Bliss, Fitz making the most of underfunded Nationwide team
By Lee Montgomery - Associate Editor
Thursday, March 20, 2008
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David Griffin / NASCAR Scene
Feb 22- Fontana, CA- Mike Bliss
There, among the heavyweight Sprint Cup teams and drivers, sits a standalone Nationwide Series team with a non-Cup driver.
Not far behind the Kevin Harvicks and Clint Bowyers and Carl Edwards of the Nationwide world is Mike Bliss, the top non-Cup driver in the series as the sixth race of the season looms.
This weekend at Nashville Superspeedway, Bliss and his Fitz Motorsports crew will go up against teams with a lot more money and a lot more resources. And chances are good Bliss will finish ahead of some of them.
Bliss, owner Armando Fitz and crew chief Paul Wolfe have somehow been able to do more with less, to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts – and greater than the sum of other team’s parts, too.
Bliss, a former Craftsman Truck Series champion, is sixth in the Nationwide Series points standings after a fifth-place finish at Bristol Motor Speedway. But a top-five is far from foreign territory for the team.
Since Bliss started driving the No. 22 Dodge last year, he has posted two top-five and eight top-10 finishes in 24 starts. The No. 22 team missed the top 10 in the owners standings by six points last season, but its 11th-place finish was the best in the eight-year history of Fitz’s team.
Now, Bliss could deliver even better results. His fifth at Bristol came after he rallied from a spin and before a rain delay halted his run further up the top five.
“We know he has a good car, he spins out, goes all the way back to 22nd-23rd and drives it back to the front,” Fitz said. “If we had another 10 laps, we would have easily gotten two more cars. We were running those guys down.
“But it’s a good day. We’re a standalone team out here just barely hanging on and running with these Cup guys. I’m proud of him, I’m proud of Paul Wolfe and all these guys. They’ve done a good job. Every week we go to a gunfight with a knife.”
Yet, Bliss and Wolfe do well with the knife. For starters, Bliss seems to fit in well with the team, giving the organization the chemistry it may have lacked in the past. Bliss is painfully close to being labeled a “journeyman” driver after bouncing from ride to ride and series to series in recent years, but he has found a home with Fitz.
Bliss put together back-to-back top-five finishes at Richmond and Dover last year, and was seventh at Atlanta in the race before Bristol this season.
“These two tracks, Atlanta and Bristol, are probably the best ones I run at,” Bliss said. “I don’t know why. Nashville, we run good there. I think we have a good chance for a top-five there.”
Bliss was quick to credit Wolfe for providing fast race cars. A former driver, Wolfe was a sought-after crew chief last year before Fitz secured him – and Bliss – for 2008.
“Paul is able to do more with the cars that he wants,” Bliss said. “Paul is very meticulous about his race cars. Lightweight. These guys on this team, they care. There is not one guy that will let a bolt hang an inch over. They’ll cut it off.
“They care [of] what they’re working on. That means a lot to me, so I’m going to give them everything I’ve got, and that’s what makes a good race team. We all care about it.”
Sponsorship money makes for a good team, too, and for Fitz Motorsports, 2008 is a work in progress. Twenty-five of the 35 races have been sold, and Fitz is working on the others.
So when Bliss talks about where the team can finish in the points standings this season, he wonders simply if it can make it to the season-finale intact.
“I am just hoping that we get to the end,” Bliss said. “We’re like everybody else – we’re still short on running all the races. We’re trying to piece together some of these races. We weren’t sponsored [at Bristol] but Supercuts gave us a little bit of money to run here and they gave us a great bonus for finishing in the top five – that’s how we’re getting here.
“I’m just hoping to see the end of the year. I don’t know if we don’t get nothing what will happen.”
Fitz said the team will run all Nationwide races this season, regardless of whether sponsorship can be found for the unsold races. Fitz recently had to scale back operations of a second team, the No. 36 driven by Kenny Wallace, because sponsorship money didn’t materialize as expected.
Bliss and the No. 22, though, will keep plugging along.
“Oh yeah. You’ve got to,” Fitz said. “But it starts straining on you the second half of the season because then you’re having to rebuild the cars and you’re having to do a lot of stuff.
“We’ll keep fighting every week, and hopefully some of these sponsors that are looking at teams will say, ‘Hey, look, there’s a standalone team that will do a good job for us.’”
Fitz is a master salesman, but he’s not selling ice to Eskimos. No, with the way the 2008 season has started, Fitz has something solid to sell.
It’s not a Cup team or a Cup driver, but Bliss and Fitz are proving you don’t need to be to run up front in the Nationwide Series this season.
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Mike Bliss
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