Jeremy Mayfield used to be a race car driver. At least, that’s how it has appeared since he ran afoul of NASCAR’s substance abuse policy in 2009. But he is back behind the wheel, and on November 29 he intends to be racing at New Jersey’s Wall Stadium in his first visit to the 64-year-old speedway.
Mayfield was a regular in NASCAR’s top series, a five-time winner who drove for such well-known car owners as Cale Yarborough and Roger Penske. But when he failed a random drug test administered by NASCAR he was shown the door. Failing a subsequent test, he remains suspended from all NASCAR racing.
It has been a tough several years for Mayfield, who has stubbornly mainlined his innocence and refused to go through NASCAR’s required “Road to Recovery” program. Among other things he was evicted from his home for failure to pay taxes and he was convicted on two counts of possession of drug paraphernalia and one count for possessing stolen items. He managed to avoid jail time, but his post-NASCAR life has not bolstered his claims of innocence.
In an attempt to return to racing, in early 2014 he joined the KOMA series, based in North Carolina, which races cars known as Modifieds and which are very similar to those raced in NASCAR’s own Whelan Modified Tour in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region. Which is how it has come to be that Mayfield will be racing a Modified in Wall Stadium’s annual “Turkey Derby.”
Interestingly, Wall Stadium is the track at which a young aspiring driver named Ray Evernham began his career, winning races in Modifieds and Midgets before going to work at the nearby IROC shops. Evernham, as most NASCAR followers know, then went on to become a championship-winning crew chief with Jeff Gordon and later a NASCAR car owner. Among Evernham’s drivers during that period was Jeremy Mayfield.
But there appears to be no connection between Evernham and Mayfield’s appearance at Wall Stadium, other than the fact that Evernham often attends the event and rumors that Mayfield hopes Evernham will view his racing favorably.
Mayfield is far from the first driver with a NASCAR background to race at Wall Stadium. Kyle Petty finished sixth in the 1986 “Turkey Derby” and Bobby Allison won a Wall Stadium event decades earlier. Even Indy 500 winner and Formula One champion Mario Andretti raced at Wall Stadium in the early part of his career.
But the sad truth is that Mayfield is likely to be only a footnote at Wall Stadium, destined never to regain the positive reputation he once enjoyed.