Where is ... Tim Bender?

It will have been a full 10 years in April since Tim Bender last stepped foot inside a NASCAR racetrack. There are probably just too many "What ifs ..."

What might have happened if Bender hadn't gotten hurt? What if he'd been able to build on the success of his first career Busch Series pole position, which he'd claimed just a few weeks prior to his injury? Or what if his replacement had fallen flat on his face, which he most certainly has not? Or what if he'd tried a little harder to come back?

See -- too many "What ifs ..."

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Tim Bender

Bender began the 1997 Busch Series season with father-and-son team owners John and Robbie Reiser. Bender had previously found success in the ill-fated NASCAR Sportsman division, and this was another step up the ladder. Despite sitting on the pole at Atlanta, however, Bender and the Reisers found little success once the green flag dropped.

The results were particularly brutal. Eight races with the team brought finishes of 27th, 26th, 29th, 40th (after starting first), 34th, 25th, 30th and 17th.

"We were making progress, but I wouldn't have been happy until we won the championship," Bender said. "We were making progress, which was good. We started to make more right [decisions] before I got hurt. We had a good team and good cars. It was a great situation. It's too bad I couldn't capitalize on it a little bit better than I did."

Then came Bristol in mid-April. Bender herniated discs in his back and neck in a crash during qualifying, forcing Robbie Reiser to take over for the race itself.

Reiser started 40th and finished 41st, and over dinner that night, he and his team tried to decide what to do about Bender's injury. Eventually, Reiser turned to a virtual unknown he'd once raced against on any number of Midwest short-tracks, an unknown who had all of one Busch Series start to his credit at that point.

The replacement's name ... Matt Kenseth.

"When Tim got hurt, I felt I needed to make a change in our team and the direction we were going in, to try to solidify the team to the point where we could go out and win races," Reiser said. "I had to do that, because we weren't going anywhere with what we had."

Reiser and Kenseth formed an instant bond. Kenseth qualified third at the old Nashville fairgrounds racetrack in his first race with Reiser Enterprises, and finished 11th. A week later, Kenseth scored a seventh-place showing at Talladega. It was the first time he'd ever seen the place. (Continued)