The sign outside his office reads, “Bill Davis Trucking,” but inside are display cases filled with trophies that prove Batesville’s Bill Davis has experience with more than just trucks.
From 1987 until the 2008 racing season, Davis owned auto-racing team Bill Davis Racing, which saw numerous big-name drivers and won races in various NASCAR series, including the trophy for the Daytona 500 in 2002. This year, Davis was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, based in North Little Rock.
“I think that people look at racing like, ‘Oh, my gosh, what a wonderful life.’ And it was,” he said. “We absolutely loved every minute of it, enjoyed every step of the way. It was very financially rewarding to us. [We] got to go and do things that the average person — certainly a couple of people from rural Arkansas — would have never got to do. That’s a wonderful thing.”
Davis said that if someone really loved racing, he or she wouldn’t look at the sport as a job — and his love for racing started early. He was born in Fayetteville but, at age 5, moved to Little Rock, where he and his father, Jake, shared a loved for racing.
“My father was a big fan — loved racing, was just a fan, but he loved, it,” Davis said. “We grew up watching what little TV coverage there was back then and went to some races.”
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Bill picked up an interest in racing and motocross.
“For me, it was strictly an amateur-level form of entertainment,” he said. “I certainly enjoyed all of it and every aspect of racing I’ve ever been in. I just enjoy the mechanics of it, the competition and just participating.”
Jake and Julian Martin of Batesville, the father of Mark Martin — who is now a NASCAR Hall of Famer — were good friends. When Mark, a good friend of Bill as well, started racing the dirt tracks on a local level as a teenager, the Davises helped out and continued to assist on the tracks as Mark advanced. In his early adulthood, Bill moved to Batesville, formed Bill Davis Trucking and eventually built his own auto-racing team.
Bill said Mark was a tremendous help in attracting sponsors.
“Even when we started, I didn’t have goals of graduating even to NASCAR, much less moving to North Carolina and having a multiple-car team that we had,” Bill said. “It just evolved.”
Bill’s team competed in NASCAR’s Busch Grand National series from 1988 to 1992, and his team began cup racing in 1993. Over his team’s years, drivers such as Bobby Labonte, Mike Skinner and Jeff Gordon joined and left. Bill said he spent February to November on the road each year with only a few weekends off during that time.
According to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, Bill’s team had overall winnings of more than $73 million and sponsorships from companies such as AT&T and Caterpillar Inc.
Bill’s involvement in NASCAR came at a unique time for the sport. Racing was gaining popularity and becoming more of a nationwide sport, rather than a sport widely celebrated throughout the Southeastern U.S.
“I think that the competition, the fact that the athletes are certainly — in the old days, particularly — more accessible and friendly and more of a down-home type person [draws people to the sport],” he said. “It was a Southern sport that really started out of backyards, and people could somewhat identify with that and dream of maybe doing that themselves. It was an attainable goal versus trying to go to the NFL or the NBA, where a very small percentage of people are able to do that.”
Davis said that in the 1990s, the influence of TV also helped educate the public about the sport of auto racing. When Bill was younger, he said, he and his father would have to wait up to a couple of days to learn who won the auto races, but in his days as a team owner, that changed.
“The cable TV channels like ESPN and TNT, and now Fox, they discovered the sport, and the cost of the sport enabled them to broadcast it live start to finish,” he said. “That’s really probably the biggest single thing that made this sport as popular as it became.”
In the early 1990s, Bill moved to High Point, North Carolina, the state where many other NASCAR teams were based, and he commuted to Batesville to maintain Bill Davis Trucking, which has been operating for 41 years.
Owning a racing team allowed him to travel across the U.S., from New York to Texas to California and more. It also meant he had to make several appearances during race weekends.
“Your sponsors brought guests, and it was your job to make them feel welcomed,” he said. “Sunday morning for a driver and car owner was pretty hectic.”
Bill said every racing win was very special. One of the highlights of his racing career was time spent on the race track in Rockingham, North Carolina.
“It was a pretty high bank, asphalt worn out, a real challenge,” he said. “But we won our first Busch pole there, won our first cup pole there, won our first cup race there — plus, it was just an hour from home. But that was always one of our favorite places.”
The pinnacle of his career, he said, was winning the Daytona 500, a 500-mile long race in Daytona Beach, Florida. He said that 2002 win took awhile to sink in and led to next-day TV appearances in New York.
“That’s like the Superbowl, so that’s huge,” he said. “It was really surreal.”
Toward the end of his racing career, his team also won a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Championship.
Bill said there is a correlation between funding and being a top-notch racing team. However, landing sponsorships is the most challenging goal of any team, he noted. Bill said money is needed to support the engineering and machinery of cars, especially since cars have to adapt to various tracks.
“It’s much, much more of a technical sport than people realize,” Bill said.
When Bill got the opportunity to sell his team at the end of the 2008 season, he took it. Though he loved the sport, he said the timing was right and that he did not want to spend the rest of his life on the racetrack, especially since he was never able to attend a ballgame or other significant activity in his nieces’ and nephews’ childhoods.
“The economy had really changed,” he said. “Sponsorships were really, really hard to come by. Teams were having to cut back and do some pretty drastic stuff.”
Bill suggested that people who are interested in the racing industry study engineering in college or a subject in the mechanical field.
Though he said Batesville is a hub for racing in Arkansas, Davis is no longer involved in the sport. He focuses his time on being president of Bill Davis Trucking, which hauls produce, pharmaceuticals and poultry across the country. His wife, Gail, is secretary-treasurer of the company.
“Pretty simple ma and pa business, but it’s been very good to us, [we’ve] been very successful at it, and 41 years is a long time,” he said.
The couple also operate Chimney Rock Cattle Co. in Concord, and Bill said the cattle industry is a “nice diversion” from other businesses in which he’s worked.
Bill said his induction into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame this year was a “huge honor.” He said he never would have imagined being recognized by his state in that way.
“We’re very appreciative of the opportunity that we had and that so many, many, many people helped us get there — just very humbled by the experience, very appreciative of the experience and thankful to all the people that helped us get there,” he said.
Staff writer Syd Hayman can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or shayman@arkansasonline.com.