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"         As a young boy racing slot cars and reading Road &amp;amp;amp; Track, I always thought that someday if I could only get my name in that magazine, I would have arrived, I would have made it to the big time. As a kid you never think you&amp;#039;ll get there. Then one day you wake up and you have three different types of cars, you win the Indy 500 three times, you win the 24 Hours of Daytona three times and you win some NASCAR races. It&amp;#039;s a dream come true for somebody like me.   Driving racing cars in the late &amp;#039;80s, I thought that maybe I could be involved in the sport in another capacity and enjoy it just as much. At the time that was a difficult transition to make because racing really wasn&amp;#039;t a bona fide business. You could hardly tell someone you did that for a living because if you did, they looked at you with a raised eyebrow\u2014especially in Pittsburgh, which is where I&amp;#039;m from. While Pittsburgh is a great sports capital, I wouldn&amp;#039;t call it the auto racing center of the United States. Racing was something that a lot of people locally didn&amp;#039;t understand. Some still don&amp;#039;t. What I was trying to explain to people 25 years ago was the whole business concept of professional racing, the sport I decided to get into.   At the time, going from driver to team owner was a difficult transition. But looking back on it now, it seems so seamless. By taking the experience I had on the track and then applying what I learned either in college or in our family business, I kind of pooled all that knowledge together under one umbrella\u2014along with my slot car racing experiences. Interestingly enough, the fundamentals of racing slot cars aren&amp;#039;t that much different than the fundamentals of racing at the highest level. Sure, the latter is a lot more expensive, but it&amp;#039;s all the same. It&amp;#039;s about having good equipment\u2014good motors, good tires and good bodywork. And it&amp;#039;s about having good drivers. I&amp;#039;m so blessed to have worked with some great ones\u2014Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon and Juan Pablo Montoya. And you can&amp;#039;t mention them without talking about guys like Alex Zanardi, Jimmy Vasser, Michael Andretti, Kenny Br\u00E4ck and Scott Pruett in sports cars. I&amp;#039;ve had a lot of guys drive for us who won a lot of races.   So how do you find great drivers? That&amp;#039;s a good question. Everybody&amp;#039;s fast. All these guys at this level are fast. But I&amp;#039;ve been lucky to find people who feel the same as I do in their hearts and souls, and whose outlook on the sport is congruent with mine. Plus if you have good equipment, you&amp;#039;ll attract good drivers. That hasn&amp;#039;t changed for a long time. I think our stuff is pretty good. And so when drivers become available, I hope they look to us as a team that they&amp;#039;d want to drive for. I&amp;#039;ve always said that I want to put a team out there that I would certainly be proud to drive for. That&amp;#039;s always been my goal. Of course, you can&amp;#039;t do it without standing on the solid footing that I&amp;#039;ve had with our sponsor, Target. It&amp;#039;s that simple.   At the end of the day, though, it&amp;#039;s all about racing. I don&amp;#039;t hear or read enough in the media about the actual racing. We all get so caught up arguing about standardized cars, standardized engines, about sponsors and sponsor commitments, and even about paint job colors, that we overlook the sheer athleticism that&amp;#039;s involved in driving at a high level of human performance for an extended period of time. Being on the outside edge of the envelope, as Chuck Yeager says. There&amp;#039;s a hell of a lot of racing going on that&amp;#039;s really good, and I think that gets lost on a lot of viewers. At every level of racing in this country, from slot cars to go karts to Legends cars, quarter midgets, sprint cars, modifieds, late models, ASA cars, you name it, you still have that little moment when you watch a driver who&amp;#039;s on the very outside edge of the envelope. That&amp;#039;s what I love so much about the sport, and that&amp;#039;s what I think the media should focus on.   Of course, not everybody understands racing. It&amp;#039;s certainly not for the faint of heart. But it&amp;#039;s been a very rewarding business for me professionally and personally, probably because I have never forgotten what my dad always used to tell me: &amp;quot;Do what you&amp;#039;re supposed to do when you&amp;#039;re supposed to do it, and everything else will take care of itself.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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