Former NASCAR champion Alan Kulwicki unapologetically did things his way

Thirty-three years after his death, there's still an Alan Kulwicki-sized hole in NASCAR. 

It's not specifically due to Kulwicki's greatness as a driver, though the five-time Cup Series winner and 1992 Cup Series champion was excellent behind the wheel. 

It's because Kulwicki was about as much of a self-made man as you can find. He was pragmatic and did things his way, and he couldn't care less if anyone agreed with him. 

That's what won him a NASCAR championship and made many of his fellow competitors try their hand at being owner-drivers in the years following his 1992 title. Few of them had any success at all, and none of them replicated what Kulwicki had been able to do as an owner-driver. 

In 1985, Kulwicki sold most of his belongings and trekked to North Carolina in his pickup truck, which caught fire. He had borrowed another truck in order to haul his trailer to Charlotte. 

The Greenfield, Wis., native who would come to be known as NASCAR's "Polish Prince" bought the Cup Series operation of Bill Terry, whom he had been driving for, in 1986. In his trademark fashion, Kulwicki had no qualms about doing things his way. Kulwicki even ran off future Hall of Fame crew chief Ray Evernham in 1992; Evernham's tenure with Kulwicki lasted just six weeks. 

"It was very hard to win his respect," Tom Roberts, a spokesman for Kulwicki's team, told the New York Times in April 1993. "My wife, who works with me, had a love-hate relationship with him for years. It wasn't until she saw the look in his eyes after he won the championship that she realized what he felt and what he was about."

Alan Kulwicki always did things his way

Kulwicki was an intense figure who was fiercely devoted to winning. Perhaps the reason he came off as an abrasive boss was because of his sense of self-reliance, which stemmed from his early days in racing, where he would have to work on his go-karts by himself because his father was off racing elsewhere. 

"I started with one car and two engines and two people working for me," Kulwicki told the New York Times in December 1992. "That's unheard of, so you've got to scratch for everything you can get. And so of course they're going to say 'He's hard to work for.'"

Kulwicki may have been hard to work for, but if you stuck around his shop, you could be guaranteed that you'd be working just as hard as he did. Even in an era of NASCAR where most drivers had at least grown up working on their own cars and some continued to at the Cup level — a rarity in today's world — Kulwicki was serious about every aspect of racing and wanted things under his control.

At NASCAR's annual banquet in December 1992, a video played to honor Kulwicki and his championship season. Fittingly, the accompanying song was Frank Sinatra's "My Way."

If ever a song could encapsulate one individual, that was the perfect pairing. And while his life was tragically cut short in an aviation accident on April 1, 1993, he put in a lifetime's worth of work over the course of his racing career. 

Not since has a NASCAR driver embodied the blue-collar nature of the nation and the sport's fan base quite like Kulwicki, who always wanted things done right — and doing things right usually meant doing them his way.