Born and built for racing, Mike Nuchols is writing a new chapter with an established chassis brand, and winning loyal customers every step of the way.

From the moment Mike Nuchols entered this world, racing was in his blood. He was born and raised in Maryville, Tennessee, as part of a racing family with the dirt and clamor of the track firmly planted in their psyche.

“My dad had raced for 15 years,” said Nuchols. “He was racing when I was little, and we did it every Saturday. When he quit racing, I was 15 or 16 years old. So I still had to be in racing. It was all I ever knew.”

To Nuchols, there simply wasn’t any choice but to make racing his career. He enrolled in NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, North Carolina, and graduated in 2005. After several relatively short detours, including a full-time job as a fabricator for a boat-trailer manufacturer, Nuchols in 2009 landed a position with veteran dirt late model chassis builder Sanford Goddard in nearby Seymour, Tennessee. With hard work and plenty of ambition, Nuchols worked his way through a progression of jobs with the company, including sheet metal fabrication and chassis setup. In 2018, Goddard retired and offered Nuchols a chance to buy the business.

RUNNING THE BUSINESS

After taking the helm, Nuchols renamed the business Warrior Race Cars. He also relocated it to an existing shop with some 2,000 square feet of workspace. It’s somewhat smaller than the original Goddard location, but it still serves well as the nerve center of Nuchols’ business, with everything the company does stemming from this compact locale. Importantly, it’s well situated at the hub of his life and the racing that takes place in the area. Located 30 minutes from Nuchols’ home in Maryville, the shop is seven miles from 411 Motor Speedway, where he often tests cars and his house race team often competes. Also nearby are Smoky Mountain Speedway and Volunteer Speedway, which are 25 and 55 miles away, respectively.

Although certainly not expansive in size, the current Warrior shop can hold up to seven cars at once, built in cooperation with Nuchols’ only full-time employee, fabricator Kevin Lusby. With careful planning, the building has enough room to carry on a steady stream of business consisting of new car builds, repairs, and upgrades.

“We try to schedule everything where cars don’t stay in the shop very long,” said Nuchols. “It’s about a 50-50 mix of repairs and new builds. We try to build two new chassis and do repairs in between them. So we’ll normally do two clip jobs or frame repairs of some sort. It takes us nine days to build a brand-new chassis, then we’ll take a couple days off to do frame repairs, and then we’ll start again and do another new chassis. We normally do four frame repairs a month.

“The repair business is a huge part of what we do, because we have a lot of older cars out there,” Nuchols continued. “We update them to modern-day stuff—that way they can travel more on the front end and get more ground clearance. We can take an older chassis, say a 2007, and give it some updates and make it like our newer cars. That way we give those guys the best chance possible to compete, without having to go out and buy a brand-new car. And we’re really successful at it. A lot of times, we’ll take a guy in and clip his car and give him that little bit of an edge that he needs, and he can go back out and compete with brand-new race cars.”

Inside the shop, Warrior relies on the usual tried-and-true metalworking equipment that has built stock cars for ages—welders, saws, benders, drills, etc., all manually operated, without any CNC control. Warrior fabricates everything on the car themselves, with the exception of spindles and rear suspension birdcages. That said, the company does rely on an old Goddard connection for one key element in the fabrication process: Back in the day, the Goddards had a machine shop on their original complex called Goddard Manufacturing and Design (GMD). Warrior still uses them to laser cut parts.

With this mix of fabrication methods, Warrior builds just one basic chassis—the proven dirt late model design developed by Sanford Goddard some 35 years ago. That said, the basic design has gone through a number of revisions over the years, the result of continual tweaking and refining from testing and the sport’s ongoing progression.

“It’s always evolving,” explained Nuchols. “Our industry has kind of gone through stages. And it’s more through just technology and knowing where the cars are at attitude-wise. So we’re always evolving, trying to make the cars more user-friendly. We try to keep up with the trends in the business.

“If you boil it down to one item that’s causing changes in chassis, it would be the shocks,” added Nuchols. “In the early 2000s they still didn’t know what was needed in shocks. But now there’s just better shock technology. And the machines that we have to collect data from the shocks, they allow us to understand what our car is doing better, so that shows us what we need to change. Twenty years ago, we didn’t think that we’d have data acquisition. We didn’t think we’d have access to the things that all the Cup teams had then. But now we have that stuff, and we can collect information about our car that once was never even thought about. As shock packages get better, we’ve realized that we don’t need as much flex in the chassis. So now we’ve been able to run a stiffer, more rigid chassis. That way we can rely on the shocks and springs more.”

PUTTING CUSTOMERS FIRST

Speaking with Nuchols, the subject of testing comes up often. It’s clearly a vital element in the day-to-day operation of Warrior Race Cars, with his crew running tests on local tracks week after week. Nuchols sees such efforts as one of his fundamental responsibilities as a car builder. “Your local customer only races maybe 10 to 15 times a year,” Nuchols observed. “He can’t waste three or four weeks of calling you back, and you guessing at something to make him run better. So we test a lot in-house, that way our customers don’t have to. We go out and we burn up our own tires and our own motors to be able to tell a customer, ‘Hey, this is how your car travels, this is the adjustment you need to make.’ That stuff isn’t an estimated guess. We know what works.

“We don’t have as broad of a customer base as the other big chassis brands do,” continued Nuchols. “Those chassis brands let their customers do a lot of the testing, and they call back to them during the week and let them know how the car felt. But for us, we don’t have that customer base, so we go [and] do most of our testing ourselves. And then we relay that back to the customers, to help them. That way the guy that works nine to five, he doesn’t have to go rent a race track, have us come out and help him, rent a data machine, stuff like that. We’re just trying to help the guys on a lower budget compete with the guys who do have all the money.”

That attention to setup and support forms the basis for a vital element of the company—Warrior Shock Service. This side of the business was established by Nuchols and Goddard in 2014, with the aim of servicing and setting up shocks for any kind of dirt late model, even if it’s not a Warrior chassis. The shock service provides just about everything racers need in the way of shocks, including sales, rebuilds, oil changes, and shim changes. A big part of the shock business is also repair. “If a guy bends or breaks a shock on Monday, if he can get it to me on Tuesday or Wednesday, we can turn it back around so he can race that weekend.”

Besides providing a solid stream of revenue for the company, the shock service expands Nuchols’ knowledge of other cars, allowing him to make even better setup recommendations for them. Shock work has also proven to be somewhat of a marketing tool. It’s a great way to start conversations and build relationships with racers in the area, all of whom are potential chassis customers.

FINDING CUSTOMERS

According to Nuchols, the shock service typically leads to several sales of complete car builds per year—a significant percentage of the company’s annual output. “I’ve had people switch chassis brands in the past two years, and it was all because I was actually helping with their other chassis brands,” said Nuchols. “I was giving more information about their other chassis than their chassis manufacturer could themselves. And they got faster once they got in my cars, because I could give them exact information and it wasn’t a guess.”

In addition to such organic marketing efforts, Nuchols uses a few select forms of online media to get the word out and connect with his customers. He sometimes advertises on DirtonDirt.com. “It’s the ESPN for our sport,” he said.

But to a much larger degree, Nuchols relies on Facebook for the heavy lifting of reaching potential customers. “Facebook seems to be where our market is at,” he said. “I post at least two or three photos, or a video a day. I always try to post something every day, that way we stay in front of people. We’ve got almost 25,000 followers on there. So anytime I can put something on there, it usually gains some good attention. I usually connect every day with 10,000 to 15,000 people at minimum. I’ve never bought an ad on Facebook a day in my life, and I’ve got more followers than a lot of people who buy ads on there. But I guess it’s just because we try to put cool content on there that our customers want to see.”

Although clearly effective, Nuchols sees these communication platforms as being mere complements to the real focus of the business, which is building the best possible chassis and letting Warrior’s products sell themselves on their merits of design, workmanship, and support. And his customers agree, keeping them coming back for more over the years. “The product proves itself,” said Tennessee-based racer Aaron Guinn. “I’ve owned two of them so far. I’ve driven other chassis before, and I just enjoy the feel of the Warriors.”

LONG DAYS WELL SPENT

In the end, Mike Nuchols and his Warrior shop aren’t trying to flood the world with race cars. He said one of his big-name rivals built more than 200 cars last year; in that same amount of time, just nine new cars emerged from the Warrior shop. In fact, Nuchols’ goal is to never build more than 15 a year. It’s about knowing your place in the industry and serving that well, he believes. “We can be a small company and compete on a big level,” he said.

Much of his success comes from the focus on taking care of people. “You give every customer, whether they spend one dollar or a million dollars with you, the same attention and the same effort,” said Nuchols. “That’s what made the Goddard name before I got there.”

And the customers that race his cars deeply appreciate Nuchols’ approach. “It’s that down-home feeling,” said Guinn. “They know your name there. You’re not ‘chassis number whatever.’ They don’t have to look you up in a book to see what chassis you bought.”

Nuchols also credits others for their part in his success, particularly Lusby. “Kevin has been here 34 years,” said Nuchols. “He is my huge asset. If it wasn’t for him knowing the ins and outs of the business, I couldn’t be as successful as I am.”

And, as Nuchols continues to run the business, he’s also careful to maintain perspective. Through it all, his wife Megan and his kids, Hunter and Turner, are still his top priorities. “My wife is a huge part of me being able to do what I do,” he said.

That support at home is undoubtedly invaluable in a demanding job like this. “I work pretty much 24 hours a day,” said Nuchols. “But in this racing business, the guys that we’re chasing to try to be better than, they’re not sleeping either.

“You’ve got to match what they’re doing to even be on their level,” he added.