Tonight, I asked Truck Series winner, rookie John King a simple question that many of you were thinking: “Who are you?”
Here’s his answer, along with what his new owner had to say.
John King: I came off of Dirt Late Models. Went to Late Model Stocks after that. We’ve run a few Truck races, but this is feature win number three for me, my whole career. This is it. I’ve won one Dirt Late Model race, and I’ve won one Late Model Stock race. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I couldn’t imagine being here, and we’re here. We got together with Tom in the offseason, and it was – I don’t really know how it worked out. We just kind of ran into each other. It evolved from there.
_Note: King had seven career Truck starts before tonight, made over the past two seasons. He had never ran higher than 15th and failed to finish each of his three 2011 starts._
Tom DeLoach, No. 7 Truck Owner: Let me give you a little more background on that. John and his dad – this is JII (pointing to the driver), his dad is JI, John King also. So they came to us, wanted to talk about, “‘What are you guys as a race team? What can you do for us? Why would it work? Why should we be with Red Horse versus this team, this team, this team. Why are you the right person?'”
And we showed them what we had. We brought them in, said, ‘Look, this is what the race team looks like. We do a lot of work with people. Part of the time I’m going to be your dad, part of the time I’m going to be your cheerleader, part of the time I’m going to be beating you on the back because that’s what it’s all about.’ We’re in this to try to mold young drivers so they can be very competitive in their careers. And as I talk to John and his dad, that’s kind of the way it came across. My team manager, Kevin Ray, worked very hard on making sure all this is going back and forth. And we’re still trying to put all the pieces together. We don’t have all the sponsorship done, you notice that truck out there said Red Horse all over it.
We’re millimeters away from a sponsorship deal, but millimeters away is still away. So we’re working very hard on that. But the one thing I was impressed with, I’ve never gone and sat with a driver as much as with John and all I get is, “Yes sir. No sir. Yes sir. Uh huh. Yes sir. Yes sir.” Very polite, very disciplined, incredibly calm in a big race like this.
You guys probably scanned him a little bit, you heard that voice on there. You heard a guy that was very meticulous. Terry Cook is the spotter. Most of you guys know Terry, he’s got 400+ Truck races under his belt. So having Terry as a spotter filled in some of the background that John doesn’t have. And that’s what we did is we put a big, warm blanket around John and tried to maximize his ability and folks, you see what happened from there.
_Note: You can also check out “www.johnkingracing.com”:http://www.johnkingracing.com for more on King. He’s also got a Twitter handle, @johnkingracing._