Newman about to get biggest prize

Jenna Fryer

Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001 | 12:50 p.m.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Any day now, Ryan Newman will pull from his mailbox a piece of paper signifying the biggest accomplishment of his life.

It won't be final plans for his first full Winston Cup season next year or a copy of the lucrative sponsorship agreement that goes with being a full-time driver.

Instead, he'll open his mail and find a degree from Purdue, ending five years of homework, headaches and hard decisions.

"To me, getting a degree is more than just something I can add to my personal resume," Newman said. "This is something that I worked hard for, it's pretty much a chapter of my life that I finished and will always have."

By earning his degree, the 23-year-old protege at Penske Racing achieved what many drivers can only dream about. He also gets to compete on NASCAR's top circuit next season as a teammate to Rusty Wallace and Jeremy Mayfield.

Because of the demands of the sport and the competitiveness to land a full-time ride, most drivers spend their days at the track, not in a classroom. The ones who do pursue a degree usually aren't racing on the top circuits yet.

Buckshot Jones, who has a Business Management degree from Georgia, pursued an education before he went after a full-time racing career. He wouldn't change the way he did it.

"The college experience is good to have because you learn a lot about life, not just book learning," Jones said. "You learn how to solve problems in college. That is really important, not just for racing, but for just about anything in life."

Newman had the same line of thinking when he graduated from high school in South Bend, Ind. He knew he wanted to be a full-time driver, but most of his racing was on small Midwestern tracks with no guarantee of making it big.

He asked Winston Cup driver Ken Schrader for advice. Schrader told him the decision was easy.

"When I started out you didn't have a choice, it was racing or school," Schrader said. "These days you sometimes have a choice, and I told Ryan a degree was something he would have forever."

Schrader told Newman to take a course that could help him with his career.

So Newman studied Vehicle Structure Engineering, a program Purdue allowed him to create. He learned about everything from engines to chassis.

"I think I can understand race cars better now," he said. "I can understand what's going on with the car and can communicate with my crew about it. We all have a common language now."

But it took a lot of hard work and frustration to get there.

For starters, Newman continued his racing career while at Purdue. He went to classes during the day, did school work at night and focused on racing on the weekends.

Although he never did homework at the track, he sometimes thought about an upcoming exam while sitting in his car and spent plenty of class time daydreaming about his next race.

As his career began to take off, Newman got busier and busier. During one semester, he was gone from Purdue four of the first five weeks.

"I've never held two jobs at once, but that was as close to it as I think you can get," he said. "Having school and racing overlap in a seven-day week made it very difficult."

He often considered quitting school, but a talk with three-time Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon convinced Newman he needed to continue his education.

Gordon told Newman that if he could do it over, he would have gone to college.

"Every day there is something I do that I could use a college education," Gordon said. "He's in a unique situation in that his race career is going well and he's able to get that education. I chose not to do that because I was afraid that my career would suffer, so I went with the momentum that I had from the racing side of it.

"But I certainly wish I could have done both and I'm proud of him for sticking with it."

Even after Gordon's pep talk, Newman had one more obstacle. After being hired by Roger Penske, he left school a few hours short of graduation to move to North Carolina.

Although he vowed to finish his course work by correspondence, he procrastinated, then when he did sign up for the work he never started it.

Finally, with needling from his family and Penske, Newman finished the work this summer.

"The last part was the hardest, but I was so close I had to take the final step," Newman said. "Now I have something that can never be taken away and I did it on my own."