Home on the road

Big-rig drivers lead nomadic life on the NASCAR circuit

Rodney and Kay Pickler have the greatest jobs in the world. They are drivers on the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit.

The Picklers are employed as truck drivers for Penske Racing South, charged with hauling Rusty Wallace’s race cars from racetrack to racetrack.

Long-haul truckers Kay and Rodney Pickler prepare radios for Rusty Wallace's No. 2 team.

“People retire hoping to go to San Francisco, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Daytona Beach,” Rodney Pickler, 60, said. “We go to all the vacation spots at somebody else’s expense and actually get paid for it.”

Rodney Pickler and his fellow big riggers such as Target’s Bob Hannigan and Arvis Zimbelmann and Tide’s David Shano are the unsung drivers of the Winston Cup Series. They always are the first to the track and the last to leave.

“There’s almost that assumption that they’re going to be there every week,” Winston Cup driver Ricky Craven said. “You take it for granted.”

Most big-rig drivers started out as race-car drivers.

Shano, 35, finished third in the points championship and was rookie of the year in 1983 while driving street stocks at his home track in Elcon, Calif. Zimbelmann, 43, won his share of dirt-track races in his 25 years of racing. Jack Dyer, Craven’s 53-year-old personal motorcoach driver, still is a legend in his hometown of Bangor, Maine, where he twice finished second in the track points championship in late models.

Rodney Pickler unwraps equipment for the No. 2 Winston Cup team.

For them, driving big rigs is the next best thing to being there.

“You always wonder, ‘What if?'” Shano said. “You need the right breaks, the right money to make it to this level. But at least we’re driving something in racing.”

Rodney Pickler, a truck driver by day, was Saturday night racing in Florida in 1978 when stock-car driver Benny Parsons showed up at the racetrack.

Parsons was introduced to Pickler, and six months later, Pickler was hauling stock cars across the country. Pickler and his wife of 36 years, Kay, equally share the driving duties.

Despite Rodney’s racing background, the Picklers’ Miller Lite teammates claim Kay is the better driver.

“All I know is when he (Rodney) does complain about my driving, he has to remember he taught me,” said Kay, who was a surgical technician in 1965 when Rodney taught her to drive a big rig.

Driving is only part of their job description.

Once big-rig drivers get to the racetrack, they do whatever is needed. They are fabricators, cooks, welders and mechanics.

Zimbelmann built a “world-famous” grill that he used to cook 36 eggs, two boxes of pancake mix and 10 to 12 pounds of bacon and sausage for breakfast Saturday and, for lunch, a surprise casserole that included ground meat, mixed vegetables and cream of mushroom soup.

Big-rig drivers are driven to be behind the wheel.

Though they travel more than 100 mph slower on the highway than the drivers on the raceway, big-rig drivers run laps around race-car drivers. And they always get their trucks home in one piece.

Wallace ran 13,223 miles and had three Did Not Finish races last season. The Picklers, who were working for the team of Penske’s No. 12 car last year, ran somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 miles last year and had no DNFs.

“But that’s nothing,” Rodney Pickler said. “We went 228,000 miles in one year in our own truck. We’ve been millions and millions and millions of miles. Too many to count.”

The truck drivers do have one worry Winston Cup drivers don’t: speed limits. They constantly are trying to avoid potholes, breakdowns and highway patrolmen.

Zimbelmann got a $186 ticket in Kansas City, Mo.,

for “getting hung out in the left lane” last year, and Shano said he’s “given out a lot of hats” to highway patrolmen.

Their hobo lifestyle offers the CliffsNotes version of sightseeing. Big-rig drivers see the country at 70 mph and half the time in the dark.

It’s not unusual for the Picklers to drive almost nonstop for 18 to 20 hours immediately following a race. They take a break every five hours to refuel the truck and themselves and to switch drivers.

“It’s like anything else; it’s a job,” Rodney Pickler said. “So many fans would love to be in this business, but they don’t realize that it is a very hard job. You put a lot of hours, a lot of hard work into it. It’s so different than what the fans see from the outside. They see us at the track on Sunday. By then, the biggest part of our work is over.”

Or just beginning.

The Picklers, who have two grown children and a granddaughter waiting for them in North Carolina, are on the road at least five days a week every week through the 36-race season that begins in February and ends in November. They sleep in the back of the cab or in a hotel more often than in their own bed at their home in Robbins, N.C.

“No, you don’t get used to it,” Rodney Pickler said. “Have you ever slept with a truck passing by your bedroom and blowing its horn? And if that’s not bad enough, when we hit a bump in the road, it’s like a lot of mini-earthquakes you live through.”

That’s the only rough road the Picklers encounter anymore. They are partners in business and in life.

“We’re good friends,” Rodney Pickler said. “After 36 years, we’ve smoothed out the bumps in the road. We now know how to avoid them.”

When the Picklers finally park the rig in North Carolina, especially after a trip to California, they always give a sigh of relief. But they know it won’t be for long. The road beckons.

“When we retire,” Kay Pickler, 57, said, “we don’t want to go anywhere.”