Talking TrailersPerformance Racing Industry

Drew Hardin

September 1, 2021

Talking Trailers

An exchange of ideas and information helps manufacturers and dealers match racers with their dream hauler. Here are the important questions for both sides to ask.

Transporting vehicles is just a small part of what racers want from their trailers. This multitool on wheels is also expected to carry a race shop and spare parts; provide food and shelter during down time; tote a mule or golf cart; serve as a motel room and/or lavatory; provide sponsors and other guests with a lounge and refreshments; and maybe even act as a concession stand for a racer’s merchandise. Organizing all that into a narrow space between wheel wells requires foresight, planning, and a keen eye for spatial coordination.

Fortunately for racers, our industry’s trailer manufacturers and dealers bring all those skills to the table and more. Many in the trailer business are racers themselves, so they have firsthand experience with the little details, like where to place D-rings or how many lights are needed at the loading ramp, that will make a racer’s life easier.

All that knowledge, though, must be tapped. When shopping for a new trailer, racers should be prepared for a thorough discussion with a manufacturer’s rep or dealer about what they carry and how they race.

trailers2 — ***Trailers are a vital multitool for racers, serving as workshop, parts storage, hospitality center, shelter, and of course, transportation for cars. Photo courtesy of Capitol Renegade.***

“We’re creating dreams, something very special for these customers,” explained Brad Bell of Formula Trailers, Bristol, Indiana. “So it’s valuable for us to ask as many questions as we can. It’s fun to talk to customers about what their end vision is. A lot of them just don’t know how to get there. They need somebody to ask those questions, and then we can dial it in.”

“You’d be surprised at how many napkin drawings I bring home from the PRI Show,” said Todd Datweiler of T&E Enterprises Auto Haulers, Herscher, Illinois. “I’ll go out to dinner with customers and bring home drawings on napkins to start a project with. All we need is the concept, and we can go from there.”

What follows are some of the most important questions trailer reps and dealers should ask a racer, and vice versa, to make sure the trailer the racer wants is the trailer he or she gets.

Q: What type of racing do you do?

“It sounds crazy, but one thing a lot of dealers miss is asking about what kind of racing they do,” said Chad Stanley of Phil’s Trailer Sales, Waco, Texas. “You have to know what the end user is doing with the trailer before we can decide what to put them in.”

“Each discipline of racing has a little different trailer requirement,” said Wayne Quackenbush of Capitol Renegade, Beltsville, Maryland. “We do a lot of sprint car trailers because we race sprint cars, and we know what it takes to be on the road for a four-day weekend. Drag racers are completely different. They’re not pitting behind the car—they’re generally next to the car—so they may need awnings, electrical and air outside, things like that.”

“Knowing what type of racing they’re doing so you know what to sell your customer is the absolute most important thing,” added Mike Nichols of Haulmark, Elkhart, Indiana. “So many dealers skip that part of the process. They just want to hurry up and sell what they have pre-packaged.”

Q: What are you carrying?

Tim Dibley of United Trailers in Bristol, Indiana, said that question “encompasses not only the vehicle that you’re carrying, but what else are you taking to the track? Are you taking a pit box, a golf cart, a mule? Are you taking hospitality? Do you have the room and weight capacity to carry that in that trailer?”

In Dibley’s experience, “if they’ve been in racing for a while, they know everything they carry with them. What they may not understand is, when everything’s totaled up, what does that weigh?”

trailers3 — **The right trailer can make a world of difference in convenience, satisfaction, and success for racers. “We’re creating dreams,” said our source at Formula Trailers.**

“If they sit down and add it up, they may be surprised at how much it comes up to,” Quackenbush agreed. “So the first thing I tell people is to buy a trailer that has the capability of handling all that weight.”

Too often, he said, “people are caught up on the price of the trailer, and they’re not asking about the capabilities of the trailer. You see a lot of inexpensive trailers out there that only have a 10,000-pound GVW (gross vehicle weight rating). But the trailer weighs 7,500 pounds, so they really have 2,500 pounds of cargo capacity. And they’re trying to load 3,000 pounds of race car and another 3,000 pounds of equipment in it. If you overload a trailer, it can be very unsafe.”

Paying more attention to price than capability can be especially true of first-time trailer buyers, said Steve Hartman of Look Trailers in Middlebury, Indiana. “First-time users are looking at just the economics of getting the lowest price. But they may not get the trailer they actually need or that is safe to pull, because they buy a trailer with axles that are too lightweight. It’s important to get it spec’d right to begin with, otherwise you’ll be needing a new trailer right away.”

Once the racer has figured out weight capacity needs, “we need to see what their footprint is,” Nichols said. “Before they come to the dealership, they should draw in their floor space, everything they plan to put in this unit, so they can find out if the trailer they want will cover that footprint.”

trailers4 — **Getting the ideal trailer configuration starts with an honest, accurate assessment of needs. Amenities for travel can be a big part of that. Photo courtesy of R&M Race Trailers.**

United Trailers has downloadable floor plan grids on its website to help with this part of the trailer-buying homework. “You can print a grid of what the floor will look like and draw your car, your cabinets and where things will go, so when you go to the dealer you have everything mapped out,” Dibley explained.

inTech Trailers of Nappanee, Indiana, also offers downloadable floor plan grids “to give them a rough idea if the layout will work for their needs,” said Jim McConnell. “Sometimes it makes it easy for them to understand that they may want a 24-foot trailer, but it’s going to take a 26 to solve their problem.”

Q: What do you tow with?

On a basic level, this question is about having enough truck to pull the trailer.

“If a guy says, ‘I want to haul two cars, plus this, that, and the other,’ and he says he’s towing with a half-ton pickup, then let’s back up here, we’re not getting anywhere,” said Alan Cape of Flying A Motorsports, Cuba, Missouri.

“A lot of people are trying to pull way too much with a smaller truck,” added Bruce Litton of Bruce Litton Trailer Sales, Indianapolis, Indiana. “That’s a recipe for a lot of problems going down the road. So the very first question I ask is, ‘What do you have to pull with?’ That gives me an idea of what size of trailer will fit their needs.”

On another level, custom work may be needed for the trailer to accommodate the tow vehicle.

“When it comes to fifth-wheel and gooseneck-style trailers, those kinds of haulers are very unique, and the manufacturers need to build the trailer to match the tow vehicle,” said Bell. “We need all the tow vehicle information: bed length, bed height, where the ball is placed, if there’s a toolbox inside the bed. Then our engineering staff can make the CAD prints for that trailer to match that tow vehicle.”

Similarly, “if you’re towing with a motorhome or toterhome, you need an extended tongue on the trailer,” said Rich Moline of R&M Race Trailer, Cushing, Oklahoma. “If you have a normal tongue on the trailer and you make a turn too sharp, the trailer will hit the back corner of that motorhome and damage both the motorhome and the trailer.”

Moline orders all his trailers for inventory with extended tongues. “It doesn’t hurt the guy who doesn’t have a motorhome,” he explained. “It just gives him a sharper turning radius with his pickup. It’s not an expensive option, so I’d rather have it on there than not.”

Q: What options do you want?

Because so many race trailers are built to order, “the sky’s the limit as far as options we can do,” said Hartman, echoing the comments of many companies. “They just need to spec it right the first time, so they don’t have the regrets of, ‘I wish I had done that.’”

Cabinets were near the top of the must-have list. “As racers, we never have enough storage,” Moline said. “If you just get the basic L-shaped cabinet up front with a straight overhead, which is what you see in most stock units, you’ll run out of storage fast. In every trailer I order, I put a wheelwell cabinet on one side or the other.”

Lighting, too, was mentioned by many. “You can never have too much lighting,” McConnell said. “Customers will say, after the fact, if they could have done anything different, they would have doubled up their lights. It’s not that expensive on the front end.”

trailers5 — **Once racers specify what they plan to carry, the manufacturer can determine exactly what size trailer is required. “We need to see what their footprint is,” explained our source at Haulmark.**

It follows, then, that “nine out of 10 racers need a power supply center to help them at the track,” said Bell. “Not only to light up the area to work on their machine, but to power any type of tools they’re using.” Like many manufacturers, Formula Trailers can supply a generator for the trailer, or build an enclosure for a generator that a customer is moving from an existing trailer.

As with so many trailer options, generator capacity varies depending on need. “We’ve put some diesel generators in these big semi-trailers that are crazy in size,” said Datweiler. “Later we’ll find out that not only is that generator running the trailer, but the client will also have a motorhome parked with the trailer and wants to use the trailer generator to also run the motorhome.”

On the other side of the generator spectrum, Haulmark’s popular Edge racing trailer is built with a top-hinged generator door, something Nichols highly recommends “if you’re running a portable generator and have to open your generator door at every race. Make sure your manufacturer is putting in a top-hinged generator door, so you don’t have the sag problems that come with the RV-style generator doors.”

An option that Nick Godfrey of Equalizer Systems in Elkhart, Indiana, considers “the best-kept secret in the trailer industry” is his company’s hydraulic tongue jack. (Hydraulic landing gear for fifth-wheel and gooseneck trailers is available as well.) “Instead of manually cranking a jack, you just push a button, and the jack does the work for you.”

Q: What are your long-term plans?

“I talk to my customers about the long term,” Moline said. “You might be racing in this class this year and next. But if you’re planning to move up in a couple of years, instead of having to buy a new trailer, look at a trailer now that will fit those needs also. In the sprint car world, in a couple of years they may move up to a wing car and will need a taller trailer. It’s cheaper to buy that taller trailer now than to buy a whole new trailer two or three years from now.”

“One thing I know about racers, they change every other year,” Stanley said. “So we’ve learned to ask, ‘What other kind of racing have you done?’ A drag racer may tell us he likes dirt track racing. So we’ll recommend the Edge because of its 96-inch-wide ramp door opening. If you go with another product, it may only have the standard 89 inches. A Late Model car is going to need every bit of that ramp door opening. This way you don’t have to replace the trailer if you decide to change.”

Customer Questions

As for those questions a racer should ask the trailer companies, the first is obvious: How much is it?

“All too often, people are caught up on cost,” said Quackenbush. “There are companies out there building cheap trailers with small axles, tires and wheels, all to get an inexpensive price, and people fall for it.”

“Price shouldn’t be the most important question,” said Moline, “but the customer’s first question usually is, ‘Do you have a 28-foot trailer, and how much is it?’ instead of asking what brand it is and what options are on it.

trailers6 — Referred to as “the best-kept secret in the trailer industry,” Equalizer Systems offers its hydraulic tongue jack and hydraulic landing gear. “Instead of manually cranking a jack, you just push a button, and the jack does the work for you,” said a company source.

“Or they’ll tell me, ‘So and so is advertising a 28-foot trailer for $1,000 less,’” Moline continued. “Is it a major brand that will be there for you warranty-wise? And why is it $1,000 less? Are they using cheaper materials, like thinner-gauge steel in their upright posts and main frames? It’s the old saying: You get what you pay for.”

In a similar vein, after “what kind of racing do you do?” Stanley said the second most important question he asks is whether the racer stays local or puts a lot of miles on the trailer. That information influences the trailer model he recommends, as he will want to put a high-mileage team in a better-quality trailer.

“We do a lot with [the television show] ‘Street Outlaws,’” he said. “When I found out they were traveling all over the place, I put a lot of them in our Haulmark Edge product because that’s our higher-end race trailer. They’re replacing models they picked up at the best price they could and realized real quick that didn’t work for them.”

Nichols said Haulmark has models “that will work great for the weekend warrior, who races 10 to 20 times a year at his local track. But if you put a guy who’s going to drive from LA to Boston to make a race in that same trailer, the long-distance racer is not going to be happy. He would be in the wrong product. Many dealers are trying to sell price, price, price, and it’s definitely not about price once you’re at a certain level, or any level of racing, in my opinion.”

trailers7 — Putting needs before price is vital for getting the right trailer. “First-time users are looking at just the economics…but they may not get the trailer they actually need,” explained our source at Look Trailers.

Another important question a racer should ask a dealer, especially in post-pandemic America, is about lead time.

“COVID put a tremendous backlog into things,” Bell explained. “Everything was going really well at the beginning of 2020, and then COVID pushed everything back.”

“It’s hard to get parts, hard to get people to build the trailers, everything is just harder right now,” said Hartman. “Lead times are out further than I’ve ever seen them in 20 years. If people are thinking about getting a trailer, they want to get it on order as quick as possible. Typically, there’s a longer lead time on race trailers anyway because they are labor intensive. It used to be 12 to 16 weeks, but right now we have some stuff that’s nine months out. They’re talking next season.”

Formula Trailers is also “building through the end of this year and into 2022,” Bell said. “We’re looking at next spring already. In a normal season, things would be winding down at the end of the year, and the PRI Show would start the next season of race trailers. We’re still picking up the pieces of last year, and it’s bleeding right through. I think PRI will just continue that momentum through 2022.”

“You can still get exactly what you want, and it will still be customized to your needs,” said Litton. “The important thing is to allow yourself plenty of time. It will all work out in the wash. We’ll get through this pandemic and be back to racing like we were soon.”