Jason Leindecker found that building engines required creating a brand and a reputation that could stand up against the long-established competition. He succeeded with race-winning performance, rock-solid reliability, and his emphasis on providing high-quality customer service.

Jason Leindecker is a very busy individual. He has been for a long time.

He launched the business that became Leindecker Racing Engines while still in college and while driving a truck for his father’s company. Upon graduation he joined the Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, police. He is still a fulltime officer, while running not only the race engine business but also Coopersburg Auto Parts, which includes a complete auto repair facility.

Although he’s built engines for drag racers, street stocks, and asphalt late models, Leindecker is now laser-focused on dirt-track modifieds. “Most of my business is Northeast-style, dirt modified racing,” he noted. “The majority of our motors are 358s, although some of my drivers have big blocks.” His regular customers range from the Canadian border to the southern tip of Delaware, and to just west of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; but he has shipped engines as far west as Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas.

One Piece At A Time

Building engines for modifieds has brought Leindecker back to his racing roots. “When I was growing up, my dad had friends who raced dirt modifieds, and every weekend my whole family—myself, my dad, and my brother—would travel to a dirt track somewhere in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Friday night we’d be one place, Saturday night another, and Sunday night another. That was pretty much every weekend throughout the racing season.

“In 1988, my brother John started racing a street stock at Nazareth Speedway, but I took a different course and went drag racing,” he continued. Leindecker still loves “hot rods and 1955, 1956, 1957 Chevys,” but mostly, “I got sick of hammering out body panels every week. I started bracket racing, and eventually I was running NHRA Stock and Super Stock. That’s where engine building started for me, because to keep up in a class like that you really have to know what’s going on. So I started learning about engines.”

Leindecker was just 19 in 1997, when he obtained a business license and bought a valve refacer, a seat grinding cabinet, and a flow bench—all secondhand. “I commandeered a corner in my dad’s truck garage, doing cylinder heads for myself and some friends. And it just kind of went from there.”

Indeed, it did. Leindecker bought a house and moved into his own garage. Several more moves and more machines followed. “I would just save my money and buy a piece of equipment, and then save my money and buy a piece of equipment. It’s tough to be at the mercy of other machine shops and other builders, so I started buying my own machines so I could control every aspect of the build and not rely on anyone else.”

Seven years ago, Leindecker moved into his present 5,000-square-foot facility in Coopersburg, about 15 minutes south of Allentown. “That houses my auto repair business, my performance parts store, my machine shop, and my engine-building business. We sell 15–20 brand-new engines each year, but that’s only part of it. A lot of our work is freshening up motors that we sold the year before, or a couple of years before, or even motors from another builder.” Counting refreshes, “we do one or two complete engines a week.” Racers who bring a competitor’s motor to Leindecker tend to stay with him.

He stocks crate motors, also. Particularly popular is GM part number 602, a sealed 350 Chevy. “We probably sell a dozen of those each year.” Altogether, building, freshening, repairing, and selling complete engines accounts for about 75% of Leindecker’s business. Another 15% is machine work for DIY builders, “and the rest is individual part sales.”

Building the Brand

Leindecker runs all three operations with just four employees. Two help out with the race engines, one handles street vehicle repairs, and “my wife runs the parts counter. She’s the glue that keeps it all together.”

Finding reliable help has been “really tough. It’s very hard to find someone with the focus the job requires, because one mistake can turn a whole motor to junk. Or they don’t want to put in the time that’s required. We had a kid washing parts, and after two weeks he thought he should be head engine builder.”

Valuing attitude over experience, Leindecker recently hired a regular customer of his repair shop. “He is into trucks, and the trucks he’s brought in have been absolutely spotless. You can tell they are well-maintained. One day he said that engine building would be really neat to learn, so now I’m teaching him machine work. If someone has good mechanical ability and a willingness to learn, I can teach them how to run any machine.”

While finding employees has been difficult, “absolutely the hardest thing has been establishing my name, my brand, and my reputation. Especially when I started, being that young, you are hard-pressed to find somebody who is going to throw you $20,000 and say, ‘Build me a race engine.’ There were so many other engine builders that I had always looked up to, and tried to fashion myself after, because they were so good and had such a reputation. And now it was hard to compete with them.”

Leindecker believed that his engines were as good as anyone’s, but it seemed like “every racer wanted a particular name, like Pat Morrison, or Kevlar, or Billy the Kid. It took a good 12 to 15 years just to get recognized, to get to where people trusted me and believed that my product was something worth having.”

To get to that place, Leindecker donated “a lot of free labor, finding somebody that I could help, and nine times out of 10 doing it for free, just to get going. It was probably not the best business model to take to the bank,” but to Leindecker, it seemed like the only way to establish himself.

He still sees customer service as key to his success. He doesn’t have a parts truck, but he attends as many races as he can. “I have a lot of racers at a dozen different tracks, and being everywhere at once is, of course, impossible,” he explained. “So I try to rotate weekly—one week I am at this track, the next week at another, and so forth. That way, all of my customers see my face, and they know that I’m not just focusing on a few favorites.

“I bring a box full of tools, with everything I need to check valves and valve springs, and any type of diagnostic that I can do at the track. And I always bring my rulebook in case there’s a question about anything. Knock on wood, I’ve never had to make a major repair while I was there, but you just never know. Mostly I try to make myself seen, so my customers know that I am interested in them, that I am invested in their purchase.”

Customers, Serviced

Leindecker also makes what he calls “house calls. I would rather go to somebody’s garage or race shop to make sure that everything is right, so I don’t have to answer a call on Monday morning where they say, ‘Hey, this broke,’ and then you get the domino effect where everything else is broken, too. My customers might see this as customer service, but I see it as just being friendly.

“One of my standout customers is 14 years old and runs a 358 modified, a DIRT-series big block modified, and some Super DIRTcar Series races, too. He’s just tremendous.” One night last year, just as Leindecker was arriving home from a night out with his wife—a rare night that he wasn’t at a race track—the young racer phoned from a local speedway. He had finished second in the heat race but had broken a pushrod. Could Leindecker fix his engine before the feature?

“Fortunately, that track is only 20 minutes from my house,” said Leindecker, who immediately drove to his shop to get his tools and arrived at the track about 40 minutes after the phone call. “I was able to fix the motor so he could run the feature.”

Brad Brightbill, who campaigns sportsman modifieds at multiple tracks in central Pennsylvania, recalled a similar experience. “The first year I was with Jason, I stripped out a head bolt, and he was at my shop the next morning getting it patched up and ready to race again.”

Brad’s father is Kenny Brightbill, a local legend who, since 1967, has scored more than 441 wins at 41 tracks—mostly in dirt modifieds. Brad began campaigning sportsman modifieds around 2002, initially powered by engines he built with his father. About 10 years ago, however, Brad switched teams, and by 2018 found himself looking for a new engine builder. “One of the guys I raced with said, ‘Hey, you should talk to Jason, he’ll give you a good deal.’ So I gave him a call, and he got me back on the track. We won the 2019 track championship at Grandview [Speedway in Bechtelsville]. Then we went back out and won the 2020 championship at Big Diamond [Speedway in Pottsville]. And we won almost every big sportsman race there was in the area,” including the Coalcracker 72 at Big Diamond and the Firecracker 40 at Grandview, for 18 feature wins and two track championships in just two years.

“Last year we had to switch over to a crate motor,” Brightbill continued, “so I got a crate motor from Jason. He’s an all-around great guy, who gives great customer service. He will bend over backward to help anybody. If you have a problem with your motor, he’s at your shop the next day. Any time I was running behind and didn’t have time to run up to his shop to get my motor, he would deliver it to me. Not many builders would go out of their way like that. It doesn’t matter what time of the day or night I call him; if he doesn’t answer he calls me back pretty quick.”

Rick Laubach owns Lightning Bodies in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and has driven modifieds for 27 years, winning 128 races and 10 significant championships. In addition to his own spec-motor car, he currently drives and maintains modifieds for owners Gary Herman and Ryan Kerr, all under the banner of Shaker Motorsports. He’s run engines from some of the biggest names in the business, but three years ago he started buying Leindecker engines for Herman’s cars and has since switched to Leindecker for his own car as well. He expressed concern that some of the best-known builders are reaching retirement age, while “Jason is up-and-coming. He got his name up there big by winning a lot of races. He’s becoming one of the major players in the business.”

Leindecker’s customer service, Laubach agreed, “is second to none. I needed a certain kind of oil for Ryan Kerr’s car, which has an engine out of Wisconsin, but my usual supplier didn’t have it. So I called Jason, and he said, ‘l can get your oil, it will be here tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘Let me know when it comes in.’ Well about 2:30 the next afternoon Jason pulls up to my shop with two cases of oil. He had driven to Lancaster to pick it up”—a three-hour round trip from Coopersburg—“for an engine that he didn’t build. He just wants to help people out.”

Range Of Motion

With endorsements like that, it’s hardly surprising that Leindecker ranks his customers as by far his best promotion. “I have advertised in racing magazines and newspapers,” he told us. “I usually have a big booth at the motorsports show in Philadelphia. I have a Facebook page, too, but very little of my business comes from social media. Most of my business comes from word-of-mouth.”

And his business is still growing. “We are in the process of building a new 2,500-square-foot facility that will eventually house some newer CNC equipment and an up-to-date dyno cell,” all on a property adjacent to Leindecker’s existing shop in Coopersburg. When we spoke in March, he expected construction to be completed by next summer. “That’s our plan for the future.”

That, and continuing to provide not only the customer service but the reliability that Leindecker believes to be just as critical to his success. “I am not looking to take your money. I just want to build a product that keeps racing going, because we all know it’s getting super expensive, and car counts are down yearly. So I am just trying to keep racing alive, to do whatever I have to do to keep my racers racing.”