Friday, March 27th, 1998 (Bristol, Tenn.)

Three of auto racing's most prolific names joined forces Friday when Dale Earnhardt, Inc. and Pennzoil announced that three-time Winston Cup Champion Darrell Waltrip will drive the #1 Pennzoil Monte Carlo until Steve Park returns from injuries suffered March 6 at Atlanta.

Waltrip begins his stint in the Pennzoil Monte Carlo this weekend at Bristol where he has posted a record 12 victories including a string of seven consecutive wins beginning in 1981.

"This is a perfect example of why you should never say never. The last person in the world I ever thought I would be driving for was Dale Earnhardt," Waltrip said. "But, this is a win- win situation for everyone involved. It gives Dale Earnhardt, Inc. and Pennzoil some stability while giving T. J. Beverley, my new car owner, a chance to reorganize the #17 team and find a sponsor.

"Now that all the headaches of being a team owner are behind me, I'm ready to climb into the Pennzoil Monte Carlo and prove to everyone that Darrell Waltrip can still get the job done as a race car driver."

Park is recuperating at his Cornellus, N. C. home from a broken right leg, left collarbone and right shoulder blade. He is expected to miss 3 to 6 months. Ty Norris, General Manager at Dale Earnhardt, Inc., said Park will replace Waltrip as soon as he is pronounced ready to drive by the doctors overseeing the recovery. Upon Park's return, Waltrip will resume driving the #17 Monte Carlo he has driven since 1991.

"Darrell Waltrip is the perfect solution to our dilemma, and I believe a Dale Earnhardt, Inc. is the perfect solution for Darrell Waltrip," Norris said. "Darrell, Don Hawk, and T. J. Beverley worked a lot of hours to make this happen, and I don't think any of us fully realize what kind of impact this alliance is going to have.

"This season has been pretty tough for us with Steve getting hurt, but Darrell's willingness to drive the Pennzoil Monte Carlo has renewed our spirit. Darrell will help this team build and be stronger when Steve returns and this should allow Darrell's team time to regroup and be stronger for when he returns."

The Pennzoil Monte Carlo Waltrip will drive this weekend at Bristol was built by Darrell Waltrip Motorsports and is the same car Waltrip drove here last August. This weekend it will be maintained by a mixed crew of employees from both Dale Earnhardt, Inc. and Darrell Waltrip Motorsports.

The Pennzoil crew will resume fielding the car next week at Texas Motor Speedway

Darrell Waltrip: "As you all have known for the past couple of weeks I have been negotiating to sell my race team, car No. 17. I finalized that deal this past week with this gentleman sitting to my left here, Tim Beverley. He's a business man down from Tyler, Texas -- Tyler Jet. Most guys who have ever bought an airplane have talked to him some time or the other, particularly if it's a jet. We finalized that deal. Everybody knows about Dale's situation with Steve Park getting injured. They need somebody to drive their car. As things went along, Dale wanted to know how all this was going to work out. I wasn't really sure either. I think sometimes you have to just really believe that some things are meant to be. I believe this is one of those situations where it was meant to be. Tim comes in and I said 'Tim, what are we going to do?' I'll let him go into it in further detail, but basically what Tim wanted to do was take my team and analyze it and look at it and see what we need to do to put it back up front. One thing we know we need is a sponsor and the other thing we know we need is a little bit of time. I got really excited. He needs a little bit of time and Dale needs a driver. Man, this looks like a win-win to me. Tim and I got together and Dale and Don Hawk. We put a deal together for me to drive for Dale and drive the Pennzoil car for the next several weeks. "That's the long and short of it. I'm really excited because it's what I've wanted. This couldn't work out any better for me. I needed to get out of the headaches of owning a race team. Tim wants to tackle that. He's a businessman. He thinks he can run the team better than I can, and I agree with him. Dale needed a race car driver, and I said I wanted to prove that I can still drive a race car. That's perfect for me. For me, it's a win-win. "I'm going to stay in the car until Indianapolis. That's about 14 or 15 weeks. That was the exciting thing for me. Going to Darlington and doing the Tim Flock thing was very gratifying for me. Also, it was probably a low point in my career to go to a race track without a major sponsor on my race car. I'd never done that before. That was kind of a low point. To turn around and get a chance to do this deal with Dale and Pennzoil, that's as good as it gets. I went from the bottom to what I feel like is the top in a very short period of time. I got a new friend here in Tim Beverley and he's got a lot of great plans. That's exciting. I'm driving for Pennzoil. Michael (Waltrip) drove for them for a lot of years. Last year when we were trying to put a deal together, we talked to them a little bit. It's really, really exciting for me. Plus, I working with a bunch of new guys, young guys. We did pit practice up at the shop, and they've got a great pit crew. We've all worked together on the car. I'm pretty pumped up. I told Dale, 'listen, don't start putting pressure on me now. It's my first week working with everybody. It is Bristol, and yeah, I've won a lot of races here. I might be able to win one this week, but give me a couple of weeks anyway. Let me work through a few things with the guys.' By Martinsville, I think you're going to see a team that's going to run up there and be a threat to win. That's what I'm going to work real hard for. I do want to clarify one thing. I get worn out with everybody writing about this champion's provisional. I wish you would research that a little bit more and understand why. Yeah, I'm been at the back, but I haven't had to take an actual champion's provisional, actual provisional for a champion, except one time. Other times, I would have gotten in on my normal car owner points. I'm getting tired of hearing that the champion's provisional as being tarnished or whatever. I've helped three guys get in races this year already by using the champion's provisional. If you would just take a few minutes and look at what they did and the way they defined that, you would understand that a little bit better. It's a neat thing for me to have, and it's a neat thing for me to tell Dale that I think I can get us in the race every week, anyway. But, by the same token, and he was willing to talk about that by the way, you need to look at that rule and understand it a little better before you start blasting me. I'm not going to use it anymore anyway. I'm going to be right up in front. "We had this car here that my guys were working real hard on. We didn't really finalize this thing until Monday. My guys look forward to Bristol. They know this is a good race track for me. We had built a car in mind for this race and taken it up to Nashville, Tenn., to test after the Busch race. I was real happy with it. We went up to Dale's and I was looking at the cars they had. I said the only thing I hate is that I'm not going to get to run that car we were working on. I think it'll do real good. Dale said, 'hey man, go get it. We'll run your car. We'll run your motor. We'll do whatever you want to do.' "We went and got the car and dynoed the thing on their chassis dyno with their engine in it. Then we dynoed it with our engine in it. Theirs was a tick better, so we put their engine in our car. This is a win-win for a number of reasons. I think Dale knows and I know you can't do this -- one guy has a hard time competing out here against this competition today. I don't care who you are or how much experience or knowledge you have. The more you can draw in. The more people you can draw in. The more information, two-car teams, three- car teams, whatever it may be, that's what you've got to do to be competitive today. We're taking the best that I've had and the best that they've had and we put it all together and hopefully it'll turn out to be good for all of us. I think it will be. I'm excited about it. I haven't felt this good in a long time. I'm nervous. Earnhardt is looking over my shoulder, and he's on the same channel I'm on right now. I ain't going to be able to complain a whole lot I don't reckon. I got pretty much everything I asked for. "This ought to be a good lesson to everybody. Don't ever say never. I probably have said that a few times and regretted it. Between the two of us, there's 10 championships and a hundred and something wins. We bring a lot to the table. We offer a sponsor a lot. What I can do for his young team, I think I can get them headed in a better direction. Help them cut down on some of their trial and errors and hopefully I'll be able to help that team and in the process help myself as well. I hate to keep saying it, but this has got to be a win-win-win for everybody. "I want to win real bad. I'd a lot rather go sit down and talk to my boss about why I had to run into him than I would somebody I'm not that comfortable with. I'd tell Teresa, 'you need to talk to Dale. He seems a little upset.' I can see a lot of fun things occurring out of this situation. Hopefully, that's what it will be. We can be competitive, run good and I'd love nothing better for it to come down to the end of the day and have to race him and see how it turned out. It would be pretty exciting for both of us I think. "You feel like you're out there all by yourself. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of technology. You just can't pull all that together. One guy has a hard time doing that. I think what we're going to see is working together with a team that's a single-car team, take another single-car team and put them together and try to get the best out of both of them. I think that's what you'll see. These guys will have to do that to stay in the business and be competitive."

TIM BEVERLEY (Car owner No. 17 Chevrolet Monte Carlo): "I'm a pretty fortunate individual. Last week I got a phone call from Darrell and we got together and started talking about possibly purchasing his team. That all worked out great. It's like something fell out of heaven. Here I am a rookie in NASCAR. I barely know how to spell it, and here I am working with Dale Earnhardt and Darrell Waltrip. The first week is pretty good. We want to go in and fix some things and change some things and build some cars and make the program that much better so we can bring Darrell back up front. The only problem, he couldn't take two months off to go sit at home and watch the races on Sunday, so this worked out just perfect. It gives him a chance to stay active and drive the car and help Dale. We want to secure a sponsor and get ready to go racing again. We'll do that. It looks like right now, we'll probably come back at Indianapolis. Hopefully, that'll all work out great and we can do that. If not, maybe we can run some people during the period of time Darrell is working with Dale. We'll try to get is straightened it out and get things going. "I'm one of those people when people tell me there's something I can't do, that's something I love. It's kind of what I eat for breakfast. Darrell is coming back to us. There's no question. He's coming back to us next year. We're going to go have some fun. It's just simply you can't do 100 things at one time. You can't run a Winston Cup team, make changes and race at the same time. You've got to take that sabbatical. The people I sell to are not inexpensive companies. They're pretty big companies I deal with on a day-to-day basis. I've got some connections there. If I don't know 'em, I probably know somebody who does know 'em, so that will give me a big leg up. I'll make a lot of phone calls myself to secure a sponsor. "I've always loved racing. I've always enjoyed it. This is really a dream for me. I drove cars for awhile, not on this level, but I've always enjoyed racing. People who know me know I do enjoy that, and that's how this all got started. "We may run the truck. We may run half a dozen races. We may work with Earnhardt's people to put Hornaday in the car. Hornaday is a talented driver. I might be able to secure one-off deal with sponsors."

Dale Earnhardt: "As far as Dale Earnhardt, Inc., part in it, we were out there looking and racking our brains on who to put in the race car until Steve got well. We were going to run (Ron) Hornaday here. As this thing came together with Tim and Darrell it really worked out to help us out, too. As many times as Darrell and I have run into each other and raced hard with each other and did a lot of things, it's sort of ironic. Here we are working together as a team effort with our team and the Pennzoil folks. It's really good for us. It gives us some stability with our team and some time to focus and some experience like Darrell's to come in here and help us. We sort of split the difference. Tim and I did and Earnhardt, Inc., and Don and Darrell and all of their guys. We didn't want to just not use anything they had and we had some things we were slack on. Actually, we're running Tim's car here and our engine and the crews are working in conjunction with it, so it's a joint effort really this weekend. It sort of gives my guys a chance to work with Darrell and his guys to see what kind of program they're doing. It'll help us along toward Texas. I'm sure Tim and his team will be developing and growing and we're talking about some things we can do for development and finding out some things for testing and maybe working together on some things. It's going to be a win situation for both of us. "Ten years ago I don't think Darrell or I either one... I don't know, in '88we were getting over some of that '86 stuff. I think it's a unique thing. Pennzoil is really happy about it. That's the tough thing for Darrell. His sponsor didn't work out and you just can't race without a sponsor this day and time. With Tim's business expertise and what he can do, and also Don Hawk with Dale Earnhardt, Inc., is going to be working with them and trying to put something together sponsor package-wise. Then they can go racing again, but I'm excited about having Darrell in there to help my team grow. We're brand new. We sort of got all frazzled when Steve got hurt. This sort of gives us some confidence in what we're doing. He can really give the guys a lot of confidence. With his experience and expertise, he'll do well. We'll do well together. "We paid him (Waltrip) some incentives to qualify the first day. His other car owner he used to drive for was a pretty tight guy and wouldn't do that, so we've offered some incentives on qualifying. I think we'll pump the driver up now and get the car owner out of the way. "Steve Park will go back in the car for sure. How many races he'll run is up to him and Philippe and the sponsor. The important thing here is Darrell doing this and Tim coming on board here. We put Tyler Jet on it, he's an associate sponsor here and that works well for us. We're going to be working together with their team and helping Tim put his team together. Hopefully we can help out in a big way with him. Also, he's got a lot of G-4s and stuff we may could use. He's got a lot of airplanes, so it's going to work out hand in hand. But it is important for you guys to write and know that Tyler Jet is an associate. It is a team effort all the way around. Tim is not just a new owner. He's just not standing in the back. He's here with us and is part of the team. He's helping out just as much as we are. "If Darrell should win a race in one of Teresa's cars, he better hope I'm not on his bumper. It's not my race car. What happens if I'm leading and he's in second? I'm in trouble I think. You might could see some of that '86 stuff come out in us."