Business travel can be a grind, But for NASCAR drivers and race teams who are on the road for 36 races per year travel is unavoidable. If these teams had to rely on commercial airline schedules travel would be a nightmare, if not a logistical impossibility.
That’s why most of the top tier drivers own private jets, and race teams operate fleets of small aircraft to transport pit crew members and team executives to the racetrack each week. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. Owns a LearJet 60, which is the top of the LearJet line, and their largest jet.
It’s a business jet that can seat up to 10 passengers. Thanks to the jet Earnhardt can leave his home in North Carolina and be at the racetrack in Daytona or Texas a couple of hours later - about the time it would take to drive to a major airport and clear security. NASCAR rookie and former Formula One driver Juan Pablo Montoya also owns a LearJet 60. 2006 champion Jimmie Johnson owns a Learjet 31A, and Jeff Gordon owns a British Aerospace Hawker 800. Most of the drivers leave the flying to professional pilots, but Mark Martin is a licensed pilot who often pilots his own Cessna Citation. Martin lives in a unique community near Daytona Beach called Spruce Creek.
It’s a fly in community with it’s own airport. Residents have aircraft hangars in the yard where most of us have garages. Martin can literally park his jet in the garage. The race teams operate larger planes to ferry the pit crews and team executives to the track. Roush Racing operates a fleet of planes, including a Boeing 737 and several smaller business jets.
Dale Earnhardt, Inc. Flies it’s pit crew on an Embraer 120, a mid-size turbo-prop that seats 30 passengers. While cars have vanity license plates, NASCAR teams have vanity aircraft registration numbers. Dale Jr’s Learjet is N8JR, and Jeff Gordon’s Hawker is N24JG. The corporate Embraer at Dale Earnhardt, Inc.
NASCAR has come to rely on private jet travel so much that many tracks are located right next to airports. Daytona International Speedway is located right next to Daytona Beach International Airport where private jets and commercial flights arrive daily. While most tracks are not located so close to a major international airport, some tracks have built their own airports.
Right next to Atlanta Motor Speedway sits Tara Field, a small general aviation airstrip that sees little traffic until race week, when more than 600 planes descend on this tiny airfield. However, some tracks are not as convenient, but when that happens expect the NASCAR drivers to come up with a solution.
When NASCAR descends on a track like Dover Delaware some drivers like Dale Earnhardt bypass race traffic by flying from the airport to the racetrack in a chartered helicopter, landing directly in he infield. Some people consider private air travel a luxury, but with the hectic schedule of today’s drivers it is a necessity. Following a Sunday afternoon race a driver can hop on his jet and be home by Sunday night. This means they can meet with the crew chiefs and team owners Monday morning to review the previous race, and develop a strategy for the following race. During the week drivers are often on the jet again, meeting with sponsors, shooting TV commercials, making public appearances, and testing. Without a jet this schedule would be impossible.
Most drivers agree that having a private jet gives them one to two days per week of productive time, or just allows an occasional day off.
An employee places flowers at a memorial site at the Hendrick Motorsports headquarters in Concord, N.C. A fleet of private planes known as the 'NASCAR Air Force' has made travel easier for drivers and teams. But Sunday's crash that killed 10 people flying to a race aboard a Hendrick Motorsports team plane showed such convenience also can involve risks. 'We use planes just like our cars,' said Ricky Rudd, one of several NASCAR Nextel Cup drivers who are also pilots. 'We put a lot of hours in the air and have some of the best pilots in the country that fly these things, and some of the best equipment.' The backbone of the NASCAR air fleet has been the two-engine, 12-passenger aircraft like the Beech 200 King Air that crashed into the side of a mountain in thick fog Sunday while trying to land at a small airport near Martinsville Speedway in Virginia.
All 10 people aboard were killed, including team owner Rick Hendrick's son, Ricky; his brother, John, and John's two daughters, Jennifer and Kimberly. Also on the plane were the team's general manager, Jeff Turner, and its chief engine builder, Randy Dorton, as well as Joe Jackson, an executive with DuPont; Scott Lathram, 38, a pilot for NASCAR driver Tony Stewart; and pilots Richard Tracy and Elizabeth Morrison.
For years, nearly everyone traveled back and forth to the races in team vans or private cars, but the proliferation of private planes has changed that. Nextel Cup teams race 38 weekends each year, including two all-star events. On many of those weekends, the Concord, N.C., Regional Airport - the closest airport for most teams - is buzzing with activity.
More than 100 aircraft - helicopters and airplanes - take off and land, ferrying drivers, team owners, crewmen, sponsors and fans to airports near the racetrack. More aircraft, including a pair of 727 jets owned by Roush Racing, fly in and out of nearby Charlotte Douglas International Airport. 'Actually, it's not just race weekends,' said Annette Privette, a spokeswoman for the city of Concord. 'Our airport has approximately 200 aircraft based there and about 60 percent of them are NASCAR-related. There's a lot of flying back and forth to testing and pole nights and driver appearances and races. 'It's convenient because the teams, obviously, want to spend as much time with their families as possible.' Petty Enterprises driver Jeff Green sees private plane travel as more than just a convenience.
'Taking the chance on being delayed in an airport just won't work,' Green said. 'You have to be there Friday morning for practice or you miss practice. Minecraft download kostenlos deutsch vollversion. Miss practice, and they don't let you attempt to qualify.
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'It's more than just drivers. The crews, everybody has to use private planes.
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We're not talking about convenience, we're talking about necessity. To be able to test and to be able to get to the tracks where you need to be - on top of doing the things you need to do for your sponsors and your team - you just don't have much choice.' Mark Martin, another driver who is also a pilot, lost his father, stepmother and half sister in 1998 when a private plane his father was piloting crashed in Nevada. But Martin said he has no qualms about continuing to use his plane. 'I suppose we've been pretty lucky in a way,' Martin said in an interview last year. 'But everybody knows that flying is still safer than driving in your personal car.
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And we really have no choice. We have to fly to get our jobs done.' With the escalating use of helicopters - for short hauls - and private planes, NASCAR's Air Force has a very good safety record. Driver Alan Kulwicki and three others were killed in the crash of a private plane in 1993 while flying to a race in Bristol, Tenn. Later that same year, Davey Allison died in the crash of his helicopter as he tried to land at Talladega Superspeedway. There had been no aircraft-related fatalities in NASCAR since, but that doesn't mean there haven't been accidents.
In one three-week period in November 2003, Martin's plane blew two tires taking off from a Goodyear, Ariz., airport after racing at Phoenix, a plane carrying Petty crewmen also blew a tire on takeoff after a test earlier in Phoenix, and driver Tony Stewart's plane hit a deer while landing to refuel at a rural Texas airport on the way to the Phoenix race. Nobody on board was injured.
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