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As cars are tuned up, drivers get toned up

April 30, 2006 1:45 am

By JIM McCONNELL

Twenty-five years ago, most NASCAR drivers didn't know "six-pack abs" from a six-pack of Budweiser.

Contrast that with the cover of ESPN The Magazine's February issue, on which phenom Carl Edwards posed shirtless and showed off a physique chiseled enough to make Superman jealous.

Clearly, this isn't your father's NASCAR. When it comes to racing in the 21st century, fat is out and fit is in.

"The commitment to fitness has changed," veteran driver Jeff Burton said. "People have started to understand that they're paid like professional athletes. They need to start acting like it."

Understand, driver-as-athlete is still a fairly new concept. Many of NASCAR's earliest racers were bootleggers, whose idea of training was barreling down narrow, dimly lit back roads to avoid detection by local police.

Even as recently as the 1980s, the stereotypical NASCAR driver was a Southern-bred good old boy whose athletic gifts were limited to turning wrenches and turning left.

But while Edwards may be the biggest reason why that perception is changing, he wasn't the first racer to embrace the tenets of healthy living and physical fitness.

That honor belongs to Mark Martin.

Martin turned into a "gym rat" early in his racing career. He preferred lifting weights to drinking beer, ate broiled chicken instead of pork rinds and soon became well known as the most fit driver in the NASCAR garage.

Along the way, he unwittingly served an inspiration to one of his future Roush Racing teammates.

"I watched this show about how Mark works out, I was like 15 years old or something, and thought, 'Man, I can do that to be a little better,'" Edwards recently told NASCAR.com.

"I thought I was in shape, but Mark Martin, at the gym the other day, he was telling me about his ab workout. That dude showed me his abs and I was like, 'There is no way I'll ever have abs like that.'"

That tells you everything you need to know about Martin. At the age of 47, when many men begin to lose the battle of the bulge, the Arkansas native has become a role model for a generation of drivers half his age.

Edwards, Jimmie Johnson, Reed Sorensen, Casey Mears, Denny Hamlin, J.J. Yeley and Brian Vickers are all twentysomething Nextel Cup drivers--and there's not more than a few ounces of fat on any of them.

"I look around and see all these kids out here doing this stuff, but I've really stayed committed to my physical fitness program," Martin said. "It's a lot harder work when you get my age to get it done. I tailor my workout to benefit my age and my body type now maybe different than I did 15 years ago. But for the most part the commitment's the same and the effort's the same."

Magazine covers aside, vanity isn't the driving force behind the unprecedented emphasis on exercise. Today's drivers have many more practical reasons for maintaining a higher level of physical fitness.

First, there are the physical demands placed on drivers inside the cockpit: extreme temperatures (at times exceeding 200 degrees), G-forces similar to those experienced during a space shuttle liftoff, and the concentration required to race 42 other cars for more than three hours without a break.

Extreme physical fatigue often leads to mental lapses, and those aren't good when you're racing fender-to-fender at speeds surpassing 180 mph.

"The requirements of a race driver are different than anybody who ever sat on a couch and drank beer and ate potato chips for four hours can imagine," Martin said. "You can't tell someone the difference between driving a car as fast as you're comfortable driving and driving a car faster than it will go.

"You have a mental and physical fatigue factor that's incredible. You'll be out of breath to the point that you can't hardly talk. You'll be physically whipped."

That fatigue doesn't end when drivers climb out the window after a race. In addition to the 36-race schedule, racers face an almost endless array of off-track obligations to sponsors, media and fans.

During a testing session earlier this month at Richmond International Raceway, Kevin Harvick said he had been home for a total of 14 hours in the previous three weeks.

With that kind of schedule, sticking to an exercise plan is difficult at best.

"I work out when I can. I rest when I can. The rest of it I'm lucky. I'm young and that helps a lot," Vickers said.

Now 38, Burton no longer has the luxury of youth. So when he was in Richmond for testing, he found a local YMCA and was in the gym pumping iron at 5:45 a.m.--just as he does at home.

"The thing about my program is I have to be able to do it in an hour, hour and 10 minutes. I don't have time for more," said Burton, who frequently works out with Carolina Panthers strength and conditioning coach Jerry Simmons. "If you don't goof around and talk or use it as a social hour, you lift and go right on to the next thing, you can get it done."

Burton freely acknowledges that he's in much better shape today than he was when he was 18. He added 16 pounds of muscle during the offseason, while dropping his body-fat content by 2 percent.

Another thirtysomething driver with Virginia roots, Emporia native Elliott Sadler, also significantly transformed his body between the 2005 and '06 seasons. Challenged by new crew chief Tommy Baldwin Jr. to lose 14 pounds, Sadler instead dropped 16 and said he felt much better for it.

Even Tony Stewart got into the fitness craze. Stewart, who once famously remarked that his favorite form of exercise was pushing the channel-up and channel-down buttons on his TV remote control, spent thousands of dollars on exercise equipment late last season in an effort to improve his strength and endurance.

Put simply, however, Stewart is just not a workout nut. No matter how many Nextel Cup titles he wins, Stewart will never have a body like Edwards'--and he's not the only one.

"You can still walk through the garage area and it's not real hard to tell that not everybody is committed to fitness," Burton said. "But a lot of people are."

To reach JIM McCONNELL: 540/374-5444
Email: jmcconnell@freelancestar.com