After spending more than 30 years helping to conceptualize, build and polish Lowe's Motor Speedway and Speedway Motorsports Inc. into what many motor racing industry insiders consider the leading entity in the business, H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler was ready to move on.

Given Wheeler's dynamic personality, it's key to note that he says "move on," as opposed to "retire," because even at age 69, retirement is a term that Wheeler figures he'll never accept, much less recognize.

"That's me," Wheeler said of his activity level. "I've been doing this all my life and I like to stay busy."

While the timing of his departure was the source of some contention, Wheeler stepped down from his dual roles as chief operating officer and president of SMI and president and general manager of LMS after this past May's Coca-Cola 600, the signature event at SMI's lead facility.

But he wasn't going into mothballs.

"No, never," Wheeler said of true retirement. "I simply said that I retired from the speedway, and when I made the announcement I was very emphatic to say that I was going to continue to be involved in racing -- and I wanted to be sure everybody got that message."

Little more than three months ago, he said it was only a matter of time before he'd be back in the business full-time, and earlier this week, Wheeler announced the launch of The Wheeler Co., a management consulting firm primarily focusing on professional sports, motorsports and general business.

Wheeler will serve as chairman and his son, marketing executive Howard "Trip" Wheeler III, as president, with close ties to daughter Patti's Wheeler Television.

In fact, the companies share adjacent office space on Morehead Street in Charlotte, N.C. It provides Wheeler the stage on which to announce in the next few weeks a couple major clients as well as his plan to represent an up-and-coming race driver.

Wheeler never thought he'd be a sports agent, but he said that's what he's on the verge of undertaking.

"I think I'm going to enjoy this more [than preparing for racing events] because I'm going to be working with other people who have the privilege of doing all this other stuff, whether it's a race team or a young race driver," Wheeler said. "We've just signed one of the hottest young race drivers in the world and we'll announce that some time in the next three weeks.

"I'm going to take on a couple of race drivers, but that is not the intention of the company -- though I made an exception. I've always enjoyed [working with drivers] and we're going to have fun doing that."

Wheeler said things have come together on schedule.

"It was about the timeframe I expected," Wheeler said of organizing the launch. "You know, [after] 33 years of running big speedways, I had just gotten to the point where it was time to move on and the important thing for me was to make a change and be my own boss.

"That's the way I started out my professional life and that's the way I wanted to end it."

And working with his children is something he couldn't pass up, either.

"There are two elements here, one is Trip and one is Patti," Wheeler said. "Patti has got a tremendously successful television production business that specializes in live sports television production, particularly racing. She pioneered the way for females to get into direction and production of major sports events on network television and she's a very creative person.

"Trip knows how to sell. He was the first guy to sell the [NASCAR] in-car camera [and] he did the Gillette Young Guns. He's capable of coming up with the real big money. So when we take those two elements of TV and sales and marketing, and you put them together with innovation, I think we've got something that very few other people have in racing."

The way Humpy sees it he's got the best of every world imaginable, being able to trade off his experience and work with his kids while doing it.

"I didn't ever hire my kids at the speedway, and I regret doing that because I obviously think I could have taught them and coached them a lot," Wheeler said. "I just really, at the time didn't think it was the thing to do. But I certainly have no qualms about doing it now, because Trip is certainly a bright young guy who'll be one of the leaders in the sport down the road.

"I think I can teach him a lot and that's going to give me a lot of pleasure. I don't know that I can teach Patti a damned thing, because she's 100 light years ahead of everyone else, I think, in what she's doing; but I'll certainly enjoy working with her, as I have before."

Craving a challenge

Autostock

Humpy Wheeler made Lowe's Motor Speedway the standard-bearer of NASCAR tracks.

Humpy Wheeler went to work at Lowe's, when it was known as Charlotte Motor Speedway, in 1975 and became its general manager in 1976.

Among his achievements were expanding the 1.5-mile quad-oval's seating capacity to 167,000, lighting it for night racing, adding a number of configurations of racetracks to the complex, as well as condominiums and an office tower.

Wheeler never met a challenge he didn't relish, going back to the days when he promoted dirt racetracks after graduating from college, when the image of racing and racers was certainly a little "dusty."

What Wheeler did at Lowe's Motor Speedway, and what SMI has done with its other facilities across the country proves a lot can be overcome, and Wheeler hopes to trade on those accomplishments in his new endeavor.

"The biggest challenge we have in all of motorsports is fighting change [because] we must change," Wheeler said. "We're as much in the entertainment business as prime-time TV [and] as the movie industry, and anybody that doesn't think that is living in a false world.

"In entertainment, they see trends and they change. Hollywood saw that sit-coms were loosening up a bit and bang -- reality TV was born. Back in the '50s Westerns began to sag a bit and boom -- adventure films came in.

"We've been reluctant to do that, whether it's open-wheel racing or stock-car racing; and that's to change when we start to see the benchmarks start to move south. When the benchmarks move south, every other type of entertainment makes changes and keeps up -- because the benchmark is simply the people voting -- they vote whether they buy tickets or they watch on TV.

"When they start becoming negative, that's when you need to make changes. I don't care what business you're in and I don't care who you are, if you don't heed those warnings, you're going to be in the same shape as the guy who sold buggy whips."

Wheeler, obviously, has ideas of how to effect changes or to create new ideas and with his new company plans to attempt to do that while maintaining a small client base.

Wheeler said two major clients have been signed, and will be announced "soon," because "they want to make the announcement, though we've already made the deals." In addition, The Wheeler Co. already has been working with SPEED Channel.

Trading off his legacy, Wheeler wants to make an impact in motorsports.

"We're also doing another assignment for a company that will be short-lived," Wheeler said. "We'll be doing a lot of things behind the scenes for people that we won't talk about, gathering information and giving them recommendations on things to do."

“

... what happens when the green flag drops and the checkered flag drops -- that's what makes or breaks us. And until we make some changes in that area, we're going to continue to suffer.

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HUMPY WHEELER

Wheeler was asked what he thought about the state of short-track racing in America and he used that as a taking-off point for a wider angle strike.

"No, [short-track racing] is not healthy," Wheeler said. "And I think motorsports in general is not healthy. I was up in Detroit last week and Detroit [and the automakers] is fighting the battle of its life right now, with these ridiculous gasoline prices, and the American need for a big car. Everyone wants a big car that gets 40 miles to the gallon, and Detroit doesn't have one.

"So people in Detroit are looking around and saying, 'what's racing got to do with all of this? We're not selling cars.' In the past, performance sold cars and right now, people are looking for efficiency. So what's that got to do with racing?

"We've been through that before, and we've survived that. We don't absolutely have to have Detroit to have racing and have entertaining racing. It certainly helps to have it. Detroit has come and gone in racing and their enthusiasm comes and goes. Right now it's not what it was because the market's dictating something different."

But the economy is only one aspect that's hurting racing, Wheeler said. Not surprisingly, the man who made outrageous pre-race shows the norm at Lowe's sees something else missing.

"The single biggest battle we're fighting is the entertainment aspect, and we've lost a lot of the entertainment aspect of racing that we had years ago," Wheeler said, citing his experiences at Lowe's. "We can jump school buses and do $100,000 worth of fireworks and bring Mariah Carey in to sing whatever but what happens when the green flag drops and the checkered flag drops -- that's what makes or breaks us.

"And until we make some changes in that area, we're going to continue to suffer. And the changes, and what's not happening -- and I'm going all across racing on this, from short-track racing all the way to the IRL and NASCAR -- is passing and re-passing, as it was years ago.

"Some guy passes the leader and he goes on and makes a pit stop and gets passed again in the pits, or somebody runs him down on the racetrack. We don't have that back-and-forth, and that's what really gets people going."

Wheeler often uses parallels between the NFL and racing, whether it was fighting image problems back in the day or creating excitement in current times; and he uses it again in truing to incite change in racing, for excitement's sake.

"It's almost like in the NFL saying, 'we're not going to have any more passes that are over 30 yards,'" Wheeler said. "That's when the grandstand lights up, when the guy throws a 40-yard pass and the guy runs another 30 [yards] for a touchdown. That's what lights it up.

"But right now we're racing -- but we're playing football and the games are 3-3, like the old SEC [Southeastern Conference]."

As usual, Wheeler has a potential solution.

"What we need to do is get these cars -- whatever they are -- back to where you can have what I call 'the re-pass,' when the leader gets passed, within 20 laps he takes the lead again," Wheeler said. "I've been watching all forms of motorsports this year, and that's what's missing.

"That's where your great rivalries are formed -- where Petty-Allison and Foyt-Andretti was formed and where Cale Yarborough and Darrell Waltrip's rivalry was formed. "You can't have great rivalries without the re-pass."

What to do

Jason Smith/Getty Images

Humpy Wheeler chats with NASCAR VP of corporate communications Jim Hunter prior to the Nextel Open at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

In his time at LMS, Wheeler saw many changes in Cup cars: from the barge-like behemoths of the mid- to late-1970s to downsizing in the early 1980s, to greater and greater aerodynamic efficiency from the late 1980s to the advent of the current new car in the past couple of seasons.

He also formed 600 Racing, a company that designed and built cars and sanctioned racing for racecars built to identical specifications in the hopes that the best drivers would prevail. It creates a great empathy for the task at hand in NASCAR racing.

"As the designer and builder of racecars from scratch, myself, with the Legends Cars and Bandoleros and stuff, I sympathize with anybody that is designing and building a racecar from scratch, and that's what they did," Wheeler said. "You really don't know what that car's going to do until it gets in competition."

Many people, from competitors to those buying tickets and watching on TV, have decried the new car's competitive aspects. Wheeler got in line on the car's safer aspects, as has been proven over and over this season; as well as it serving as a cost-saving measure, which remains to be seen over a number of seasons.

As a man who recently was charged with selling a show, that's his overwhelming concern.

"Competition was supposed to be a major aspect of this car, and in certain instances, certain things they've done have worked," Wheeler said. "The difficulty of the car has been matching the car with the tires."

Wheeler states the obvious when noting in attempting to find that balance, handling -- and thus, racing and competition -- have sometimes suffered.

"The car goes down the straightaway just fine," Wheeler said. "But NASCAR is not the NHRA. You have to turn down at the end of the straightaway, and not only do you have to turn, but you have to pass, in my opinion; and the car has run into problems there, particularly with the re-pass."

Wheeler said the new car's front end had all the positive attributes of a go-kart in the turns, which were none, since a go-kart doesn't have a front suspension. And while he said he didn't have a definite solution to fix the new car, he went back to his earlier preaching about the need for change.

"It needs to change, but I'm only repeating what about 90 percent of the people in the garage area are saying," Wheeler said of fixing the new car's handling issues. "Why anything hasn't been done about that is a good question. I think NASCAR feels like they're in a Catch-22 where the owners have hollered and screamed about the cost of changing the car over -- and that's true, that was a tremendous expense and that's a valid argument, and if we change anything it's just going to cost the owners more.

"My contention is we have to change because of the entertainment value and the fact that there's been a lot of empty seats. Ticket sales have gone down, continuously, since 2001, and anybody that denies that doesn't look at ticket sales.

"Ticket sales have gone down because of a number of things. One is that I don't think we have the wheel-to-wheel competition that we've enjoyed in the past, particularly with the re-pass. Second, gasoline expense and traveling expense and hotel expense has gone up significantly at a lot of tracks.

"And then you couple it with the fact that there are so many more things to do in America, today, than there was even 10 years ago. You've got 300 channels on HDTV, home is comfortable, you've maybe got a pool in your backyard and you've got cheap beer -- so that's pretty hard to fight.

"In order to get these people back you've got to get some real promoters back running speedways because we've had these problems before. Selling tickets has not always been easy. And you've got to get some people running these speedways that are into operations -- getting cars in and out and keeping the bathrooms clean, wider seats and better seats. All the things you have to do to keep people happy today.

"All you've got to do is look at the movie theaters because they've always shown us the way, and I've always looked at them for the next thing in creature comforts -- though they've got a roof over their head, which is not a bad idea and maybe someday we can do that [at a racetrack].

"But really, as long as the show is good and we've got drama on the racetrack, which is another thing, we've got to fight. And drama comes from exciting drivers -- guys that are passing each other and saying things back-and-forth.

"We don't need any more cookie-cutter, sponsor-filtered guys that only say, 'my Acme Plymouth done great and the boys back at the shop, continue to do an awesome job.' They ought to eliminate the word 'awesome' from ever being used in the winner's circle again -- fine someone as much for saying 'awesome' as they do for saying a four-letter word."

Wheeler says he's excited because he'll be able to exercise his experience without "having a 50-pound mallet hanging over my head because we've got a race coming up," and that his new company could execute a number of programs in racing.

"A new company that wanted to get into racing could come to us and say, 'tell us how to do it, tell us who to do it with' and we could put the whole program together for 'em," Wheeler said. "We can get the driver, we can get the team, the car owner and get the cars and we can oversee that operation and make sure they get their money's worth."

But he has another scheme in the works: His own racing series matching the best aspects of racing and television.

“

The people who designed 'Survivor' knew what the public wanted -- why can't we do the same in racing? ... a lot of people are going to laugh at it, at first, just like they laughed at 'Survivor.' That's the kind of thing I want to get my teeth into.

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HUMPY WHEELER

"If, like, [producer] Barry Josephson comes along and says, 'we want to come up with a whole new concept in racing, for TV,' then we can help him do that," Wheeler said. "Because we know where to get the cars, or how to build the cars; we know where to get the track or how to modify the track to come up with whatever we're doing; and certainly we know, through Patti, how to produce the TV and do that in a first-class manner."

Wheeler is intrigued by such a project as a racing series and, given his experience at SMI, knows it could fill a niche on a couple of counts.

"We would certainly consider that and here's the big thing and the challenge," Wheeler said. "ISC [International Speedway Corporation, SMI's rival motorsports entity] and SMI have got a lot of speedways. They're not NASCAR speedways -- they're just speedways.

"And they need more events than what they have. They need events that can produce a profit for them, and let's look at what can and can't make a profit at these places. No. 1, about the only significant profit you can make with these places is to make sure that you've anchored it with a Sprint Cup weekend."

Wheeler acknowledged there are currently only 36 Sprint Cup weekends to go around, and they're all spoken for. And he said stand-alone Nationwide Series or Craftsman Truck Series weekends are "a tough, tough go right there. I'm not saying you can't make any money at it -- but you can't make a lot."

Wheeler said stand-alone IndyCar Series weekends are the same, setting aside places such as Texas, Chicagoland and Kansas Speedway, which he said forced patrons who desire prime Sprint Cup tickets to also buy the IRL races.

"That's kind of an artificial way of looking at it," Wheeler said. "What will an IRL race do on a stand-alone basis? It's tough. It is really, really tough to make money."

"So obviously there needs to be something else you can run on these tracks. So if somebody came along and said design a new series -- not to compete with these other things, but to enhance what ISC and SMI might have, to give them another weekend -- we'd jump all over that and we'd love to do that.

"People would probably think we were crazy, what we'd come up with but it would be different and I think people would like it and I think it would combine a lot of the elements that are popular today in racing, because as many challenges as we have in racing, there are still some great things going on."

As Wheeler delves more deeply into what he'd like to do, exactly what his proposed series might involve doesn't become clear, but it piques the curiosity.

"One thing that the people who are the movers and shakers in major racing don't realize, and they need to get a grip on themselves when they think about this, is that if you take the second-highest form of paid attendance for stand-alone motorsports, it's not the IRL, Nationwide or the NASCAR Truck Series," Wheeler said. "It's monster trucks run at the big stadiums. Now that's telling us something when you're getting true turnstile crowds of 55,000 in Atlanta, you're filling up the Citrus Bowl in Orlando [Fla.], etc., etc.

"That's telling us the American public is voting loud and clear that there's something there that people like -- and not just for a few years. This has been going on for a long time.

"Someone's going to latch onto that and vault it into the stratosphere. And something new might combine some of the elements of monster trucks, some of the elements of Cup racing -- it might be a wild, zany new form of racing that would appeal to some of those same elements of the American public."

Wheeler said people who design entertainment for the American public know exactly what they're doing, and he hopes to tap into the same reservoir.

"The people who designed Survivor knew what the public wanted, American Idol's producers knew what people wanted -- why can't we do the same in racing?" Wheeler said. "It's going to take a change and it's going to take coming up with something that a lot of people are going to laugh at it, at first, just like they laughed at Survivor.

"That's the kind of thing I want to get my teeth into."

Marking time

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Humpy Wheeler says NASCAR needs drivers with personality as well as talent.

Wheeler said one of the positives in racing right now is some of the young, new stars coming up in Sprint Cup racing.

"Kyle Busch may end up being the villain, but you need one," Wheeler said. "Carl Edwards may end being the pretty boy, but that's all right because you need one of them.

"The continued popularity of Dale Earnhardt [Jr.] is amazing, considering the fact that he's won one race in two years. There's no telling what would happen if he'd win two or three. So those things are good.

"And the TV ratings have been OK. They could be better, but they've been OK. Truck racing continues to run well, they've run some good races and they're a lot of fun to watch. Their ratings on SPEED Channel have been good."

He's already been talking about working with U.S. motorsports' premier sanctioning body.

"I continue to talk to NASCAR because they've talked to us and we've talked to them and at the right point in time, when we get everything pulled together, then I'm going to sit down with [NASCAR's] Brian and Jim France and we'll have a talk as to whether we feel like we can help each other out," Wheeler said. "Because they certainly have some challenges, and I understand that. I think we understand their situation as well as anybody. That'll come in another month or so."

But Wheeler said he doesn't plan on expanding much beyond the current concise, tight-running ship.

"I want to keep it that way," Wheeler said. "I don't want to ever have an office a whole lot bigger than a phone booth. We want to keep this thing small, lean and agile but not hostile."