PHOTO: Jean-Paul Cyr has a new ride and a fresh start for 2011. (VMM photo)

-by Justin St. Louis

MILTON — “HELLO?” a voice shouts through the earpiece in my BlackBerry. I can hear at least one piece of heavy machinery running in the background.

“I just pulled onto the road, I’ll be there in a couple minutes,” I say back.

“OKAY,” I hear as the loud noise dulls. Then, softer and more clearly, “I’m on the loader, so just wait a few minutes in the office for me.”

“Sure.”

I’m on my way to meet Jean-Paul Cyr at his family’s lumber yard in Milton as a follow-up to an interview we started over the phone a few days back. After he finds me, we’ll drive down the road about a mile to his race shop, sit in the garage for a few minutes and shoot the breeze about whatever, I’ll snap a few photographs of the new paint job on his race car, and I’ll ask him a few more racing questions.

As he always does, the seven-time American-Canadian Tour champion will answer every one of them honestly in his classic cerebral style, where pauses of ten or fifteen seconds — which feels like an eternity at the race track but is much easier to handle today — fall between words as often as oak leaves saunter to the ground in October.

It’s obvious that he’s busy today, but Cyr, I think, welcomes my visit. He needs the break. He might even be treating those ten-to-fifteen-second pauses like mini-vacations for all I know. Hell, he deserves to.

Jean-Paul Cyr (it’s pronounced “Gene Paul Seer” in case you’re not familiar) is not necessarily a big man — he stands maybe 5-foot-10, 5-foot-11, somewhere in there — but it’s obvious that you wouldn’t want to screw with him.

His big, powerful-looking hands, one stained with red paint, both with dirt, hang on to the sleeves of a black coat, dusty from a day’s work in the mill. Underneath that coat are two steel arms, crossed at the chest. Work boots plant two denim-laden legs on the ground, and a tool bench supports the whole frame as he leans up against it.

Cyr’s face may not look all of its 45 years, but it’s obvious that the head behind it is feeling every one of those years today. He’s already put in his share of hours this week, and it’s only 2:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

He’s a tough, tough guy. He’s a hard worker. He’s a thinker and a fabricator. He’s smooth as silk behind the wheel. And today he’s exhausted.

Cyr could have retired from racing five or six years ago and he would have gone down as one of the most accomplished drivers in the history of Vermont stock car racing, and certainly in the history of the American-Canadian Tour. Five years ago, in 2006, Cyr collected his sixth ACT Late Model Tour championship — adding to a title he won on the short-lived Am/Can Challenge Series and a dirt-track championship at Devil’s Bowl Speedway — and made a transition from owning his own equipment to driving for someone else.

Longtime friend and crew chief Rick Paya purchased Cyr’s operation and the two continued to race together in 2007. Like usual, they collected another ACT championship — their fifth straight, Cyr’s seventh overall. But things were different. Cyr didn’t have as much control as he once did. Paya called the shots, paid the bills, kept the car in his own garage, and brought it to the track in his own trailer.

After winning 15 races from 2002 to 2006, Cyr laid an egg during his seventh title run. He knocked off a win at Airborne Speedway in 2008, but it was clear by mid-season that this was not the same team that had dominated the decade. Cyr finished a distant third in the championship, and there were times when he and Paya were visibly frustrated with either the race car or each other or both.

It was announced shortly after the season finale that Cyr would be cutting back to a limited ACT schedule for 2009, and that Brian Hoar would take over as the primary driver for Paya’s RPM Motorsports team. Not long after that, news came that Cyr would forgo any ACT plans to pursue the 50th anniversary track championship at Barre’s Thunder Road Int’l Speedbowl with car owner Joey Laquerre and Laquerre’s son Jeff as crew chief.

The combination clicked, and Cyr came home as the “King of the Road.” And while being competitive at Thunder Road, Cyr also turned in a gutsy performance at the Baja 500-mile off-road race in Mexico, finishing the race in less than 12 hours.

With a broken arm.

On a motorcycle.

Tough guy.

Sponsorship dollars for the Late Model were few, though, and Cyr had no choice but to leave the Laquerre team after just one season. He rejoined ACT with Gary Caron’s operation, but a horrendous string of results — in order: 13th at Thunder Road, a DNQ at Oxford in May, 20th at Lee USA, 25th at Oxford in June, 30th at White Mountain, and 32nd at Airborne — led to Cyr pulling out of the Caron team by the halfway point of the season.

So he bought a new chassis from McColl Racing Enterprises in Ontario and started fresh. He competed at six of the final seven ACT Late Model Tour events, and while he earned a top-ten finish at Thunder Road’s Bond Auto Labor Day Classic 200, he also failed to qualify at Beech Ridge and retired early at Ste-Croix, Airborne, and the finale at Waterford due to handling woes.

For a man used to working hard and winning, it was an unexpected low point in his career. Maybe the lowest he’s ever seen.

Cyr could have retired then, just as he could have retired five years ago, and there still would be a spot waiting for him in whichever halls of fame he’s eligible for. But he’s a racer, and feels the need to win and prove himself again and again, even if there’s really nothing to prove.

He’s that tough.

***

“We’re getting there,” Cyr says, looking over at his car. Always working, he’s just gotten off a phone call that, as best as I could tell, involved the lumber yard. “It’s coming along, but we’ve still got another 40 man-hours to put into this thing before we’re ready for Lee this weekend. We’ll square the rear end and pin it down tonight, we’ll bleed the brakes and get the duct work in tomorrow, and we’ll do everything else on Friday. I’d say that if you add up all the hours between everyone that’s going to be here working on it, yeah, it’s about 40 hours away from being race-ready.”

It’s a surprising thing to hear from a driver with ten championships to his credit. The first race is four days away, and the car isn’t finished. Then he drops this bomb: “For me, I’m pretty much on schedule. It’s been like this every year I’ve owned the car.”

Regardless of what my expectations were, Cyr assures me that everything will be done, and done right the first time. That’s why it takes so long.

“I’m proud of this car,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to own my own stuff. Even when I always owned it years ago I wanted to be driving for someone else. But there isn’t a single thing on this car that isn’t perfect. I never cut any corners on anything with this car. I never put anything on it and said, ‘Eh, that’s good enough.’ Everything here is the best. I never wanted to own and build these things, but I know I’m good at it when I do.”

He’s right, the car is pretty perfect. The welds are clean, the body is straight, the bolt-on parts are brand new, the fabricated parts fit right, and the graphics that Yipes Auto Accessories applied earlier in the week look sharp. A budget supplied by Harrison Concrete, Vermont Technical College, Cobble Hill Trailers, and TJ Toyota of Potsdam, N.Y., — plus career-long partner Four Seasons Realty — has allowed Cyr to build not only an equally impressive cache of brand new spare parts and equipment, but also a substantial amount of confidence.

Cyr has drafted the services of ultra-successful crew chief Brian Latuch for the season and will also receive help from standout crewmen Gene Depot, Brock Rouse, and long-time Cyr team member and fellow Baja rider Randy Ploof, among others. The team retooled the McColl chassis to Cyr’s liking over the winter and has begun to jell as a group.

“This is the year. This is the year I come back and get it done again,” Cyr says, ice water in his veins. “I’m cautiously optimistic, but I really think this is going to be a good year.”

Cyr is known as one of the most mentally intense competitors in the northeast, and he displays a shining example here: “You know that old saying that you’re only as good as your last race?” he asks me. “You look back at the last eight years, and it’s been six championships, a third, and a terrible year. I see that as a travesty.”

My mind races back to our conversation a few days earlier, when I asked Cyr if he was going to have a better year than he did in 2010. “I’m only doing this because I want to win,” he replied.

Jean-Paul Cyr isn’t just at the track to be a race car driver. He’s there to be a winner.

“I don’t worry about Brian [Hoar] winning his eighth championship and breaking the tie,” Cyr says of his current logjam atop the ACT Late Model Tour record book with his friend and rival. “He’s not what I’m focused on. My motivation is to win or at least finish in the top-five every week. We’ll see how the points come out when it’s over.

“There are a lot more cars on the track than just him or Joey (Polewarczyk, who won five ACT-sanctioned races last summer). My sights aren’t set onany one driver, I just want to win. I’ve got enough titles, and an eighth one would be great, but my motivation comes from doing the best I can and achieving my own goals. They’ve got good, solid teams and there’s no reason to expect them to fall off the top, but I’m focused on what we’re doing as a team. I’m gonna top-three and top-five ‘em to death.”

Cyr leans back on the bench and rubs his forehead for a second. He tells me how he and the team members that show up tonight will be underneath the car — as they have been nearly every night all winter — until 11:00 or later. And keep in mind Cyr’s been hauling logs around the mill all day.

He takes a deep breath, sighs, and sticks out his hand to shake mine, letting me know as politely as he can that it’s time to return to work. I’ve got big hands, but his — the one with dirt and red paint all over it — looks like it could crush mine. Imagine how that steering wheel feels every week.

“So you’ll be ready for Sunday?” I ask him on the way out.

He’s already started to walk back to his car to get back to the lumber yard.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m ready.”