For Greg Biffle, the relentless dedication to his work was just a game.
That’s what drove a future champion and NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee to start a chassis shop as a teenager – four years before he’d even race a Late Model, let alone win a race.
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“I thought, ‘If I can build race cars all day without having to work, I’ll be in heaven,'” he said. “So that’s what I did.”
Biffle’s vision of heaven was a workaholic’s dream.
For the better part of a decade, he worked non-stop right out of high school — starting as a fabricator, working six days and 60 hours a week at a pipe welding company. After saving $20,000, he found a job at his parents’ steel company and reduced his work hours slightly.
But he never took a day off from racing.
Biffle slept four hours a night while spending five months (and much of his savings) on a Street Stock whose magnificent precision work caught everyone’s attention when it debuted among a 70-car field at Portland Speedway in Oregon.
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“People were like, ‘Who the hell are you and where did you get this car?’ “, Biffle recalled. “I said, ‘I built it.’ It wasn’t a big deal to me, but suddenly everyone wanted me to build them cars. You didn’t need to tell me twice. So I took all my money and started building race cars.
After his died Thursday at age 55 in a plane crashBiffle, the only driver to win the NASCAR Truck and Xfinity championships and finish second in the Cup Series, has been memorialized in several ways.
He was prodigiously talented with a loose race car, outperforming the best of his generation by racing at the absolute limit. He was a selfless teammate and a caring father. He had a remarkable second act as a renowned humanitarian and philanthropist who made national headlines by flying countless helicopter sorties to areas of western North Carolina ravaged by Hurricane Helen (and his foundation had also saved thousands of dogs long before that).
All his achievements were based on the simple principle that his hard work could overcome all obstacles.
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“I’m sort of a self-made man,” he once said. “I like to do things on my own.”
Biffle will be remembered as one of NASCAR’s last true blue-collar racers.
It’s a lineage of stars perhaps best embodied by homebuilder-turned-racer Harry Gant, another late bloomer who once won a Cup race on a Sunday and celebrated it by building an addition to his garage on Monday.
The same sense of purpose motivated Biffle, who wouldn’t hesitate to DIY a home improvement project the day after his checkered flag.
“Some people call me the last driver’s driver,” Biffle told USA TODAY Sports in 2006. “I’ve heard that. The David Pearsons, the Dale Earnhardts. That’s how all these Cup drivers got here, like Sterling Marlin, Ricky Rudd and whoever. I came in like a normal driver. I’m very proud of that, but I also wouldn’t mind getting (to the Cup Series) at 20 years.”
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Generational and societal changes erased the path to the Cup taken by Biffle, who began his racing career as an adult and took a big break in his mid-20s.
21st century racing phenomena appear in go-karts from the age of 5. A superstar emerging from obscurity after adolescence would now be considered a remarkable story.
But such a narrative would still struggle to surpass the force of will and self-determination of Biffle, whose youth was singularly guided by manifest destiny in motorsport.
At age 19, he started J&S Racing (named after his parents, Jack and Sally Biffle) with his longtime friend Rodger Ueltschi. Their chassis business brought in big money – generating a few dozen cars and more than $150,000 a year in the mid-1990s – but Biffle reinvested it all in his Late Model while living in a double-wide trailer in Vancouver, Washington, and driving a beat-up old Ford pickup truck.
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He and Ueltschi worked weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on customer cars in their chassis shop. Then they would ride Biffle’s race car until midnight.
Their weekends were spent racing at two tracks four hours apart – Friday at Portland Speedway and Saturday at Tri-City Raceway. They would arrive from Portland at 1 a.m., wake up at 6 a.m. Saturday morning to work on the race car until noon, drive to Tri City and return at 5 a.m. Sunday. They were up at 11 a.m. fixing customers’ cars.
Sleep deprivation has had little effect on Biffle, who has already won 57 of 60 races at Tri-City and 30 of 37 at Portland.
“Some nights we didn’t have enough gas to make it back and forth to Tri-City,” Ueltschi once said. “But you had to pay $800 to win, and that would get us home.”
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Yet this still wasn’t enough to fund Biffle’s long-term career aspirations. With J&S Racing as his car sponsor and parts supplier, he sought other sources of income.
A friend convinced him to put down $50,000 and partner with a renovated bar and grill specializing in microbrews. That meant taking on half a million in debt, but there was enough growth potential to provide a touring series budget for Biffle.
“It made business sense and it seemed like fun,” he said.
But six months to the day after Biffle became a quasi-restaurateur, he received a cold call from Geoff Smith on the recommendation of 1973 champion and analyst Benny Parsons, who was excited to see Biffle dominate a 1997 winter series in Tucson, Arizona.
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Roush Racing offered a golden opportunity in NASCAR that was virtually unheard of.
Always the “Prove it” guy, Biffle hung up on Smith, looked up the Roush Racing president’s phone number, then called him back to verify authenticity.
1998: Greg Biffle (center) with car owner Jack Roush (left) during a NASCAR Truck Series race. This was Biffle’s first season with Fords for Roush in the series and, although he did not score any wins in his first year, Biffle had 16 truck wins before moving full-time to the NASCAR Busch Grand National Series in 2002. (Photo by ISC Images & Archives via Getty Images)
It began a nearly three-decade career with Roush and ended his career as a driver-owner-sponsor whose entrepreneurial spirit and no-holds-barred work ethic were well suited to grassroots racing but had limited prospects for high-value advancement.
“The more money I could make, the more races I could do,” Biffle said. “I stood by my habit. It was easier to work hard and make money than to put on a polo shirt and knock on doors soliciting money from (sponsors) because I didn’t know how to do it. I had no training in marketing. I can tell you how to put an engine in a car, but I couldn’t put together a presentation to save my life.
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“And I have a hard time telling people stupid things. I couldn’t do that part of the business.”
As noted in the endless tributes following Thursday’s tragedy, Biffle’s complete lack of pretension was adored by fans, media and his peers.
In the no-nonsense style of someone who spent his life working manually to tight deadlines, he was one of the straightest shooters in NASCAR and was often blunt to the point of error.
After his fourth and final victory at Michigan International Speedway in 2013, Biffle apologized for a radio transmission in which he celebrated a crash by Jimmie Johnson (who was trying to catch the leader).
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During a late 2000s interview in his No. 16 vehicle with longtime automotive journalist Brant James, Biffle complained about his Ford’s lack of performance and his frustration with contract extension negotiations. Team owner Jack Roush walked into the show in the middle of the interview, but Biffle never stopped airing his grievances during the stream of consciousness.
“He’s very transparent in a positive way,” Smith once said of Biffle’s direct manner. “If something is wrong, he talks about it.”
Well, naturally he would.
Because working is ultimately what mattered most to Greg Biffle.
