Shortened win worth long trip for Reutimanns

Buzzie Reutimann was all set to spend last weekend running open wheels at East Bay Raceway, because there's no better way for a short track legend to pass the time than that. But every time he checked the weather forecast, it looked like rain.

What to do? He could have waited out the weather here, but then he could have wound up sitting around the house in Zephyrhills with nothing to do. Or, he could drive to the Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., to watch his son, David, run the Coca-Cola 600.

He took off driving north.

It probably didn't seem like that big of a deal at the time. David is 39 years old and had never won a Sprint Cup race in 74 previous starts. After all, this is a young man's game. But that all changed on a soggy Monday afternoon. The sky opened up and the rain wouldn't stop. They waited and waited, but by the end everyone knew what the deal was. There would be no more racing. The winner would be the guy who was ahead when the rain started falling.

That was David.

It's probably not the way you imagine your first Cup win to go. It might make a better story by taking the checkered flag a half-length ahead of Tony Stewart at Daytona or something like that. But this story is good enough, even without the dramatics.

"That was one of the neatest things I have ever seen," Buzzie said. "It's an emotional thing. It's like David said, when he started racing we never envisioned being a NASCAR star. We raced at East Bay to make the $250 prize for winning so we could come back the next week and race again. That's why we're in it."

Long time coming

Buzzie is 68 years old and has been racing since he was 13. He has been to all the tracks around here. He remembered that night at the old Winter Haven dirt track in Polk County when his dad gave him his first ride.

"I was sitting there on the tailgate and he goes, 'Buz, you want to go out there and run?'" Buzzie said. "It had this little ol' body with a flathead Ford motor in it. They dropped the green flag and I kept that car right there in the groove. I was ahead of everybody, but then the flagman started waving the flag. It was the white flag to signal the last lap, but I didn't know that. I spun out. He broke my concentration."

There would be so many other nights for the racing Reutimanns over the years. His dad raced. His brother, Wayne, raced. And there is Buzzie's son. He's a racer too.

In a sport where a Jeff Gordon was winning championships at age 24, David Reutemann took the long way around. He did the Busch and Nationwide series for a while and didn't land a full-time ride on the Cup circuit until he was 37. He has done well there, but he hadn't had the big breakthrough.

Buzzie takes up the story from there.

"It was sort of nerve-wracking, I guess you could say. We had a car that was running pretty good, but it was getting bad - it was getting too tight. David was starting to whine about the car - it was plowing, no grip, I'm getting killed out here, on and on like that," he said.

He was running 14th when a caution flag came out. Most of the field went to the pits for fuel, but on a hunch from his crew chief, David stayed out on the track. The racing Reutimanns had one eye on their fuel gauge and one eye on the radar. They were gambling the track would get wet before their tank went dry.

"We had enough fuel for 11 laps on yellow," Buzzie said. "We made it through five. I kept going back and forth to look at the radar. Rain was everywhere."

Can't take it away

Reutimann's No. 00 stayed listed at the top of the leader board throughout the long delay. Buzzie kept running 11 spaces down pit road to check the radar, pacing back and forth and wondering if this could really be David's day.

"I told him, 'Son, as long as there are puddles out there on the track, we're OK.' I knew something was up when I saw the Nextel Cup girls walk down to the end of pit road, like they were getting ready to leave," he said. "Then I saw an official guy there with a bunch of Coke bottles walking toward us. I knew they were fixing to call it."

They did.

It was still raining so hard that they couldn't do the ceremony in victory lane, so they retired to the media center where David got his trophy. It's a big ol' thing.

"I'll bet it weighs 250 pounds," Buzzie said. "And it's as tall as I am, and I'm 6-foot."

It has all the names of past winners in this race. Names like Dale Earnhardt, Buddy Baker, and Richard Petty.

And now it has David Reutimann's name.

"Fifty years from now David's name will still be on there," Buzzie said. "That's pretty neat."

Buzzie drove on back toward Zephyrhills about 9:30 Monday night, driving down through Charlotte and South Carolina before he realized he was getting pretty tired and probably ought to stop. Remember those Coke bottles the official guy was bringing? Buzzie wound up wearing a lot of that Coke, along with beer and champagne.

David didn't know how to pop the champagne cork. Buzzie had to show him.

David knew how to spray it though.

"It's a good thing a cop didn't stop me," Buzzie said. "I smelled like a beer brawl."

He found a room in Orangeburg, S.C., got cleaned up, and tried to get some sleep. It took a while, though. He lay there, eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling and remembering all those nights at all those tracks. And now, his boy was a winner in the big time.

"Buz, you want to go out there and run?"

May they never stop.