In 1992, while still working his way up the Outlaw ladder, Blaney made his first NASCAR Winston Cup start at North Carolina Speedway. The way he tells it, he had yet to race a full-bodied car and was just checking it out. "A friend of mine from Ohio, Stan Hoover-he still runs ARCA races-had bought some Winston Cup cars. He was looking to run a couple races, and we'd been friends for a long time. We just both went down there to see what it was like. I remember everybody there made the race-40 cars. We just had some fun learning what it was all about," he says.
"I ran about two thirds of the race. I remember the exhaust breaking, and I was breathing in a bunch of fumes and getting sick. That's about my only memory of it, other than it being my first start in any kind of full-bodied stock car."
From there, Blaney kept up his Outlaw schedule, added a total of six more ARCA stock car races with Hoover, and earned a third at Atlanta to show for his pavement stocker efforts.
His next jump into stockers would come when Amoco was an associate sponsor on the sprint car. The team was discussing the possibility of Amoco being the primary sponsor, and the subject of Amoco getting into NASCAR Winston Cup racing came up. The plan was to start out with a Busch Grand National (BGN) team and then take it into Winston Cup.
"I begged them to put my name on the list," Blaney says. Eventually, the plan was set in motion. Blaney drove the BGN car in 1999 and moved up to the Winston Cup ride. This plan also provided Davis with a two-car Cup team, much like fellow Pontiac team owner Joe Gibbs.
Bill Davis is no newbie to BGN racing, however. Remember Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon's stints driving for Davis? The records still stand. He's also one of only five active owners to field both Winston Cup and Busch Grand National teams. All in all, it was a grand plan for forming, training, and ultimately getting a team into Winston Cup racing. But, while a sponsor and team owner with Winston Cup experience could hire mechanics and crew people with similar experience, wouldn't the unknown part of the equation be a driver that had virtually none?
Clearly, Blaney was the weak link. With such vast differences in the two types of racing, how would he be brought up to speed in as little as two years? Any good driver will have an open line of chassis and track communication with the crew chief and even take advice. But that data has to transfer back to the crew and the crew chief in the same language to become effective chassis changes. Then there are the vast differences between tossing a winged sprinter around a half-mile dirt bull-ring and hanging onto a full-bodied stocker as it snorts its way around Daytona. Worlds apart? You bet.
When talking with the quiet Blaney, he points out those differences between driving sprinters and stockers. As far as on-track driving, Blaney says the sprinters "are a stop-and-go type of car" and the stockers are not. He says a stocker requires more consistency per lap to capitalize on momentum, thereby building lap speeds. On the dirt with a lighter, more powerful car, he often used many different lines around the track for changing surface conditions and close racing.
"On the dirt tracks, the line is always changing," says Blaney. The only time changing a line is used with stockers is when avoiding trouble or when testing another line to see how it reacts with the car's setup, looking for better lap times. Blaney quickly points out an example, "Jeff Gordon's is the first one to seek out a good line." That comes from dirt and open wheel driving.