The Speedway Review: Nashville
We are joined this week by 1990 Daytona 500 winner Derrike Cope, ARCA Menard's Series owner Alex Clubb with driver Casey Carden, and Legends driver Jay Reynolds
Derrike Cope shares life lessons from a racer’s perspective in new E-book, “Changing Gears”
“I’m not claiming to be a great writer,” Cope said. “I just hope experiences and lessons I have learned firsthand can inspire others to reach their potential."(Submitted photo)
Published: Feb. 27, 2023 at 7:22 AM EST
SALISBURY, N.C. (WBTV) - Daytona 500 winner Derrike Cope, who recently stepped away from NASCAR after the obligatory sale of the Salisbury-based StarCom Racing #00 charter to 23XI Racing at the end of the 2021 season, has announced he is “Changing Gears.”
After a brief stint of racing his own TransAm Series Car in 2022 with Nitro Motorsports, he has shifted his focus to mentoring, coaching, speaking and hosting a podcast, Race Theory, with his wife Elyshia. Cope is also currently writing a book about his successful racing career and personal life.
“The first chapter of my e-book becomes available this week,” Cope said. “How fitting that it is released following the Daytona 500! A great deal of what is included in chapter one helped pave the way to my 1990 Daytona 500 win.”
The first chapter of Cope’s book has been released in e-book form on his website DerrikeCope.club.
No NASCAR driver has ever won the World Series. But Derrike Cope was a potential major league prospect who went on to win NASCAR’s crown jewel, the Daytona 500.
The Spanaway, Washington, native grew up as a baseball standout, so good as a hard-hitting catcher in high school and college (on a full athletic scholarship) that major league scouts — particularly from the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles — were regularly attending his games.
RELATED: Derrike Cope career stats
“I had aspirations to play professional baseball since I was very young,” Cope said. “Really, that’s all I did and patterned my life towards. I felt very close to seeing that come to fruition.”
That all ended in his freshman year at Whitman College when, after retrieving a wild pitch, he attempted to throw the ball to catch a runner at second base. Unfortunately, Cope went one way and his right knee went in the other direction.
End result: torn and severed medial collateral and anterior cruciate ligaments, torn meniscus and surgery where doctors had to cut out part of his hamstring to help stabilize the knee.
“It was a very severe knee injury, a complete blowout, ended all my baseball hopes,” Cope said. “My leg never went straight for the next three years.”
It was time for Plan B, and in a sense, follow a family tradition. His father, Don, was a longtime NHRA drag racer, and with his brothers owned a speed shop in Spanaway where they built race engines for a number of late model and Winston Grand National West stock car teams.
In a way, the younger Cope unknowingly began preparing for what would become a lifetime in racing when his father took the then 14-year-old to his race shop and put him to work grinding camshafts.
Rusty Jarrett Getty Images
