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" The first thing I learned about an automobile was how to wash it. I always compare my family to a farming family. My father was in the racing business instead of being a farmer. When I grew up, I started in the racing business instead of milking cows. We used to go to school and play football, baseball, and basketball, and all the boys, when they&amp;#039;d get through, they&amp;#039;d go home -- most of them was country boys, and they&amp;#039;d plow fields and milk cows. I went home and worked on race cars.  Some people are destined to do certain things and be successful at &amp;#039;em, and we don&amp;#039;t have any control over that. All we can do is do all we can and hope we&amp;#039;re one of the chosen ones. My father was a jack-of-all-trades. Before he went into the racing business, he had a couple of trucks; he&amp;#039;d haul anything for anybody, anywhere, anytime -- you know, one of those kinds of deals. And then, in 1949, he hung out in a service station in Greensboro, and he read in the paper where Bill France was having a strictly stock-car race in Charlotte. And he said, &amp;quot;Hmmm. We&amp;#039;re going to try that.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s how it got started. You see somebody driving a Volkswagen, their personality is for the Volkswagen. You see somebody driving a Cadillac, they&amp;#039;ve got a Cadillac personality. Everybody expresses their self in their automobile.  Anything I tell you is just the way I see it. Luck is where opportunity meets preparation or preparation meets opportunity.  If you took all the cars out of our country, it&amp;#039;d fold in on top of itself. It would be a black hole. The United States was formed by people who couldn&amp;#039;t get along where they were staying. These people were individual people. They didn&amp;#039;t like what they were seeing or what was going on, so they came over to do their own thing. That was two hundred or three hundred years ago. That&amp;#039;s our upbringing and we&amp;#039;re still doing it. We&amp;#039;ve got a guy from Mexico that&amp;#039;s driving for our team now, Carlos Contreras. He came over to our team last year and he couldn&amp;#039;t talk English, so he had to learn it to talk to the people who work on the cars. Now he&amp;#039;s got pretty good English, and I&amp;#039;ll talk to him and I&amp;#039;ll say something, and he&amp;#039;ll look at me, and I&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;quot;You forget, Carlos, I don&amp;#039;t talk English. I talk Southern American, okay?&amp;quot; Speed&amp;#039;s relative. When I first started racing, my father, one of the first things he said, he said, &amp;quot;Win the race as slow as you can.&amp;quot; Everything&amp;#039;s on the even keel. If you have a bad day, somebody&amp;#039;s going to have a good day because of it, or vice versa. If you&amp;#039;re 100 percent confident, go, but if you&amp;#039;re 95 percent confident, don&amp;#039;t, because you&amp;#039;ll get in trouble. We look at Nascar as really growing and growing. It has, but it&amp;#039;s not grown any more than the neighborhood where you lived thirty years ago, you know what I mean? In building a business, exposure is everything. Good, bad, or indifferent. Let your kids be individuals. Whatever they want to do, try to back. When my grandson Adam died, I was more than upset. You say, Okay, my father done this, I done it, Kyle done it, and then Adam was doing it and he gets killed. I set down one night thinking about all this stuff, and I was reading the paper at the same time, and I said, You know, part of this is my own fault. If I hadn&amp;#039;t encouraged him... And then I saw two different articles: Fourteen-year-old got killed in a boating accident on a Sunday afternoon, playing around. Another kid, seventeen years old, drowned playing around in the lake. And I said, Okay, that&amp;#039;s it. See what I mean? It wouldn&amp;#039;t have made any difference. To Adam, it was playing. A nineteen-year-old kid in a race car, having a big time. He died enjoying what he was doing. Quick as my kids got out of the hospital, took &amp;#039;em to the racetrack. Most people are bad drivers. They don&amp;#039;t realize they&amp;#039;re running fifty, sixty miles an hour, and one little mistake from them can cause an accident or kill somebody. If people pay attention, nine times out of ten they&amp;#039;re going to get by. You can&amp;#039;t go from the first step on the ladder to the third or fourth. I&amp;#039;m a big believer in fate. We can do everything we can to create the right circumstances and win the game, but fate steps in, and we can&amp;#039;t control fate. I&amp;#039;ve allowed a lot of things to happen instead of making them happen. You know what I mean? There&amp;#039;s no old brave drivers. Originally published in the August 2001 issue "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/interviews/a958/esq0801-aug-wil/>