When he was just a boy, Wayne Harron would walk about a mile down the railroad tracks behind his house in Welcome, N.C., over to the Richard Childress Racing shop.

“I’d sit there, listening to the cars on the chassis dynamometer and the motors running and trying to catch a glimpse of anybody and everybody,” Harron said. “I guess I had it in my blood. I tried to get as close as I could get without getting into trouble.”

Once, when he was about 12, Harron’s Boy Scout troop got the chance to sell snacks at an open house at the shop. That day, he met Dale Earnhardt and got an autograph.

Someday, Harron thought. Someday, he’d be part of that race team. Now, after several years and many turns on his path, that day has come.

On race days this season, Harron finds himself working along pit road for the No. 07 Chevrolets owned by Childress and driven by Dave Blaney.

He’s part of the pit support team for Blaney and crew chief Philippe Lopez. He helps set up the pit stall, goes for the day’s first run of gas and generally does whatever he can to help the team he grew up wanting to be part of.

The way he got there might not be typical among the hundreds of people who work on Nextel Cup pit crews, but Harron just kept trying. And he plans to keep on trying as long as he gets a shot to do something that he’s always wanted to do.

A year after graduating from high school, Harron joined the U.S. Marines. He went to Camp LeJeune and various other places around the country while in the Corps, but after four years came back home and worked in various jobs.

“I did a little bit of everything,” Harron said. “I just couldn’t find a niche, what I liked doing. I kept trying to find a place that felt right and was something I enjoyed.”

Wayne Harron, second from right, and the No. 07 Richard Childress Racing team stand for the national anthem before the 2005 Golden Corral 500.

He wanted to work in racing, and he visited race shops hoping to find somebody who’d hire him. Even when he managed to talk his way past a receptionist’s desk, though, the first question was about what experience he had, and Harron had none.

Eventually, he heard about a motorsports-related program at Forsyth Technical College in Winston-Salem, N.C. When he went to see about getting in, the class was already full. But Harron was determined. He was already 29 years old, as much as 10 years older than his potential classmates, but he convinced the program’s director that he’d work as hard as anyone could and pleaded his way in.

Harron was working at an auto supply store while attending school, and one day the phone rang at work. One of his instructors knew Bobby Hutchens at Richard Childress Racing, and the team was looking for someone to fill an entry-level job.

“I said, ‘I don’t care what it is, I’m interested,'” Harron said. He got an interview and, in July 2003, finally got a job in racing.

“I helped with all the pit crews, I drove the pit stop practice car,” Harron said. “I used to tell my buddies that I knew all of those guys they saw doing pit stops on TV.”

Harron kept working and, last summer, a mechanic’s position opened up in the team’s Nextel Cup shop. Again, Harron jumped at the chance. Then, when RCR was organizing the crew to go to the track with Blaney’s team this season, Harron’s work with the pit crew practice group paid off. He was offered the chance to go to the track, and he took it.

At Las Vegas earlier this year, the team fielding a Busch car for Blaney came up a front-tire carrier short on race day.

“They asked me if I’d ever done that, and I said that I’d practiced it a few times,” Harron said. “We needed somebody, so I went over the wall for the first time and I fell in love with it.”

At the RCR shop these days, Harron works on the oil lines and tanks in Blaney’s cars. But he’s also beginning to practice with the Busch team to be a tire carrier in addition to his Sunday duties with the Cup team.

“I got lucky in getting connected with somebody who had a connection,” Harron said. “But I was 29 years old when I went back to school and I made it a point to graduate as high in that class as I could get. It has been a lot of hard work, too.

“People ask me all of the time if I can help them and get them a job, but it’s not that easy.”

But Harron’s example suggests one way to get on track.