Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Alan Dennis Kulwicki
Greenfield-born NASCAR owner-driver; 1992 Winston Cup champion; died in a 1993 plane crash
$3 million
Alan Dennis Kulwicki was the Greenfield engineer who won NASCAR’s Winston Cup as an owner-driver—the last to do so for nearly two decades—and the first Cup champion with a college degree. He did not come out of a North Carolina shop. He came out of Greenfield’s Polish-American neighborhoods near the Milwaukee Mile with a mechanical-engineering degree and a habit of doing the work himself. He was born in Greenfield on December 14, 1954. His mother died; the family moved in with his grandmother, who died when he was in seventh grade. A year later his only brother, Kenneth, died of a hemophilia-related illness. Father Gerry Kulwicki built engines for USAC racers. The son started karts at thirteen, raced late models at Hales Corners, and won at Slinger in 1977 with a stiffer engineered chassis. He graduated from Pius XI High School and earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from UW–Milwaukee in 1977. He sold the short-track gear, borrowed a pickup after an electrical fire, and showed up unannounced at a Charlotte shop in 1985 as an owner-driver. Rookie of the Year followed in 1986; his first Cup win came at Phoenix in 1988, capped by the “Polish victory lap,” clockwise with the driver’s window to the crowd. He turned down Junior Johnson twice. In 1992 he took the Winston Cup by ten points over Bill Elliott at Atlanta in the “Underbird,” then the closest margin in Cup history, after leading 103 laps and nursing a half-can fuel stop when a broken gearbox forced fourth-gear pit exits. He always raced with a St. Christopher medal in the car. On April 1, 1993, a Hooters flight iced up near Blountville, Tennessee; he was thirty-eight. That January four to five thousand people packed Greenfield High’s gym for Alan Kulwicki Day. The park at Cold Spring and 108th still carries his name.