'Lord, This Is Car #17'

When it comes down to it, all a racecar driver really wants to do is to go faster. A slowpoke wants to catch up to the pack. A driver in the pack wants to run at the front. A driver who finishes at the front wants to win every weekend. Speed consumes all of them.

Darrell Waltrip, the former stock-car champion who has become an immensely popular racing commentator for Fox, has an on-air catchphrase for the stock-car driver's craving: "Boogity, boogity, boogity." Step on it. Go even faster. Waltrip knows all about how it can grip a driver, and how, when a driver does less well than he used to, the craving becomes an obsession.

In two seasons-1981 and '82, Waltrip boogitied like no one else. He won an astounding 24 NASCAR races, 11 more than any other driver. He won two championships and was on his way to a third. But "we had a tough year in 1983," says Waltrip in "Darrell Waltrip One-on-One: The Faith That Took Him to the Finish Line," a book of 60 devotions that read like a trackside spiritual autobiography. Waltrip's team won only two of the last 19 races of the 1983 season and lost the championship to Bobby Allison by a scant margin.

That same year, Waltrip's wife, Stevie, had her second miscarriage. The combination of personal and professional letdown inspired Waltrip to renew his Christianity. "Before that, Stevie would say, 'We need to go to church,' and I'd say, 'I don't have time. I`ve got to race. That`s my job. Sorry, I can`t make it,'" Waltrip said on the phone recently from his home in Franklin, Tenn. Suddenly, the man who felt "like the Muhammad Ali of NASCAR" had time for church.

That "miserable" season did more than get him to church on time. Waltrip soon discovered a much more substantial flaw about himself than his obsession with winning: "It was all about me," he says of his career.

That realization led the Waltrips on a faith journey that in turn led them to found a ministry, Motor Racing Outreach. These days, MRO has has expanded into a full-fledged church on wheels. Come Sunday morning, wherever the NASCAR tour brings the congregants together, drivers, mechanics, pit crew, and their wives sit on folding chairs, usually in an empty garage, for interdominational services. Waltrip had won 84 races and $19 million before he stopped racing stock cars in 2000, but he says the ministry is his proudest racing accomplishment. "If we weren't able to have a church on the road," Waltrip says, "guys wouldn't be able to get to church."

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