Have Helmet, Will Travel; From Le Mans to NASCAR, Ron Fellows will drive it.(Brief Article)

We live in an age of specialization. If you're good at one thing, goes modern thinking, you're probably not so good at anything else. Nowhere is that more true than in motorsports: The days when real race drivers were expected to be able to drive anything are gone.

Evidently, nobody ever bothered to tell Ron Fellows. A few weeks ago the 42-year-old Toronto native was in France, taking a second straight GTS win at Le Mans in a factory Corvette. The next weekend he was at Sears Point, wheeling a big old NASCAR Chevy of all things.

Along with his sterling resume in sports car racing, including two wins at Le Mans and wins at Daytona and Sebring, not to mention 20 more in Trans-Am, Fellows has collected five NASCAR wins, three in Busch and two more in the truck series. And twice a year he parachutes into Win-ston Cup as a hired gun on the road courses. All in a day's work, according to Fellows.

``The Cup car is very different from the GTS Corvette, I'll tell you that,'' he will allow. ``The Corvette weighs a thousand pounds less and has two, maybe three inches more tire, plus carbon brakes. So yeah, the Corvette is a lot more fun to drive. It's a more purpose-built car for road racing. I mean, a thousand pounds...'' he says, letting the weight of the hulking Cup car sink in. ``The thing that trained me well to drive these things is I grew up racing in Canada driving Camaros and Firebirds in the GM Player's Series. They were stock, like out of the showroom with a six-point roll cage and street tires. It took a lot of finesse to drive them. And that's what it requires here, a lot of finesse.

``I grew up wanting to race open-wheel cars but just never had the money. I did some Formula Ford 1600 and went broke and then I missed a few years paying off the debt. Then GM started their series in '86 and I learned some valuable lessons there. The connections I made there helped move me into Trans-Am, as a reward for my performances.''

At this stage in his successful road-racing career, what would a Winston Cup win mean to Fellows? ``A couple hundred thousand dollars, I think. Do you know what the exchange rate is with the Canadian dollar?'' he says, engaging his ...