Martin

INDIANAPOLIS -- Mark Martin may not have been born in Indiana, but the Batesville, Ark., native owes a great deal of his racing success to the state known as "The Crossroads of America."

Martin is hoping to hit it big with a victory in Sunday's NASCAR Winston Cup Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Just as Jeff Gordon moved to Indiana to further his racing career, Martin's motives for moving to the Hoosier state were similar in 1979. Martin had just won his first American Speed Association (ASA) national championship as a 17-year-old in 1978, but he discovered it was difficult to compete in the Midwest series when his base of operations was in the Ozark Mountain region.

"The recognition for ASA racing wasn't that great back then," Martin recalled. "There weren't any TV races. I had just won the ASA championship in 1978 and I went to the trade show at Daytona Beach in 1979 as a spectator. I was still living in Batesville, and I went to Daytona to the trade show to see what kind of deals I could make.

"That is where I met Ray Dillon, looking at his coil springs. He said he could work a deal with me on the springs. He was also a trailer manufacturer and I was going to need a trailer. We talked about a trailer and then he said, 'I've got a shop you could use, if you wanted to come up here and be centrally located. I've even got a house I could rent you.'"

The meeting with Dillon helped boost Martin into big-time stock car racing.

"He brought me up there to North Liberty, Ind., rented me a house, gave me a shop to work out of and a bunch of good deals to latch onto for an up-and-coming driver who could endorse his products," Martin said. "All along, he was knowing he wanted to build and design a winning, short-track race car. I didn't know that.

"I was up there for about six months, he grabs me over in the corner and asked, 'What do you think about us designing our own car?' And we did and we brought it out the next year. It was the hottest thing in short-track racing for a few years. That is how I ended up being located in North Liberty, Ind."

Martin moved to northern Indiana in March 1979. He spent a great deal of his time driving up and down U.S. Highway 31, which runs from Indianapolis to South Bend.

"I was there until November of 1981, and that gave me the opportunity to be on my own, enough sponsorship backing to have my own business," Martin said. "I had just turned 20 years old. For a lot of people, they can identify with the feeling of being totally independent. It's a good feeling to be financially independent. That was something that was important to me. I felt like I was on my own and I had the freedom to make all the decisions on my own.

"It was a great time in my life and a very successful time, business-wise and racing-wise for me."

Dillon is a former ASA racer who said his most famous moment was a crash at Winchester Speedway in eastern Indiana, where he tore down more than 170 feet of backstretch guardrail and ended up in the woods. Dillon also competed at local tracks in northern Indiana, including South Bend, New Paris, Plymouth and Steuben County.

Dillon remembers how determined and focused Martin was early in his racing career.

"When I met Mark at the trade show, he was telling me he was trying to find a place to move his racing operation to somewhere in Indiana or Michigan because that is where all the ASA races were," Dillon recalled. "It was just killing him driving back and forth to Batesville, Arkansas.

"I had raced for eight to 10 years and was getting ready to quit racing. In about a 10-minute conversation, we put a deal together where Mark moved up here to drive my cars. Mark brought a semi load of tools and spare parts and equipment up here and moved into the house. We converted one of the buildings into a two-stall garage for Mark to keep his race cars in. He brought his crew, moved in here, and started racing here."

The two enjoyed tremendous success after developing a coil-over-shock suspension that most ASA cars currently use. The following year, Martin not only captured the ASA championship, he won 13 races -- and Dillon's chassis were in high demand. Dillon's customers included drivers like Rusty Wallace and Ken Schrader.

But Dillon does not take much credit for Martin's success, choosing to point out the tremendous work ethic and desire the driver possesses.

"The thing I tell everybody is Mark Martin is strictly self-made," Dillon said. "Sure, I had a part, I was a player in the deal, but anyone could have taken my place. Mark had a burning desire to be a successful, big-time stock car driver. From the day I met him when he was 17 years old, he had a goal, and that was the only thing in life that kid wanted.

"If I came in at 6:30 or 7 in the morning, he was already here grinding on something or drilling holes. He was still here at 2 a.m. He lived on two or three hours of sleep a night, he never went out partying. All that kid did year-round was work, physically work on that race car.

Dillon believes Martin not only was being ambitious and had a burning desire, he had raw talent.

"His driving goes without saying. Mark is smart," Dillon said. "We used to have really, really neat conversations on theories of camber curve, roll-center height, tread width, and Mark put many, many ideas into what I got the credit for designing. As far as me thinking I should share in Mark's deal, I'm looking at I had the benefit of him here. What made Dillon Enterprises is Mark Martin."

To have so many resources at his convenience, Martin believed he had all the ingredients to succeed in racing.

"There was no place in Arkansas that manufactured and sold race car parts like Ray Dillon had and I was right on his grounds," Martin said. "For a kid from Arkansas who raced, that was heaven. I didn't get into anything else, we worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week, so I didn't get out to the Notre Dame football games or anything like that. Once in a while, we went to South Bend for dinner or a movie or to the mall.

"I didn't get out and enjoy the state that much, other than the racing part of it. There were race tracks all over the place and racers coming in every day to Dillon's place."

But the biggest track of all was located just 2 1/2 miles down U.S. 31.

"I did take a tour of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway just for kicks when I was down racing at Indianapolis Raceway Park," Martin said. "I never dreamed that I would ever have the opportunity to race there. I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to drive a winning Winston Cup car, either, at that time. I was just racing to win and having a ball doing it."

Although Martin was fascinated with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the thought of racing there never entered his mind.

"It meant less to me at the time than it might have because I didn't ever realize I might have an opportunity to do that," Martin said. "That was so far out there for me. I had basically come from the quarter-mile dirt tracks from Arkansas and that facility, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was stunning to me. It was like visiting NASA.

"I just skimmed across it and thought it was incredible. It was so far out there, it didn't sink in. If somebody had told me when I was taking that tour I was going to race there someday, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have asked, 'In what?'"

At the time, the Indianapolis 500 was the only race held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. That changed in 1994 when NASCAR held the inaugural Brickyard 400. The United States Grand Prix Formula One race began in 2000.

Martin was too preoccupied with his own career to pay much attention to what happened at Indy in those days.

"I wasn't interested in watching the Indianapolis 500 because I was too busy working," he said. "If I wasn't racing, I would have much rather been in the shop working on the race car than watching the Indianapolis 500. I don't mean that in a negative way, all I cared about was what I was doing, not what someone else was doing. That was someone else at Indy, not us."

Martin was concentrating on some of Indiana's other legendary race tracks, such as Winchester, Salem, Anderson and Indianapolis Raceway Park.

"Winchester is the most wonderful race track I ever ran on between that and Salem because they are so treacherous and high banked," Martin said. "They are just like running at Bristol, Tennessee, which is what makes Bristol so comfortable and at home for me and the guys who came from ASA.

"I won the Winchester 400 the last two years I ran there. It was the Daytona of the ASA series -- the biggest race on our circuit -- and I won it in 1985 and '86. ... Salem is great, we ran good there and won races, too. I liked the high banks, the speed, the thrill and the treacherousness. Anderson is a little quarter-mile, high-banked, awesome race track -- lots of fun. ... Indianapolis Raceway Park, I didn't have any feelings for IRP. To me, it was plain. Man, you go to Winchester and Salem, you are going somewhere."

Together, Martin and Dillon built a Winston Cup car in 1981 for Martin's debut at Nashville. In that first race, Martin won the pole but fell out early. He went to Richmond, Virginia later in the season and won the pole again.

"The following year, Mark wanted to go full-time and race Winston Cup and it wasn't feasible to do it from here," Dillon said. "I had 27 employees and a 600-acre farm. I wasn't in a position to move to Charlotte. Mark went his way and I stayed here."

After Martin's initial foray into Winston Cup racing from 1981-83 ended in failure, he returned to the ASA series and moved to Milwaukee to drive for car owner Jerry Gunderman. Martin built a successful second ASA career and returned to Winston Cup for good in 1988 when he joined team owner Jack Roush.

The combination of Martin and a Roush-prepared Ford has proved extremely successful since 1989.

Martin now lives near Daytona Beach, Florida, but he remembers his time in Indiana as special.

"Racing was more popular in Indiana than anything I had ever experienced," Martin said. "There were race tracks all over the place with all kinds of different race cars. It was different, a lot different than Arkansas was. In North Carolina, if it is not Winston Cup or Busch Grand National, it is not going to draw any special crowd. They are into their racing in Indiana.

"They have enough race fans to support a wide range of race cars and tracks -- from little dirt tracks to high-banked paved tracks to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway."

When Martin returned to NASCAR for good, Dillon continued to build cars for Bobby Allison's efforts in ASA, ARTGO, All-Pro and the NASCAR American Challenge.

Together, Dillon and Allison had a 31-race schedule, but when Allison suffered career-ending injuries in a crash at Pocono International Raceway in 1988, Dillon began to get out of racing.

In 1991, Dillon sold the business to his son, Troy, who operates out of a building in nearby Walkerton.

But Martin again is battling for the Winston Cup championship.

"Indiana played a very big role in the development of my racing," Martin said. "That is where I lived for a good part of time in a very developed mental stage of my career. I have a warm feeling for that. It was a very warm time for me to get out on my own and make a business out of racing is something I never dreamed I could do.

"When I first started racing, I didn't know you could make a living and race cars. I thought you worked and raced cars on the side for fun. It wasn't until I moved to Indiana that I realized you could make a living at it. It was a very warm time when I lived in Indiana."