Nobody Else Was Gonna Be Bill" — Former NASCAR Team Owner Recalls the 'Dark Ages' That Followed Bill Elliott's Exit — Yahoo Sports

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

August 24, 2018 – Elkhart Lake, WI, USA: Bill Elliott (23) gets ready to practice for the 9th Annual Johnsonville 180 at Road America in Elkhart Lake, WI. ©IMAGO/Depositphotos

Harry Melling ran a NASCAR team for over a decade and made money exactly once. He did not care. He believed in Bill Elliott, funded the whole thing out of his own pocket, and saw it produce a championship and 34 wins. Then Junior Johnson showed up with a Budweiser contract and an offer Bill could not turn down. Harry stepped aside.

The agreement, as far as anyone understood it, was that Bill Elliott would go collect his big payday, spend a couple of years away, and then come back home to Dawsonville where he belonged. It did not go that way. Mark Melling, Harry’s son, sat down on The Scene Vault podcast recently and walked through exactly what went wrong.

“Budweiser came knocking and I know it was like ‘Bill you go do this, take a break, get a nice paycheck for a couple of years and come on back to Dawsonville,'” Mark said. “That was the original plan and that’s when things kinda fell apart.”

Here is what people miss about Melling Racing. It was never just a race team with Bill Elliott driving. It was a whole system built around one family.

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Bill Elliott drove. His brother Ernie built the engines. His brother Dan handled parts and logistics. Harry wrote the checks. Coors put their name on the car. Pull one piece out and the whole thing stops making sense.

Bill left. Ernie and Dan followed. Coors walked. The shop was still there. The equipment was still there. But the people who made it work were gone.

“Bill, Ernie, Dan, dad and Coors, it all worked together,” Mark said. “From the Melling Racing standpoint, how we handled that transition is where things kinda fell apart.”

Harry put Phil Parsons in the car for 1992. No sponsor or budget, running purely on whatever Harry could pull together himself. Parsons finished tenth at Daytona, which was respectable. But respectable was not what anyone expected from the team that had just won a championship. The pressure was immediate and unreasonable. Mark did not sugarcoat it.

“Nobody else was gonna be Bill, so we didn’t have a sponsor, we didn’t have a budget,” he said. “Whoever got in that seat was not Bill and it became a real struggle. Those were the two or three years of dark ages for Melling Racing.”

After Parsons came Chad Little, then Greg Sacks. By 1995, Lake Speed was driving with Spam on the hood. By 1998, the car had Scooby-Doo painted on it. In 1999, Harry had a fatal heart attack. Mark took over and tried to hold it together. He could not. Melling Racing ran its last race in August 2002 and never won again after Bill Elliott left.

After Junior Johnson, Elliott tried running his own team through the late nineties with McDonald’s money. It looked good commercially. It never produced a win. Then in 2001, he joined Ray Evernham’s Dodge program, and something clicked.

He broke a 226-race losing streak and won four more times, including the 2002 Brickyard 400. He retired in 2003 with 44 wins, one championship, and a Hall of Fame induction coming in 2015.

His son Chase races in the Cup Series today. The Elliott name never really left. It just moved on without Melling Racing beside it.