Dirt-Track Veteran Listens to His Heart: Bert Culpepper is Retiring, Heeding His Bodies Warning Signs

"My wife is not crazy about that idea, but I think he would make a good driver," Culpepper said. "He won the second race he ever drove in at Dixieland, but he hasn't been in a race car in five years."

A Legend On Dirt Is Cleaning Up Again

Frank Vehorn, Staff Writer
15 Jul 1994
The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Page C1

On a hot Saturday evening at Southampton Speedway, out among the sweltering cornfields along U.S. Route 58, Bert Culpepper steps inside a van parked in front of a yellow race car and changes into a faded black driving uniform, fully appreciative of the moment.

After missing most of last season because of a heart attack, the 52-year-old Chesapeake driver is back, and in hot pursuit of a championship.

But, he insists, that isn't the reason for the smile on his tanned face.

"Winning is nice and everything, but it is not really the determining factor," he explains. "I just like to race."

Indeed, Culpepper has been in love with race cars since he was a youngster, growing up on a farm in Deep Creek. And, if he thought about it, he might smile at how little he had progressed geographically from those long-ago days when he was racing through the family cornfields.

He had his own car when he was 8. When the crops had been harvested in the fall, he would take that car and carve out his own racetrack in the fields near his home. Barely big enough to peer through the windshield, he would kick the car into a turn, feel the rear tires break loose and the rear end slide free momentarily before he gunned the throttle to straighten the car.

"I've always liked driving, driving anything," he says. "When I was 12 years old, I could have outdriven a lot of people who were racing because of the experience I got running in those fields."

While Culpepper is changing into his driving uniform, his wife, Carol, is pulling up a chair, preparing to settle down for another night at the races, completely unappreciative of the moment.

From the start, she didn't care much about racing, and it wasn't like she knew what she was getting into when she and Bert married just out of high school. He didn't start racing cars until he was 34.

"If I wasn't so crazy about him..." she laughs, dropping the sentence without finishing it. "When he first started racing, I didn't like it. I thought it was too dangerous. But, after a couple of times, I realized it was something he really loved. So it was either I was going to have to put in or put out.

"I just put in, endured it, and I became a really big fan. I really learned to love it. But we have been doing it for so long now, and I am getting a little tired of it."

And there was that heart attack Culpepper suffered a year ago when he brought his race car to Southampton for the first test of the new season. He was about to get into the car when he felt a pain ripping across his chest, the worst pain he had ever felt. Fortunately, there was a rescue unit at the track and he received immediate attention.

"Bert's mom and I really didn't want him to go back racing after that," Carol says. "But he made a good recovery from the heart attack. The doctor told Bert he wouldn't tell him not to race, but he could not imagine on a 95-degree day someone wanting to crawl into a car and run around a racetrack."

It didn't surprise Carol, though, that several weeks after the heart attack, her husband was again running around the Southampton track on 95-degree days.

"Bert is the kind who is going to enjoy his life on a daily basis," she says. "He doesn't look to next week or next year. He lives it one day at a time. And I knew he would rather be racing than anything. So, I thought, `Well, maybe if he comes back and has one more good season, this will be it.' "

Culpepper is having the good season his wife wanted.

"We've won four races, and everything was going real good until last week when we broke a rear end in a heat race," he says.

Getting back into the race car after his heart attack was an easy decision on his part, Culpepper says.

He wouldn't have thought about it at all had his wife and others not suggested that it seemed a good time to retire.

"Everyone keeps telling me I am getting too old and that I need to quit," Culpepper says. "But, you know, I am still competitive and I enjoy it. Some younger guys may have quicker reaction, but my experience makes up for that."

Ken Roberson owns the yellow No. 00 Pontiac that Culpepper drives. They have been partners in speed for about 12 years, racing on dirt tracks up and down the East Coast and, for a while, on asphalt at Langley Raceway.

Before a recent Southampton race, a visitor from the Northeast asked Culpepper to pose for a picture.

"I want to show the people back home in Connecticut what you look like," she said.

"Anywhere you go in dirt-track racing, people know who Bert Culpepper is," Roberson says. "He is as well-liked and as respected as anyone you will find. But I tell you he can be stubborn.

"I call him `Knucklehead.' You know, we argue some about the car. Most of the time, he proves to me that he is right. I don't think there is anything about a race car that he doesn't know."

Culpepper got a late start in racing, he says, because he didn't have the money and spent too much time working, which included hauling produce for his father.

"If I had got started when I was 19 or 20, I might have moved on up the line somewheres," he says. "It was something I always wanted to do, but just never got the opportunity until I was about 34."

Even then, there was no grand plan. It just kind of happened.

"I was working for a farm-equipment dealer and a friend of his was building motors for Frank Harrill, who owned race cars," Culpepper recalls. "They got to talking, and the next thing I knew, Frank hauled us a race car out there and we put a motor in it."

Culpepper 's first race was at a dirt track in Wilson, N.C. He remembers that Buddy Baker and Benny Parsons, both Winston Cup stars in those days, drove in the same race.

"I was thinking, `What a way to start,' " he says, grinning.

Culpepper didn't last long enough in the race to impress Baker or Parsons, but he did convince his first car owner that he knew a thing or two about automobiles.

"We went down there with the wrong gear in the car," Culpepper says. "I had never driven a race car before, but after a few laps of practice I tried to tell him we had too much gear. He told me, `No, you have never driven one of these cars, you don't know.' I said OK, but about 15 laps into the race, just as I was getting the feel of it, coming out of the corner I blew the engine all the way down the straightaway."

Most of his driving career has been on dirt.

"It is a little cheaper than racing on asphalt," he says. "We tried running at Langley a couple of years ago, but our pockets weren't deep enough for that. You have got to buy new tires every week to be competitive on asphalt. On dirt, you can usually run a couple of races on a set of tires."

But there is nothing cheap about racing in the elite Late Model Sportsman division at Southampton. The cars cost between $20,000 and $25,000 each. Their engines churn about 500 horsepower, which gets the cars around the 3/8-mile dirt oval at about 86 mph. Turn them loose on a big, high-banked track like Daytona, though, and they would approach 190 mph.

Because of the expense, and the competition from asphalt-track racing, which provides a more direct route to the big time, only about 10 Late Model Sportsman drivers compete regularly in Southampton's weekly series.

But there is no shortage of excitement or competitiveness.

Culpepper and Rodney Brickhouse, another Chesapeake driver, have four victories apiece this season. Greg Hubbard of Cobbs Creek, Va., has three wins, Mike Shearin of Emporia, Va., two and Earl Sawyer of Portsmouth and Glenn Hawkins of Emporia one apiece.

On this second Saturday night in July, the unofficial midway point in the season, Culpepper is feeling good about his chances for winning the championship. He had won three races in a row before the mechanical failure the previous week, and after 14 races he is only six points behind Shearin.

"If things go like they have the last four or five weeks, maybe we can win it," Culpepper says cautiously.

"It all depends on how your luck goes. It can change from one week to the next, then everything goes backwards. You can get on a roll and then hit somebody and knock your car out of whack and it might take you two or three races to find out what is wrong and correct it."

"Hitting somebody" is often part of dirt-track racing, unless you get out front early and leave the beating and banging in your dust, as Brickhouse is able to do on this night to claim his fourth victory.

Culpepper starts sixth and has to pay the consequences as he roots his way through the field.

He is involved in three accidents, one late in the race while trying to drive under Shearin for second place.

After Culpepper cleanly pushes the nose of his car under Shearin on the low side, Shearin turns left. The cars bang together, forcing Culpepper momentarily to get off the throttle.

Culpepper drops back to fourth place, but makes another charge in the final laps to reclaim second place, finishing one position ahead of Shearin, and closing to within four points of him in the championship standings.

Culpepper is sweaty but smiling as he steers his car back to the pits, where Carol and his crew are waiting. No one seems disappointed that on this night there was not a victory.

"He did a good job getting back to second after being involved in so much," Roberson says.

Culpepper is satisfied, too. But feels he might have had a shot at Brickhouse, whose tires were giving up in the final laps, if he had not knocked his front end "out of whack" in the last collision.

As for the incident with Shearin, he is willing to forgive and forget this time.

"He (Shearin) really came down on me big-time," Culpepper says. "He is in the points lead and doing everything he can to keep me behind him. He was trying to block the track to keep me from passing him. But you are supposed to do that before the car gets alongside of you."

As Culpepper is talking, someone walks up and congratulates him on keeping his cool.

"You are a better man than I am," the man says.

"I just take it in stride," Culpepper replies. "This is the first time it has happened, so I'll chalk it up as experience. But if it goes on, and I think it is intentional, he (Shearin) is going to go for a ride."

Carol Culpepper has seldom seen her husband get upset about something that happens at the racetrack.

"He is one of the most laid-back guys there is," she says. "He is slow to anger, and if something goes wrong he usually accepts it as just being a part of racing.

"But when he does get upset, he can be a bear."

Culpepper says whether he wins the championship or not won't affect his plans to race again next season. But he understands his wife's feelings.

"It is time-consuming," he says. "I have to wonder how she has put up with me all these years."

Carol wonders about that, too, and doesn't sound as if she is joking when she says, "I think I am going to have to drag him out of that race car by the hair, or what little hair he has left."

But if Bert Culpepper is back again next year, Carol will be there, too.

"I'm his No. 1 fan," she says, "the one that sticks with him, win or lose. And I get to go home with him even when he has had a bad night."

Culpepper Ancestry. Bert is Bert Young Culpepper, Jr. who can be found in the Culpepper Family Tree.