wall after his car blew a tire. It began a chain-reaction crash involving several cars.
As Gunselman drove toward the mess, his spotter told him to move to the low side of the track on the left, he said. Franchitti’s car had slid down the banking and Gunselman hit him broadside just ahead of the driver’s door. Franchitti suffered a fractured left ankle and, not long after he was well enough to drive again, he lost his ride when Chip Ganassi folded the team.
Gunselman has recovered from the concussion he got in the crash, but not from the backlash it created. He was criticized for turning left and driving into Franchitti, and Parsons pulled him from the car a short time later.
“I really don’t want to go down in history as the guy who knocked Dario Franchitti out of NASCAR,” Gunselman said. “But since I was a small person in the whole scheme of things and he was a high-profile person, I may have taken a little bit of the blame for that.
“I went where my spotter said to go and I was on the brake pedal so hard I bent it. I regret that incident terribly. I second-guess myself all the time and if I could have traded places with him and I was the one with the broken ankle, I’d do it in a second.
“It was an unfortunate combination of events. But we’re all past that now and I’m back in NASCAR’s good graces, I hope, and I really enjoy working with the owners I have. We’re just doing the best we can.”
Gunselman says he would like to drive another four or five years and achieve 100 starts in the Nationwide Series (the Phoenix race was his 70th). When his career does end, he’ll look back at the unforeseen experiences racing gave him.
Gunselman raced in Japan 10 years ago when a NASCAR contingent went there for a stock car race. He became involved in former driver Geoff Bodine’s project to aid the U.S. bobsled team and hopes to play a role with the team in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, B.C. And he worked with NASCAR on the failed attempt to build a speedway near Bremerton.
“I grew up two miles from where they wanted to put that speedway in Kitsap County,” Gunselman said. “It would have been an incredible economic boon and I think it will go down as one of the biggest mistakes in sports in the history of the Pacific Northwest. It breaks my heart.”
His racing life hasn’t turned out the way he’d hoped, but Gunselman considers himself enriched nonetheless.
“I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people and see a lot of things that a kid who was born in Bremerton and graduated from a little Class A school probably wouldn’t have gotten an opportunity to do,” he said. “Do I have regrets or disappointments that my career didn’t get to as high a level as I had wanted? Absolutely. But I can look back and say to myself that I gave it everything I had and did my best.”
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