The Tale of a Dysfunctional Team & Its Secret Weapon

I was part of a discussion recently that revolved around the question, “Which is the most successful yet most dysfunctional NASCAR team you can remember?”

Interesting. I think that almost every team gets dysfunctional for a period of time. And by dysfunctional, I mean that despite all its talent and record of success, the organization falls on hard times — sometimes due to its own making.

The great teams, the ones that produce year after year, overcome their problems and dysfunctions. That’s what makes them great.

But to me, there is one team that was seemingly always dysfunctional and yet won consistently over several years.

That was DiGard Racing Co., formed in Florida in 1976 by brothers Bill and Jim Gardner.

During its existence, DiGard went through crewmen, crew chiefs and personnel like a wildfire through a dry wheat field. The team seemed unsettled, to say the least. There was constant bickering and internal strife — or so it seemed.

But it did have one thing going for it. It had talent; plenty of it. That was obvious given the skills of its rising star driver Darrell Waltrip and such veteran, creative crew chiefs as Buddy Parrott and Gary Nelson.

Undoubtedly, the best example of how DiGard benefitted from its combination of innovation and talent — and thus overcame its myriad other problems — came during the 1977-80 seasons.

That was the era of the team’s bulky Chevrolet known as Buckshot Bertha.

Named after a World War II battleship, there wasn’t much appealing about Bertha. Created in late 1976 at the shop of Edwin “Banjo” Matthews in Arden, N.C., it was a brute of a racecar with very little, if any, aerodynamic appeal.

Matthews would argue with that. He claimed that Bertha, a Monte Carlo, had more downforce than it appeared.

“The big, boxy look of that car was misleading,” Matthews said.

Bertha was updated to 1977 standards and delivered to DiGard. It was an instant success.

Over the years, Bertha won at every short track on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule, several superspeedways — including Charlotte Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway, Atlanta Motor Speedway, Michigan International Speedway — and on the road course at Riverside, Calif.

Unlike most stock cars of the day, Bertha’s level of performance didn’t decline over the years. It endured the usual and expected wear and tear, but overall, it remained a well-handling machine.

“It didn’t matter what…