Dave Kallmann | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

His time in NASCAR was short but inspirational.

A college-educated engineer from Wisconsin, Alan Kulwicki was an outsider and underdog. Determination did more than money did to keep him on the racetrack. He turned down the offer of a lifetime and staged one of the great comebacks in sports, winning the 1992 championship with his tiny, loyal team.

Then 4½ months later on a cool and drizzly night in Tennessee, Kulwicki died in a plane crash in a pasture in Tennessee.

“No matter what else you have when you talk about Alan Kulwicki, is the speculation and the loss of potential,” said Kyle Petty, a competitor and friend.

“How many more championships could there have been? What else could he have done? So many wins. So many poles. So many things were left laying on the table that we’ll never know.”

Could Kulwicki have adapted to a rapidly changing NASCAR business model? He was fiercely independent; how would he have fared as an employee in a company of hundreds? Might he have kept Dale Earnhardt from seven titles or, say, Rusty Wallace from 55 victories?

April 1 marks 25 years since Kulwicki died. As the anniversary approached, a handful of people who knew Kulwicki shared their thoughts on how NASCAR changed because of him and how it might have been different yet.

“He had a tremendous, tremendous future in front of him,” said H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, the longtime president and general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway. “And I don’t even think he (fully) realized that.”

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Before pondering what Kulwicki might have done or been, it’s important to understand who he was.

The son of an engine builder in the USAC stock-car series, Kulwicki lost his mother when he was in the second grade. He grew up in the working-class Milwaukee suburbs and raced karts as a kid.

Kulwicki earned his engineering degree from UW-Milwaukee and then graduated from such local short tracks as Hales Corners Speedway, Slinger Speedway and Wisconsin International Raceway and the regional American Speed Association circuit.

Determined to make it in NASCAR, Kulwicki packed up with no promises and moved to Charlotte, N.C., and by the end of 1986 he was rookie of the year as an owner/driver with one tough car named Sirloin.

Courtesy of Tom Roberts

“Everything Alan did from his rookie season to his championship season challenged the status quo and the established notion of what you needed to have to have a successful race team,” said Mike Joy, the lead announcer for NASCAR broadcasts on Fox.

“He owned one race car. He put his team together with what we would now call a skeleton crew. I would say there’s not a team in the garage that is as thinly staffed as when Alan won his championship.

“And he made people believe that anything was possible.”

NASCAR legend Junior Johnson approached Kulwicki with a three-year offer in 1989, at which point Kulwicki had won just once. He would have a fully-funded entry for a multiple-car, Ford-supported team. Kulwicki would be freed from management responsibilities. But he also would have had to give up control.

“His decision to not go with Junior was not a lack of respect for Junior Johnson,” said Don Hawk, a confidante who discussed the decision the night before Kulwicki made it, who later became general manager of Kulwicki's team.

“He had a huge respect for Junior Johnson and what he’d accomplished. But I think Alan always knew he wasn’t the No. 1 draft pick. He was an added piece to the portfolio of Junior Johnson Racing.”

Kulwicki pressed on as an independent. He was building a dedicated, tight-knit team and was even ahead of such trends as physical training for his crew.

Although Kulwicki struggled to find sponsorship to stay in business, his confidence in himself and his team was borne out in 1992. Behind by 282 points – about 1½ full races’ worth – with six weeks to go, Kulwicki clawed his way back to beat one of Johnson’s drivers, Bill Elliott, for the championship.

“The timing was right for him with that group of people,” said Hall of Fame crew chief Ray Evernham, who worked briefly for Kulwicki the previous off-season. “And I just don’t think there was another person in the world that could have done what he did that year.”

Often credited as a major factor in Kulwicki’s success is his engineering background.

Courtesy of Tom Roberts

He came along when the mind-set in the NASCAR garage was changing, when manufacturers and larger teams had begun to use such tools as data acquisition and analysis to help them understand their cars. Kulwicki may have influenced the movement to a degree.

“I will say, Alan had a leg up on everybody on understanding what came out on that computer screen,” said Petty, now an analyst for NBC’s NASCAR coverage. “He was there when the door was open, and he was able to take advantage of those first few years when the sport headed in that direction.

“There were a lot of teams that fought it for the next 10 years. But it would have been interesting to see how he would have taken the lead. And then we may have been sitting here saying, yes, not only did he open the door, he was the one who ran to it.”

Wheeler is convinced Kulwicki would have more than held his own as the mentality changed.

“I thought of Alan Kulwicki last October,” Wheeler said. “(Seven-time champion) Jimmie Johnson was having trouble with his car, and I went into his trailer. He wasn’t there, but there were four engineers working on the problem.

“I thought, boy, has this sport come a different route. Not one, but four. I’m wondering if Alan Kulwicki could have solved that particular problem that day, and pretty fast. He probably could have.”

Kulwicki’s influence was felt in the years that followed his championship, as Ricky Rudd and Elliott began to field their own teams and Brett Bodine bought out Johnson. These owner/drivers saw two primary benefits: A driver could control his own destiny, and he could set himself up in the sport beyond his driving days.

Courtesy of Tom Roberts

“He set a precedent, and other people thought, hell, I can do that,” Evernham said.

“But Alan was a very unique person that had the ability to do that, and I think some of the other drivers who tried to become owners realized it was more difficult than they thought. And at the same time, what it was taking to be competitive, the amount of time it was taking to be competitive in the sport, was changing.”

Other owners establishing themselves around the time of Kulwicki’s success, such as Rick Hendrick and Jack Roush and Joe Gibbs, found efficiencies in fielding multiple teams. To go from one car on the track to two or three would increase the amount of information available to engineers but didn’t necessarily increase costs proportionally.

In 1992, the top 20 finishers in the Winston Cup standings came from 18 teams. Just eight years later, Hendrick alone had four top-20 finishers and five other owners had at least two. And of all the full-time teams in the series, only two had owner/drivers: Bodine and Elliott.

Would Kulwicki have hung on? How might he have adapted?

“Sadly, I look at it like some of the late John Wayne westerns, because here you have this great hero who had great accomplishments and great respect,” Joy said. “But the world was changing around him, and it would have been difficult for him to change with it.

“For example, I don’t see Alan going to drive for someone else and enjoying that. I don’t see Alan being part of a multi-car team without conflict.”

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Independent and headstrong and a little paranoid, Kulwicki could be a difficult leader. Evernham – who ultimately won three championships with Jeff Gordon – lasted just six weeks at Alan Kulwicki Racing before departing on the eve of the 1992 Daytona 500.

“Alan was good with a small group of people doing a huge job,” Evernham said. “Now, with this many people … things aren’t done nearly as efficiently as they were back then. I can only guess that that would really have gotten under Alan’s skin because he was a person who got the most out of everything that you could possibly get.”

On the other hand, Kulwicki was a pragmatist. He was wired to solve problems.

“You’ve got to remember, Junior Johnson was being pretty successful with a two-car team,” said Bodine, who bought Johnson’s team before the 1996 season. “And Junior and Alan had a pretty good relationship also. So I’m not so sure Junior wouldn’t have been schooling him.

“It just as easily could have been a partnership between Junior and Alan at some time. We’ll never know. We can only speculate. But I thought during that time when I was negotiating with Junior for the team that I could have been second fiddle to Alan at that time had he still been alive.”

Regardless of how Alan Kulwicki Racing got to be a multiple-car team, the change would have been virtually inevitable. As would the struggle.

“He was the master of wanting to control his own destiny,” said Hawk, now the chief racing development officer for the Speedway Motorsports chain of tracks. “I really believe the second car would have been in the future, but it would have been him fielding it, him choosing the driver, him choosing the crew chief, him telling them where to park the truck.”

If Kulwicki had decided he needed to drive for someone else – or at least give that a try – by most accounts he’d have had no shortage of suitors. The biggest question then was what sort of teammate Kulwicki might have been. He’d never had one.

“He may not get employee of the year at the end of the year for his people skills," Petty said, "but at the same time, I think he could have made that situation work.”

Kulwicki was 38 when he died, and he had won five races. A driver his age today would be fending off questions about retirement routinely, but at the time, 52-year-old Harry Gant was winning races and contending for the championship. Kulwicki probably had at least another 10 years to drive.

But then what?

Among Kulwicki’s contemporaries, Petty remained involved in the sport through television. Wallace also joined the media. Bodine stuck with ownership for a few years and then went to work for NASCAR. Elliott stayed connected to NASCAR through his son, Chase, a third-year Cup driver.

Kulwicki wanted to design and build a race car chassis to sell to teams as other independent manufacturers at the time did. He probably would have begun that even before he quit driving, Hawk said. Kulwicki also wanted to open an engine shop.

Bodine said he thought Kulwicki would have continued to be a successful team owner. Wheeler speculated he might have gone on to run one of the big teams.

Joy is reluctant to guess.

He misses Kulwicki, believes in his abilities and determination and remains one of the biggest backers in the push to get Kulwicki into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

But Joy also wonders, what if Kulwicki hadn’t adapted to changing times? What if he couldn’t work for a super-team? What if he had failed and slipped into obscurity?

“In a weird way, that’s what keeps what he did so special,” Joy said. “Because it was all upside. There was no downside to what Alan did.

“It’s sad in one way. And in another way, we get to celebrate what he did without worrying about what would have happened after that.”

View | 19 Photos

Photos: Alan Kulwicki through the years