Man on a mission: Faith, family and racing drive Morgan Shepherd

By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Faith Motorsports' Morgan Shepherd competes in the Nationwide Series with a limited budget and help from some friends in the garage.

LaDon George
NASCAR Scene

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CONOVER, N.C. - Morgan Shepherd is the Last Man Standing, a relic of a stock-car racing era that is long gone but one he refuses to abandon.

He races on a wing and – literally – a prayer, a 67-year-old man who could be the grandfather of the frisky youngsters he chases in the Nationwide Series. He was born, for Pete’s sake, during the war (not Persian Gulf, not Vietnam, not even Korea – World War II).

He hasn’t been in real danger of winning a race – any race – since the mid-1990s, but he races on largely because it’s what he does and it’s all he knows and the opportunity is there and because there’s a bigger mission in the foundation.

He gets by with a little help from his friends.

Eldora Speedway, Tony Stewart’s half-mile dirt oval in Rossburg, Ohio, is the most recognizable sponsor on Shepherd’s Nationwide cars, and that’s mainly because Stewart himself is the real sponsor. Shepherd rides largely because Stewart puts tires under him. The tire bill goes straight to Stewart, a generous guy who could choose to support virtually any other struggling racer but chose to invest his money in Shepherd, if for no other reason than his doggedness.

“It’s Morgan’s determination,” Stewart says. “He has been around here a long time. He’s one of those guys that’s still doing everything he can do to stay a part of it. There’s hundreds of thousands of people who could come here and try to race and appreciate the same help, but Morgan’s been here and done it.

“He has paid his dues. He has done things the hard way. I guess I just respect his effort. Here’s a guy that could go do something else, but this is what he loves to do and wants to continue to do it. You hate to see somebody struggle, so we decided to try to help.”

Stewart also has helped Shepherd with engines, and fellow Cup driver Kevin Harvick has pitched in with a car and parts.

It has made a big difference for Shepherd, who races from a woebegone little shop in Conover with only a handful of full-time mechanics.

“I’ll be riding down the road, and all of a sudden tears come in my eyes just thinking about it,” Shepherd says. “Why would those guys care about helping me? I’m sure they could figure out better things they could do with their money. It’s not just because I’ve been in the sport so long and don’t give up. It has to be a God thing. I let them know that there’s never a day that goes by that I don’t wear the Lord out for both of them.”

Shepherd sees such encounters as proof that he’s in the right business. He has no delusions about winning five races a year or competing for championships, but he wants to race, not embarrass himself or those who support him and use his driving to spread the word about his strong Christian faith.

“A lot of people ask me if I’ve thought about retiring,” Shepherd said. “I don’t make plans. If I was out there running into the wall, taking people out, making a lot of mistakes, I’d look at my ability to drive a race car. But I can’t tell any difference in the driving part from 10 years ago. If I start missing my lines, I’ll know.

“I know I’ve kept in it a lot more years than most people do. But a lot of that is because of the passion I have for the sport. This is the only thing I know how to do in life. I don’t know anything but cars.”

Shepherd’s story isn’t exactly rags-to-riches, but it is one of the more unusual in the history of NASCAR racing. He lacks a formal education, but he basically trained himself in the ways and means of automobile mechanics.

He got a motorbike when he was 10 years old and soon had torn it apart to see how it worked. At 12, he traded three squirrels, a shotgun and $12.50 for a 1937 Chevrolet and launched into serious car tinkering. A year or so later, he knew enough to rebuild engines in the hot rods owned by local high school boys.

The natural progression was to get involved in auto racing, and that journey landed Shepherd in NASCAR’s top series full time in 1981 (he ran a few races in 1970, 1977 and 1978), and he was a race winner that first full season in cars owned by Cliff Stewart (no relation to Tony).

From there, Shepherd bounced from ride to ride, most notably driving for Bud Moore Engineering and Wood Brothers Racing. He won a total of four Cup races, the last win coming in 1993.

As Shepherd was getting older, racing was getting younger. Teams and sponsors valued youth and smiling faces over experience, and Shepherd found himself struggling to keep racing and to keep his bottom line from swimming in red ink.

He went through a series of financial struggles – and almost as many marriages. His fifth and current wife, Cindy, helped to bring stability to his life and has been his partner in keeping his racing and his ministry alive. They married in 1994.

“When my [fourth] wife left me, I’d finally had it with women,” Shepherd said. “We had been married for nine years, but it just wasn’t good. She finally left. I didn’t even want to see any women. Six months later, a friend called and said he had a girl he wanted me to meet. I didn’t need any more troubles. I had had all the troubles I needed with women. My life with women had not been very good. I had had only one good wife, and that was my first one, and I treated her like a dog. I was a drunk back then, and I always felt like when I got remarried I paid for everything I had done to her.

“But I met Cindy, and we went to dinner and went out a few times. I brought her to a race at Watkins Glen. We kept getting closer and closer. I saw her as genuine.”

They live in Conover in a house across the street from Shepherd’s shop.

“She is a sore loser,” Shepherd said. “She makes it hard on me when things go bad. It kills her when things go wrong. She’s hard to be around when things happen.”

There is CindyWife, and then there is CindyDaughter. This distinction must be made, because Cindy Caldwell is Shepherd’s office manager and also his child from a previous marriage. She pays the bills, pursues sponsors, coordinates Shepherd’s ministry activities and, until recently, stepped out of her small office (located adjacent to Shepherd’s home) several times a day so that the team’s mechanics could visit the office restroom. Before recent renovations, the team shop did not have a restroom.

This is the sort of problem that Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus don’t deal with on a daily basis.

It’s fairly normal, though, for Shepherd, who juggles his budget from week to week. He drives his motorhome himself and does the final prep on his race cars.

Around Conover, he drives a green 1996 Nissan pickup with an odometer that reads 220,990. It has had a long road, as has Shepherd.

In the shop, stacked willy-nilly on neglected and dusty shelves, is a collection of Shepherd’s racing trophies, including the winner’s award from his last victory in 1993 at Atlanta. It’s stuck up there, right over the old and apparently retired Maytag washing machine.

More important to Shepherd than his dusty archives is his ministry work and fundraising for the Morgan Shepherd Charity Fund, which assists needy families, primarily in southern Virginia, where Shepherd has participated in a Christmas Santa Claus train gift delivery run for 23 years.

“I was real down and out at the end of last season because we missed three races in a row there,” Shepherd said. “I ran into Carl Edwards after the race in Homestead and was congratulating him. I gave him some brochures about our charity and told him how we started off with one person in 1986 and how we’ll be helping a couple thousand up in the mountains this year. When we finished talking, he said he was going to help us with $25,000. I grabbed him and hugged him and shook his hand. That changed my whole trip up the road.”

Shepherd’s charity and ministry work are likely to continue as long as he’s reasonably vertical. The racing?

“I’m still just as passionate as I ever was about it,” he said. “It’s all good.”