*Competed in NCWTS races at Kentucky Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway while continuing his Late Model career at the local level (2011)
*Made his Camping World Truck Series debut at Bristol Motor Speedway where he finished a career-high 15th (2010)
*Joined the Bill Elliott Driver Development program, competing in the UARA-STARS Late Model Series (2009)
*Finished among the top-30 in the Fastrak Racing Series ‘Grand Nationals’ event with over 200 drivers (2007)
*Captured first career pole in Fastrack Racing event at Volunteer Speedway (2007)
*Started full-time racing driving in Late Model series, collecting several top-five finishes (2006-2007)(ToyotaRacing.com)
Excerpts – NASCAR’s post-race interview with John King & team owner Tom DeLoach:
Q: John, what happened with getting into Sauter? Were you getting pushed?
King: I don’t know that I was getting pushed. All I know was closing rate was real fast, I couldn’t get off of him. I’m a rookie. I’ve never pushed in my life. This is my first time at Daytona or any Superspeedway. I apologize to him from the bottom of my heart. It wasn’t my intention at all. Without wrecking him, I was good to go. I couldn’t get off of him. Once I got up to him in the tri-oval, that’s all I had, so…
Q: I speak for a lot of people in America, on Twitter and everywhere else, they’re asking a simple question: John, who are you? In all seriousness, can you explain how this Red Horse Racing opportunity came about, how in the last couple months you’ve gotten to this point where here you are?
King: I came off of dirt late models, went to late model stocks after that. We’ve run a few truck races. This is feature win number three for me my whole career. This is it. I’ve won one dirt late model race and one late model stock race. It’s unbelievable. I couldn’t imagine being here. We’re here. But we got together with Tom in the off-season. I don’t really know how it worked out. We just kind of ran into each other. It just evolved from there.
DeLoach: Let me give you a little bit more background on that. John and his dad, this is J1, his dad is J2, John King also. What we did, they came to us, wanted to talk about, What have you got as a race team? Why should we be with Red Horse versus this team, this team, this team? Why are you the right person? We showed them what we had. We brought them in, said, This is what the race team looks like. We do a lot of work with people. Part of the time I’m going to be your dad, part of the time I’m going to be your cheerleader, part of the time I’m going to be beating you on the back. This is what it’s all about. We’re in there to try to mold a young driver so they can be very competitive as they go forward in their career. As I talked to John and his dad, that’s kind of the way it came across. My team manager, Kevin Ray, worked very hard on making sure all this is going back and forth. We’re still trying to put all the pieces together. We don’t have all the sponsorship done. You notice that truck out there said Red Horse all over it. We’re millimeters away from a sponsorship deal, but a millimeter away is still away. The one thing I was impressed with, Chad said it two or three times, I’ve never gone and sat with a driver as much as with John and all I get is, Yes, sir; no, sir; uh-huh; yes, sir; yes, sir. Very polite, very disciplined, incredibly calm in a big race like this. Terry Cook is the spotter. Most of you guys know Terry. He’s raced 400 truck races under his belt. Having Terry as a spotter fills in some of the background that John doesn’t have. That’s what we did is we kind of put a big warm blanket around John and tried to maximize his ability. Folks, you see what happened tonight.(NASCAR Integrated Marketing Communications)(2-25-2012)
