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Mike Wallace The Race To Get Back On The Track

Mike Wallace joined a short list of veteran racers during the 2008 season when he started his 600th career NASCAR race. With that many starts and the success he's had, it's no wonder that Wallace has accumulated more than $17 million in winnings. Of course, this doesn't shock anyone who's familiar with the Wallace racing family. His brothers, Rusty and Kenny have also gained fame in the world of NASCAR.

Wallace's long and illustrious career began in 1990 with a race in the NASCAR Nationwide series. He placed sixth and never looked back. His first win came four years later in the same series. It was a season that brought him two more wins for a total of three. He also had six top five finishes and nine top 10 finishes that year. In 2001, Wallace started 37 races and racked up a whopping $2,189,935 in winnings.

Wallace has always had success at superspeedways. In fact, in 2003 at Daytona, he recorded three top 10 finishes in three days in three different Series and with three different manufacturers. The first was a sixth-place finish in the Federated Auto Parts Chevrolet in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race, the second was a fourth-place finish in the GEICO Pontiac in the NASCAR Busch Series race, and the third was a ninth-place finish in the Miccosukee Gaming & Resorts Dodge in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series race.

Wallace may be best known for his July 2, 2004 victory in the Winn-Dixie 250. Not only did he go from fifth to first on the final lap of the race, but he handed GEICO its first NASCAR Busch Series victory.

2009 marked 26 consecutive seasons at least one of the Wallace brothers has taken the green flag at the Daytona 500. Mike drove the #01 Fishburn Military Academy Chevrolet for JD Motorsports where he qualified 19th. Mike continued driving the 01 for JD Motorsports for the 2010-2013 NASACAR Nationwide Series finishing 12th in points in the 2012 season.

Mike is switching teams for the 2014 season where he will drive the #28 Dodge for the newly formed JGL Racing team, and its owners Gregg Mixon and James Whitner. All of us at mikewallace.com wish Mike and the #28 team, best of luck for this years campaign.

Duration:: 20m
Broadcast on:: 18 Mar 2016
Audio Format:: other

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See site for details. Hey, it's Arrow and iHeartRadio. We are unplugged and totally uncut with NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Mike Wallace. So what have you been up to, mister, since the heart attack? It was the last time I talked. Well, you know, the great thing is that I didn't have a heart attack, but I had heart bypass surgery. I was one of those fortunate people. I guess if there's such word as "fortunate" that I wasn't feeling good, there's a couple instances that led up to me going to the hospital to getting a heart catheterization done. I was short-winded, got a little achy feeling. My son told me I looked bad one day when we were trying to do something, and so I went to the hospital. They had a heart cat. They told me a great part is I didn't have a heart attack, you know, so there's no heart damage, but they did some checking. I had three arteries clogged up. One of them, they called the Whittlemaker, which is the backside of your heart, to suppose with this one that kills everybody, you know, and has some great doctors that got in there right away, got me fixed up, put three new arteries in, and you know, that was basically last April, so April of 2015, and here we're coming up on, you know, the end of March of 2016, so a year later, and I think I'm gonna be just fine. I'm gonna survive and live to another day, as they say. How's the lifestyle changed? I mean, I know that you're not in a car, but you're helping your son with his car. The lifestyle has changed dramatically, and what that means, you know, being a race car driver since 1991, far as making a living at it, you know, in a car every weekend, 36 times a year, and not being able to get in a car, you know, because, you know, it's not so much the health issue. It's not like, "Oh, it's your heart good enough." It's, you know, they have to cut your sternum open when they do that type of heart surgery, and of course, the way the seat belts are in your car, and the scenario we keep talking about the doctor's and I is, "Okay, I blow right front tire, entering turn one in the land at 200 mile an hour." You know, what happens? And they look at me, and they get this honestly big kind of quarter-size eyes and go, "I don't know, you know, we've never had a race car driver that we've taken care of, have bypass heart surgery, and continue to try to race." It's normally a, "Hey, it's an over with career, and you're done," and whatever. Well, I still have the desire to race. I still have the passion in my own mind to race, but I have three wonderful kids and a great wife, and a lot of cool things happen in life, so I'm, I'm making sure that when I have the opportunity to get back in a car, I hope I am able to do that, that I'll be just fine in case one of those in rare case instances. You know, you crash, you get hard, but in the interim, I'm hanging out with my son, Matt Wallace, enjoying that. We just, you know, we were down in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, right outside of Daytona Beach, run his late model a few weeks back. That was absolute fun, and you know, what you realize in life, if you have a career doing something forever, you missed a lot of things, and you didn't think you missed them, you know? Well, man, I've been a race car driver, I've been everywhere. Well, I missed hanging out with my kids, is what I missed. And, you know, the two daughters are a little older, and my son's just 20, and he's fun to hang out with. All my kids are fun to hang out. We've been going to basketball games lately. I'm not even a basketball fan, but I'm having fun hanging out with my family, so that's enjoyable. That's incredible that you say that because Phil Collins won't go on tour again because of the same thing. He says, "I didn't get to see my first kids, but I'm seeing my second kids now." Yeah. And that it's so important to him to be with family, and it's like, so it's almost like we go through life, and it's like, wait, we have to stop and go backwards just because we do miss out on so much. Yeah, without a doubt, and what you find out as you're doing something in a career as a Phil Collins and other people and myself, you know, your NASCAR race driver, everything's wonderful, then you realize that you're not in the middle of it, and you know what happens? Nobody calls you. You're irrelevant at that time. Nobody. It's not like you're still a major story. It's not like they're paying attention to where you're at. It's just like, oh, he's not around forgetting. Leave him alone, you know? And I said that. I says, "Heck, my wife used to give me a hard time saying, oh, you're always on the phone. Now I look on my phone to make sure it's not broke, because it doesn't never ring." So it's got differences, but I've absolutely enjoyed hanging out with my family. Part of my lecture series is based on that. It's called becoming the used to be, and because you used to be. Hey, didn't you used to be? And so in trying to train future people to learn what it's like to be a used to be helps them get up over that home so they can continue to be. And so, you know, look how you're continuing to be in NASCAR through your son. Yeah, it's what you said was amazing because I apologize for not remembering his name, a famous football coach. Used football to train his players, tell them the football is not going to be forever. It's an intermediary step for you to get from here to where you really are going to be. You know, well, you used to play football. You used to do this, but now you're, say, a Roger Stahlback from back in the day. I mean, he's a multi-global real estate magnet right now. You would think Roger Stahlback, a famous quarterback, he's now running these big empires. And it's like, that was his format. You know, good Joe Gibbs owns one of the most successful race teams in the business because he was a football coach. He won a championship. Now he's winning championships in his race team. So pretty cool. That opens my eyes to what is Kobe Bryant's next step? What happens to Steph Curry, even though he's the big shooter now, his vision has got to be way down the path. Yeah, well, you know, you would probably assume that because of their mass success that they hopefully have been positioning theirself for that next step. You know, the immediate next step of the great athletes is accommodating, you know, a broadcasting career. That's because they know what they're talking about. They don't have to think about what they're talking about. They understand what the rules of the game are in the format of the game. And if not, you know, I would assume, and just like yourself in your industry and numerous other ones, you read a lot about what other people do. How do you how do you go on? I mean, you know, I've raced race cars for many, many years. I thought there was no other life out there than that. I thought, what are these people? Regular jobs? What is that all about? And then successful business people? There's life after each event and you just the hardest part is finding yourself. Yep. You know, I've told people, I don't know what to do with myself totally yet. You know, how do you reinvent yourself? I'm not good enough to come take your job. So I got to figure out what you can have it. Now you're not going to have it. Yeah. Well, well, I can't do it as good as you. That's the problem. I want, I want to do good at what I do. So, you know, I is that a challenge? Because I mean, you're in the racing business is and I race ratings. So I mean, to break free of that always trying to get that, is that difficult to break free of it? Well, I think it's more the difficulty is you're enjoying for a few moments not having to always face it. I want to mean by that, you know, our business, the race world has really turned into you got to help raise revenue. You have to have good ratings to have good partners on your network to, you know, yeah, to make things work. We are constantly out there trying to raise money. And even when you have a lot of talent, and I've talked to people in the music industry that I know that are quite successful. And it's like, hey, look, we got to do the same thing you do. We got to raise enough money for a tour. We got to be big enough that somebody wants to pay us to go on tour. And, you know, we're trying to raise enough money to sponsor. And it's like, it's just a challenge. You're tired of asking for you. You just want somebody to go, you know what, that guy is good. I'm going to call him. I'm going to offer him a deal and his life's going to be simple. And I drive around the Charlotte area where we live at now in Concord, North Carolina, and look at all these big buildings, all this prosperous industry. And I go, there's someone in one of those buildings that wants to sponsor a race car. I just can't find them. Yeah. And how do you prepare for something like that? Well, you know, you take the old story failures, not an option. You pick up the phone, you call, you go to social events, you hand out your business card, you talk with them, you try to get them that they'll least accept your phone call. If you call them, you know, on a Monday after you met them over the weekend somewhere. And some of them do and some of them go, who? I don't remember you, man. You use the old trick where like when I would try to get a radio station job set, I would always go, hey, Mike and I were just talking on the phone. We were disconnected. Can you hook me up again? Yeah, I'll have to remember that one. I know I haven't used that. That sounds really good, because there's people, most companies, big companies, ain't more. You can't get to them. Right. You can't get to the decision maker. They got the best people in the world to keep you from that. But that's great. There's two people I'm trying to get a whole lot, and I'm going to use that phrase. Hey, I got disconnected. My lot when I say that, they'll catch me in a lie because a guy's been out of the country for two weeks or something like that. So that's when you come back and say, I thought you wanted creative people to be a part of your team. We are creative. So therefore, I just had to give you my show. I just realized I'm going to get you involved in my race program, and I'm going to let you place those calls and get past that, those gatekeeper force. It took me the longest time to understand the business of radio. I was always in the showmanship. What about you as a race driver? Did it take long for you to understand that there was a business involved, or was it from the very beginning? No, it was not. I did it for a hobby. It was fun. That's what you do for fun. Somehow or another, you start off early in life, and you're doing it for fun, and you've got enough personal money, or you're working your regular job, and you're stealing every dime from the utility bill that you were supposed to pay to buy a set of tires for your race car to advancing along, having some success. For a while, it seems like, oh, this is going to be easy. This is going to work out fine. Man, I just won this big race. Somebody is going to jump up and sponsor me. For a period of time, that happened. It really did. It worked out well. The race world still relates to the 2008 financial crisis. That's kind of like an image that's stuck in everybody's mind, because there was a lot of companies, a lot of people that were involved in NASCAR racing, or would get involved in just because they liked it. It really didn't have to make perfect business sense. They weren't 100% accountable that it had a return on investment, and when that happened, everybody that had just a little bit of open-mindedness quit. We're not going to do it. We can't justify it. We don't know how to justify it. We don't want to take that gamble, and now you're really having to figure out how do I get to the right person. How do you tell them how it makes a return on their investment? It's hard, because there are so many other categories out there that are forming to spend money. You go to the football game, you go to the baseball game, you go to the basketball game, sponsors everywhere, everybody's fighting for entertainment dollars. That's why I love going down to Pitt Road to find out the businessman that's there for the passion of it. I will sit there and watch body language and everything to find out who's here to learn more about the sport, and who's here because they basically want to do it, but they're living vicariously through you guys. Yeah, I tell you one of the biggest companies that I see that their corporate leadership are race fans, but they've made such an impact in a sport is the Dollar General people. Their CEO is a passionate, passionate race fan, but he knew how to equate his passion for return on his investment and use it for an employee morale program inside of his company. Got these thousands of locations around the country and just makes it look simple. It does make it look simple because he's just, I think when you have a passion for something, you're more going to tell all your people it's going to work. We're going to make it work. If you don't believe in today, in a month from now, you're going to believe in the way it works, and those guys do such a great job with it. How do you think the big change with the evolution basically has gone from Gen Xers to now they want the millennials? And then there was word out this week, even from Forbes magazine that talked about Gen Z is coming up, but they don't want to participate. They're not into electronics. They're not into things. They seem to be more of a low key. That's three different generations that you're messing around with of decision makers. Yeah, that's way above my head. As they say, it's way above my pay grade. First of all, I guess that's where people, how do you establish the next generation of people? How do you establish what's going to turn them on in regards to what are they going to buy? What are they going to listen to? Where are they going to go? All I've heard the last couple of years, millennial, millennial, millennial. And it seems like people are having a hard time equating to reaching out to them. And now they're saying they've got a whole new target audience that's got to be, what, five years down the road? They've got to figure out how to equate to. It's always changing. And with you being in the business that you are, how do you attract them with so much media around? Yeah, I used to say I knew how to or understood it. I don't anymore. I just, I talked to a lot of people. You and I are sitting here talking and I'm learning as we're talking really. And it's creating a network of people that maybe we might end up before we leave here and there's six people we run into and one person's good at this, one person's good at that and says, hey, let's just all get together and see if we can help each other. Maybe I can help your show. Maybe you can help our race and maybe we can help the guy next door. And when it's all said and done, wow, we've actually accomplished something today. So that's what I've always thought the next level of radio is, is that there's so many people that used to be in radio, but they, you don't, you don't lose your experience. So those people could all get back together and go and get a little tiny AM station. And then you have an app because the millennials like apps, boom, why do you need an AM signal when you can just fill the need through an app? Well, you know, I think you're on to something there because there's a, there's a lot of people in the music or radio business that used to be in the radio business that I see a little different categories trying to still trying to stay in the entertainment, communications business, ratings, business, whatever it is that who knows unless you throw it out there. I mean, think of all the young kids in the world that have made millions of dollars on apps and YouTube clips and Twitter clips and this and that is like, man, if you're good at something, just try it, throw it out there. What's the worst that can happen, right? Do you ever sneak into like the legends racing and just to see what the future's holding there? I say, you know, I don't even have to sneak into it. You see what's happening in today's world in the race world. Traveling with my son are going to race as with him. There's such a young generation of race car drivers. I remember when I first got an opportunity to race, you literally had to be 30 years old. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I remember calling the great Kale Yarborough. I lived in St. Louis, Missouri. I found a phone number to the Honda dealership that he owned down in Florence, South Carolina, and I called the number and he was there and I got to him and I swear this is exactly what he told me. I put my pitch on, you know, I'm nervous. This can be on the phone and telling him I just won this championship. I'm this, that and I was 30 years old and he goes, well, son, would that Kale Yarborough slang? I can't repeat or I can't do. He says, I think you just need some more experience. And I went, oh, thank you, Mr. Yarborough. I appreciate it. And I'm thinking he's telling me the truth. Now, if you're not, if you don't have a career established by 15, man, 16 years old, you might as well change directions, you know? And if you're not in a really good car and racing hard by the age of 20, I suggest go do something else. I love it. What's the best way for someone to follow you on the web? Well, we just, we do a little bit at mikewallas.com, you know, and my son's got matwallas.com and just that's the best way, you know, we're, we need to be better at all that social media. I mean, everybody tells me kind of have social media have social media, but I'm not sure that we, you've gotten so much better because what did I say? We were walking down the hallway. I've been following you on Facebook. I remember when we couldn't follow you on Facebook. We're just trying to, trying to put it out there a little bit, you know, I, I study from the distance, the people that are really capped of the social media program. And I'm not sure I have the qualities to do that yet, but we're going to let people know what we're doing somewhere or another. And hopefully the right person pays attention and sees it and has fun with it. But, you know, hanging out with you as cool as can be, you know, a lot of millions of people around the world are watching us right now are listening to us. As they say in radio, maybe millions, but we're only talking to one. Ah, it's family. Wonderful time. Thank you for coming in. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. >> Breaking news and this one is almost unbelievable. >> Yeah, it's all about new customers at Bet365 because they get $150 in bonus bets when they bet $5 and even better bonus bets can be used on the spread, totals, and player props. >> There you have it. Bet $5 to get $150 in bonus bets. 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