When Rusty Wallace, never the retiring sort, stepped away from Nextel Cup racing after 25 seasons, he was shocked at what he found.

“I never dreamed I’d be this busy after retirement,” he said.

Here’s what Wallace – one of the sport’s biggest stars who won 55 Nextel Cup races and the 1989 series championship – has been up to:

¢ Most publicly, he has been on television. He’s working for ESPN and ABC-TV, where two weeks ago he was the lead commentator for the Indianapolis 500.

¢ He owns a Busch Series team, the No. 64 Dodge driven by his son Steve and Jamie McMurray.

¢ He owns five car dealerships in Tennessee.

¢ He owns a touring fleet of show cars.

¢ And Wallace is finishing up work on a new racetrack he has designed in Iowa, of which he is new-father proud.

MARTINSVILLE, VA- OCTOBER 23: Rusty Wallace, driver of the #2 Penske Racing Dodge, during qualifying for the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series BASS Pro Shops MBNA 500 on October 28, 2005 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Hampton, Georgia. (Photo by Chris Stanford/Getty Images).

The television booth was a natural landing spot for Wallace, 49, who never met a microphone he didn’t like during his driving career. He will be ESPN’s lead analyst in 2007 when NASCAR returns to the network. This season, he’s learning the craft by working on Indy Racing League events on ABC. He’s become a fan.

“I had no idea those drivers were that talented; I’d never heard of a lot of them, to be truthful,” Wallace said. “And they’re brutally fast.”

Wallace seems a little uncomfortable with his new-found appreciation of IRL.

“I’ve been a stock car driver all my life,” he said. “That’s my core business, and that’s what I know. I don’t want anybody to think I’m disrespecting NASCAR in any way. I’m just calling it as I see it and that’s how I see it.

“But I’ve really gained an appreciation for these IRL guys. I never thought of myself calling Indy Car racing. They asked me, ‘What about going into the booth?’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!'”

Wallace was obviously a natural for the broadcast booth. He can get carried away and make rookie mistakes, like he did toward the end of the Indianapolis 500 when he exclaimed, “This is one of the most exciting Daytona 500s – oops, I’m sorry – one of the most exciting Indy 500s ever!”

Wallace says his television career is taking up about 60 percent of his time. But his real passion might lie back in the Midwest, where the sparkling Iowa Speedway is rising from the dust off Interstate 80 about 20 miles from Des Moines in Newton.

The speedway will be a state-of-the-art facility ready to host races in September. Wallace says the $92-million track is the first oval track in the country designed by a driver.

“Somebody was building that track and asked if a driver could design it,” said Wallace, who travels to Iowa once a week to check the track’s progress. “He was told, ‘This isn’t like golf, where players design courses all the time.’ But then somebody said to call Rusty. And I’ve designed every aspect of it.”

The 7â8-mile racing surface will be surrounded entirely by SAFER barriers, soft walls that reduce the level of impact during crashes (NASCAR’s oval tracks have soft-walls in the corners). Cameras will be built into the asphalt, their lenses poking up a quarter-inch onto the track (they won’t affect the cars). The track will be built in a bowl, so that spectators sitting in the lowest portion of the grandstands will be able to see over every building and obstacle.

“I’m making sure all the contours, everything, is right,” Wallace said. “I have to because it’s got my name all over the place.”

That will include a road leading to the track: Rusty Wallace Boulevard.