When Johnny Benson dropped from the lead to eighth place on a single pit stop during the Carolina Dodge Dealers 400 at Darlington, crew chief James Ince yanked his starters and called in the specialists.
Using the pit crew from Jeff Gordon's car, which had fallen out of the running, Ince got his driver only one spot better at the finish. On most teams, that would have been enough to get the starters upset, if not outright mad. But Benson's crew, Ince said, is not like the rest. They're better.
"This race team has been through more adversity than anything that can happen on a pit stop," Ince said, "so I have no doubt we are going to come through this. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot with that stop, but we aren't going to hang our heads.
"The guys that built this car that looked so good (Sunday) are the same guys who are going to make these stops faster."
If attitude counts for anything, Benson and his team should be in victory lane right now. Remember the old saying about "accomplishing the difficult for so long with so little that we can now do the impossible with nothing?"
Last year, the No. 10 team did the impossible with nearly nothing. They started the season without a sponsor, then when a sponsor came aboard, it reneged, leaving without paying a dime.
The team was sold during the middle of the season, picked up a real sponsor in August, then was resold after the season.
So what did the team do? Benson came within a whisker of winning the Daytona 500, for starters. But for a pack of Fords that ganged up on his Pontiac in the last few laps, he might have pulled off the biggest upset in racing history.
Then he went on to post two more top-five finishes and seven top 10s overall to wind up 13th in the championship points standings.
That's not bad for a team that didn't know from one week to the next whether it would be open for business.
How did it survive, much less flourish?
"We didn't," Benson said, laughing. "It all boils down to the people. The driver could have gone somewhere, James could have gone somewhere and the crew could have gone somewhere. But we all wanted to stay until they threw us out of the shop.
"I think that everybody realized that this was a good race team and that's why it has worked out."
At the beginning of last season, the No. 10 team was owned by Tim Beverly, who struggled to keep it going. When he found out in July that the sponsor whose name Benson's car had carried wasn't going to come through, he sold the team to a group of three Georgia businessmen.
In August, Aaron's Rents came in to help pay the bills for the rest of the season. Then, at the end of the year, Valvoline decided it could get better bang for its buck by sponsoring Benson instead of Mark Martin. Part of the deal was Valvoline would buy into the team. It was an unusual sponsor/owner arrangement, Ince said, but just what the team needed.
"Right now we're reaping the benefits of what Aaron's did for us last year," he said. "Valvoline was a pretty awesome deal. That means probably more to Johnny, and to me personally, because I worked on that Valvoline car for four years.
"We felt honored when they wanted to be a part of this race team. That was probably as big a shot in the arm from the mental side of things as it was from the financial side."
Valvoline's confidence in the team was justified. Benson has finished in the top 10 in four of the six races this season and is fourth in the points standings.
According to Ince, it is not so much the money as the attitude. "I'm the crew chief and I make all of the decisions, but I'm one of the guys," he said. "Nobody works for me. We all work together. We're a group of racers that were lucky enough to assemble, that has the same goals."
Missing from the goals is to win the team's first race.
"That's not something we're pushing," Ince said. "Naturally, we want to win races, but that's not what's making or breaking our attitude right now. Right now, we're practicing to win a championship. We plan on winning a championship in 2002, and we plan on growing this race team to have it in position to do that."
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