Colorado-based Furniture Row Racing has big plans for its NASCAR future
By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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Craig Phillips can sit at his window and watch elk walk through his yard. This is part of the reason that Furniture Row Racing is the only full-time NASCAR Sprint Cup team not based in North Carolina. The only one, in fact, based west of the Appalachians – so far west that it’s time zones and mountain ranges far, far away.
Furniture Row is trying to be a competitive Cup team from an unlikely base – Denver, Colo.
Not Denver, N.C. Denver, Colo.
The team is located in Denver because its owner, Barney Visser, lives there and headquarters his furniture manufacturing and retail business – Furniture Row – there. For many years, it has been assumed that success at the top levels of NASCAR comes only for teams located within a reasonable driving distance of Charlotte, N.C., the sport’s recognized hub. The mechanics, engineers and other technicians who fuel racing – literally and figuratively – flock to the Piedmont area of the Carolinas because the jobs are there.
Phillips, on the other hand, abandoned North Carolina because Colorado is where the elk reside. A former Roush Fenway Racing employee, Phillips left a solid position at Dale Earnhardt Inc. after nine years to join Furniture Row Racing to work in the team’s seven-post shaker operation. And to hunt.
“I wanted to live in the Rocky Mountains,” Phillips said. “I usually come out here or to Wyoming at the end of the season to hunt, and I’ve always wanted to live here. It’s worked out really well.”
Phillips and his wife, Vivian, bought a house 8,500 feet up a mountain outside Denver, about an hour’s drive from the team shop. “I watched elk walk through my yard this morning before I came to work,” Phillips said. “My wife says I’m living my dream. I guess I am. This started off almost as a joke. I had known Joe Garone [team manager] and Jay Guy [crew chief] for a long time, and they were kind of kidding around about me coming out here. It worked out. I love living here and being with a smaller organization.”
Garone says about half the team’s members moved to Denver from North Carolina teams, many for reasons similar to Phillips’ – the area’s dramatic mountain scenery and outstanding hunting, fishing and other recreational activities. In addition, there’s the chance to assist in building a foundation for a team trying to make things work in unusual circumstances.
Visser & Co. clearly race against the wind, located as they are in a former mattress manufacturing plant in the shadow of the Rockies, about 1,600 miles from the NASCAR core. They also race against the odds. With veteran driver Joe Nemechek aboard and with an employee roster of about 50 – a fraction of that carried by the sport’s top teams, they face a tall order. At the moment, their biggest race is not the long one but the short of it – pushing into the top 35 and earning a coveted automatic starting spot.
There has been mixed success. Nemechek and Kenny Wallace (making a one-race appearance with the team) made some headlines with strong runs during Daytona 500 week, and Nemechek, typically a strong qualifier, won the pole for the April 27 race at Talladega. But Nemechek also has failed to qualify for two races, and the team is swimming upstream in its attempt to crack the top 35.
Although Furniture Row’s perspective is a bit different because of its location and the differing logistics involved, the hunt for the top 35 is very similar to the struggles of other “outside” teams.
“It’s so disheartening in a lot of cases,” Garone says. “Like last year when we were in the top 20 in qualifying and missed the race. When you’re used to being up there, it’s tough. It just rips your guts out. It builds men.
“It’s funny during qualifying. I scan the other teams [on radio], and you listen to the guys who are in the top 35. Their whole mindset is different. The crews are relaxed. Somebody runs a bad lap, and the crew chief says, ‘That’s OK. We’ll be all right. We’ll take what we got and move on.’ There’s no stress in their voices. We don’t have that luxury.
“You can’t really describe the feeling. The pressure that comes down on you every single weekend is almost unbearable, especially for a team that’s trying to build. You judge yourself every weekend by the performance. If you don’t make it, you feel like you’ve failed, but you’re growing. You just didn’t get to race.”
Visser says he takes it in stride. “I think it’s a lot harder on the team than it is on me,” he said. “I think it kills guys like Joe and Jay. Me – I’ve never known anything else.”
Visser jumped into motorsports in 2005 without any knowledge of racing other than it had piqued his interest. The trip from there to here has been a relatively fast one.
“I wanted a hobby,” says Visser, who owns more than 300 Furniture Row stores in 31 states and employs more than 3,000. “I opened up the newspaper, and there was a Grand American modified for sale. I bought the car and went to a couple of races and met some guys, and one thing led to another. Then I went out looking for Busch cars and bought a couple.
“I didn’t know anything about NASCAR, really. It seemed like the Cup side was where most of the exposure was, and that’s where we wanted to be. I just kept moving in that direction. We tried the first Cup race [at Dover in 2005] and made it, and I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t so tough.’ I’ve gotten a real serious education since then.”
Visser, 58, says he approached the sport not as a fan but as someone who wanted to get his hands deep into the process.
“Wells Fargo was courting our business some years ago, and they got us some tickets to a race in Charlotte,” he says. “I brought my two daughters out. We were in the infield before the race looking around, and Jeff Gordon walked up and saw my daughters and stood between them when he saw me with my camera. I didn’t even know who he was, so I didn’t take his picture. I learned later who he was. What an idiot. I knew nothing.
“I got into the sport because I enjoy the people and seeing how it works. I love the manufacturing side of our [furniture] business. I’ve always enjoyed the factories a little more than the retail. I enjoy the equipment, the precision, the people. I enjoy the race team and all the precision and engineering that goes with it.”
Visser hired Garone, a former project director at NASCAR’s Research and Development Center, in 2005 to manage the team and build its core.
“It’s been difficult,” Garone says. “And that’s mainly because we started from scratch. It would have been difficult even in North Carolina. But we do have the travel to overcome and making sure that everything works from a logistical standpoint as far as getting to the tracks and the tests and so forth. We have to have the cars ready far ahead of time so the transporters can leave early.”
The transportation issue is less of a problem in part because Visser is in the furniture business. One of his furniture trucks makes a run to the Carolinas weekly to pick up fabric, and part of that vehicle has been modified so that engines and racing parts can share the ride. The team has tested at tracks in Kentucky, Iowa and Tennessee and is looking at scheduling tests in California.
“Denver gives us the sort of challenges that have solutions,” Garone says. “We feel confident we can compete from Colorado.”
Garone is from Denver and jumped at the chance to return home after working in NASCAR circles in the Charlotte area for 13 years. Others, he says, are interested in following.
“We’ve gotten a lot of interest from people in North Carolina,” he says. “There’s a whole different array of things to do with their families out here. Colorado just naturally lends itself to family activities. We have opportunities that other places just don’t have.”
The team’s growth employee-wise depends largely on the acquisition of a second sponsor for another team car, Garone and Visser say. “I think we’re going to have all kinds of opportunities to hire very talented people if we can get that second team up and running,” Garone said.
Visser ran cars for both Nemechek and Wallace in the Daytona 500 but hasn’t been able to pick up a major sponsor to fuel two teams. He has funded his racing operations with Furniture Row advertising dollars, and the exposure has boosted sales considerably, he says. “You can spend your ad dollars a lot of different ways, but not in a way that’s more fun than this,” he says. “It’s a bit of a stretch. Our company is not that big. It’s not even a David and Goliath story for us. It’s more pathetic than that, but I think we can do it.
“If we’d stayed in the Busch [Nationwide] series, I think we’d be a middle-of-the-road team now. On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re a 2 or a 3 in Cup, but we’re attracting the right kind of people and we’re getting the right information together. I think by the end of ’08 we’ll be in the middle of the pack. We plan to have two cars when we find the right sponsor situation.
“I don’t think there’s any question we can make it here. If the engineering is right, we can do well. More people doesn’t always mean a better solution. And we’re not going anywhere. We’re right here.”
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