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| Mario Gosselin: A Racer Living A NASCAR Dream | The dream of big time NASCAR racing for most local short track racers is only that, a dream. But for Mario Gosselin, that dream is fast becoming a reality with his new contract to drive in five Busch Grand National events and three ARCA races this year.The friendly, fun loving racer who started at Hialeah Speedway 10 years ago is ready for a shot at the big time racing of NASCAR.
"I've had more fun than I've had in years driving".
Michael J. Belle, Attorney and motorsports agent, said Mario Gosselin of Lake Wales, Florida has signed a deal to put the 1997 USAR Hooters ProCup Champion in five NASCAR Busch Grand National races this year. Belle, speaking from his law offices in Sarasota confirmed Gosselin will be sponsored by Carter Grandle/CFI Manufacturing, along with Western Nonwovens and Eastern Metal Supply as associate sponsors. Busch races at Charlotte, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Myrtle Beach are planned, though the exact venues haven't been confirmed yet. Gosselin will also run three ARCA races this year, with another, as yet unnamed sponsor getting involved.
Belle, who has worked with several ProCup racers as well as NASCAR's Wally Dallenbach, told KARNAC that Sarasota based Carter Grandle, manufacturer of casual pool and patio furniture is the major cog in a sponsorship package that will give Gosselin all the tools to have a shot at securing a solid future in NASCAR racing.
Mario Gosselin, born in Quebec City, Canada, first began racing at Hialeah Speedway in 1990 in the pure stocks, winning the track championship.
His late model career began the next year with two wins and runner-up in points at the Hialeah flat track. It was about this time that veteran stock car promoter Don Nerone came into the picture. Gosselin went racing with Nerones' U.S.A Late Model Series and over the next few years cranked out championships and major wins from one end of Florida to the other. When Hooters Restaurants got involved with the U.S.A. series, and changed the name to Hooters Cup Series in 1995 Gosselin won the Championship with 3 wins and 16 top ten finishes.
Don Nerone has been very instrumental in the success that Gosselin has had. Nerone remembers, "I watched Mario's career come right on through,... he always ran respectably", speaking of Gosselin's first year in the U.S.A series,
" but he was young." Nerone continues, "The following year he came back and just did a dominating job and he has ever since. Probably the lightning for everybody was when they ran the little series over there in Pensacola, along with the Snowball Derby, he went over there and absolutely murdered them in that deal. Everybody who was anybody went and they all said 'who is Mario?', they hadn't even heard of him".
Mario remembers those days of learning to qualify "Don has helped me a lot...at first it almost felt like we were fighting him but then once we were one of the boys, he helped us out a lot". I was having a hard time qualifying, I would practice well but be lucky to qualify 15th. In '93, all these guys were coming from up North, it was big thing you know, and we went out to Lakeland one night and we did nothing but qualify. This was Don's idea, you have to practice qualifying. From there on, boy what a difference". Mario laughs when he remembers those days, "And I won the Triple Crown that year". His accumulation of ProCup poles attests to the fact that Mario Gosselin was indeed a good student.
Having run in every USAR Hooters ProCup race since the inaugural season in 1997, Gosselin holds all the major ProCup records. In 53 races he has 13 poles and 15 wins, and has finished in the top 10 over 60 percent of the time. He was able to win the Championship the first year of ProCup competition, in a series which uses heavy Busch Grand National cars.
Besides the three scheduled ARCA races and the 5 NASCAR Busch races this season, Gosselin is planning to run the entire USAR Hooters ProCup series, and is leading the points after two races. Asked about the increasingly tough competition in the ProCup series, as more and more teams are using the series as the training ground for the Busch series, he said "oh there's definitely more money getting involved, and when there's more money getting involved it's gets tougher, no doubt about it"
At the end of last year the money pressures involved with big league racing forced Gosselin to rethink his career and make some changes. 1999 was a mixed bag, a disappointing and sometimes frustrating year in the ProCup, with some very high points as well. In May he took his operation to Lowe's Motor Speedway (Charlotte) and not only sat on the pole in his very first ARCA event, but won the race as well. In October the guy the kids know as "Super" Mario proved the first ARCA race was no fluke , as he sat on the pole again, this time setting a speedway record of 181.354 mph. He ended up with another podium finish in third place. Also in 1999 Gosselin made his first, and only Busch race to date, with a 20th starting spot and came in 16th at the tough Myrtle Beach Speedway.
But while the promise of success was there, the ProCup wasn't going so well for the WJ Plemons Chevrolet team in 1999. After destroying the car in the opener at USA International Speedway, the team went to work and though struggling put several top fives together and won the June race at USA International, putting him in the points lead. Still in the thick of the championship battle with Jay Fogleman and Bobby Gill, in the latter part of the season things started to go wrong again as the team's car problems began to mount, over heating one race, a wreck while running for second in another, and "getting further behind the eight ball" as Mario recalls it.
This year Gosselin hopes for a different outcome. Like so many other drivers, the cost of being competitive takes it's toll, and so at the end of the year he got out of being the team and car owner and went looking for a team to drive for. "I don't work on the car....we talk on the phone about setups and what we're going to do, and he puts it in there pretty much gets it all ready" .The relief from all the added pressures of running his own team has proven, thus far, to be an enormous benefit to Gosselin. He lights up when asked about the change, "Boy I tell you, these past two ProCup races, I've had more fun than I've had in years driving." Speaking of team owner and crew chief, Haskell Wittingham, "they are really great people to deal with. You hope everything is going to go smooth, and I mean it's been a lot smoother than I had hoped for. They're happy, they had never been on a pole in a ProCup race, now they have their first pole and a track record, a second and a fifth and we're leading the points. They're pretty psyched up."
And it's evident than the 28 year old native of Canada is pretty psyched up too. "I have enough money to set up the Busch deal the way I want it. That is why I sold all that stuff...I knew I had to do something different. It' not that I didn't know how or know what I needed to do, I didn't have what I needed to make it happen A lot of the strain is off of me...."
Now that the sponsorship package is there Mario Gosselin will now have a chance to prove he is ready for the Busch Grand National Series. The goals are simple: "We're just looking at making the races and getting solid top 20 finishes. We've got to realize one thing, we're not a team that's been formed for 2 or 3 years that has unlimited resources, which there's a lot of Busch teams out there that that is the way they are, they have unlimited resources with some of them with 4 million dollar sponsors." Gosselin seems to understand well the challenge ahead of him and has a clear cut standard of success.
With the major hurdle of securing the funding necessary to compete at the Busch level behind him Gosselin can focus on getting the job done, "We 're kind of starting at the bottom of the ladder, so for us to accomplish qualifying for the races and getting good solid finishes, and being there at the end. If we can go in and do something like that, and build on that, I think we 're going to show our sponsors we're serious about it, we're going to give them the coverage they are looking for."
Most drivers run out of resources before they run out of talent. With the sponsorship, the good relationship with his ProCup team owner, and the Carter Grandle partnership he says " I feel I'm going to have fair shot at it."
And that's about as much as you can ask in a sport where only a very few ever get a chance to live their racing dream.
-Jack Smith
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