Working with family can be beneficial and prosperous—if done correctly. These owners of family-run motorsports businesses provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what has led to thriving operations, and the plans they have in place for another generation to successfully continue the tradition.

For a good many people, the thought of operating a family business is a dream job. To be surrounded by loved ones, all working toward a common goal, not having to answer to remote bosses who may not have the family’s best interests in mind, has the feel of an ideal occupation.

It is true that with a family business, the good parts can be very good. It is also true that family dynamics can be tricky to navigate, bringing their own unique complications to running a business.

The motorsports industry seems especially fertile ground for family businesses, as many young gearheads and their families start out chasing dreams of racing success, only to discover along the way that engine building, chassis fabrication, or selling parts is their true calling.

Several of the sources we spoke with for this article followed that very pattern. These long-time family-run operations have seen the good side and the harder side but have managed to work their way through to success.

Brandon Maxwell and his father Gary have run 45 Race Shop in Milan, Tennessee, for many years. “My dad started an auto salvage business in 1971. I came along shortly thereafter,” Brandon said. “As a teenager I started racing, and we started horse-trading race car parts on the side to offset what I was doing. By the mid-1990s it had turned into a full-fledged business. I went off to college, and when I came back, I said to Dad, ‘You keep going with the salvage yard, and I’m going to push the race car stuff.’ We ran it all out of the same location, because a lot of our salvage customers were racing people.”

They operated both businesses for several years, until selling the salvage yard nearly 10 years ago. “My dad was getting older, and I was getting wiser, I guess, and decided that wasn’t the route I wanted to pursue the rest of my life.”

At Automotive Specialists in Concord, North Carolina, Keith Dorton has been building racing engines first with his brother and now with his son Jeff. “It’s a lot of fun, but it can bring you to your knees, too,” Dorton said. “We started in 1965. It was just me at that time as far as the family, as that was the same year I got married. My wife had to keep a regular job to support my addiction for working on engines until we got established.

“As things got bigger, she helped with the books and things,” he continued. “But the first real family member to work with me was my brother Randy, who was 10 years younger. He started when he was just a toddler almost. He worked with me until he went to technical school for two years, and then a year after that he went out on his own, drag racing. Which I totally agreed to have him do his own thing.”

Randy went on to great motorsports success, rising to director of engine operations at Hendrick Motorsports, before tragically losing his life in the 2004 airplane crash that saw 10 members of the Hendrick family and NASCAR race team killed. “Randy was a smart guy, a good engine guy, and a good businessman. He ran the engine shop for Mr. Hendrick until the plane crash,” Dorton said.

“Then my son followed in the same way. Jeff just turned 55. He took an interest and started helping in the shop when he was a toddler also, and that’s all he’s ever done. I don’t know how we’ve managed to stay pretty tight. We kind of separate our family social part of it from the business. We try not to talk about the business so much when we’re having Thanksgiving dinner or we’re at the beach.”

Blake Robertson has worked with his father Brock at sprint car specialists BR Motorsports in Visalia, California, until Brock’s recent retirement. “We started in 1993, so we just celebrated 30 years on March 1,” Blake said. “I was a senior in high school, and my dad had a wheel and tire shop company. We raced and came up through quarter midgets, micro sprints, and mini-sprints, and we had a sprint car. We had some friends who were in the industry, and we got some support from some manufacturers.”

As a racer with connections, he would get requests from other locals for parts, so when ordering for himself, he would tag on some additional parts for other racers. “It was actually on a trip to PRI in 1992 when my dad and I decided on the flight home. He said he would really like to get into a business like that.”

Blake had his eyes on being a World of Outlaws sprint car driver, but financially it wasn’t viable, and being located far from the sport’s Midwestern stomping ground made it tougher. “So we started this little company, and the rest is history. It’s just kind of grown and evolved over the 30 years. My dad just retired in 2020. It’s been a thrill ride, that’s for sure.”

Bud Kaeding is the third generation to work at Kaeding Performance in Campbell, California, and works alongside his dad Brent. “The shop itself started with my grandfather and his brother; they started building lawn furniture back in the 1950s and ’60s. They started building wheels, and that turned into engine work. We were a machine shop for years,” Bud said. “About 1986 my dad started the retail side for sprint car racing. From then on it has blossomed from a hobby shop—that’s kind of what sprint car racing was at the time. It wasn’t quite the industry it is today. There weren’t so many specialty manufacturers in sprint car racing at the time. It was one-off parts where you had to modify everything to fit your car.

“My dad and Brian Matherly really run the shop now,” he continued. “My dad’s here pretty much every day, but Brian pretty much runs the show. My dad’s 63 now, and since he’s kind of retired from racing, he’s found other things in life that excite him. He’s built himself a second hot rod and has been hitting up car shows here lately.”

Barry Wright Race Cars in Cowpens, South Carolina, has been a family business from the beginning. “I’ve been in business since 1977,” Barry said. “My wife Judy—she’s wanting retirement—she’s been with me the whole time. And I’ve got my daughter Ashley and my son Lance working here.”

All Together

Reality TV has presented many warped versions of family-run businesses in recent years. Even though few of our sources could relate to the wrench-throwing antics at Orange County Choppers, nearly all of them mentioned the American Chopper TV show unprompted.

“There are definitely some pros and cons (to a family business),” Robertson said. “The pro is, you’re getting to work with your family. There’s nothing better than having your dad there, who’s someone you look up to, your hero—that’s the way I looked at it—and always want to learn from him, and he could do no wrong. The cons are, tensions do get high. When things go tough, there are definitely some fireworks that go off every now and then. We had our fair share of those. I think back to the American Chopper show that was on Discovery. And I was thinking, ‘They should have done a story on BR Motorsports. Dad, we could have retired by now if they’d have spent a month here. They’d have been like, ‘Holy cow, these people are nuts.’”

For others, that reality TV vision of a family business was more of an eye-opening cautionary tale. “That TV show that was on a few years ago with those motorcycle fellas, the guys that cussed and throwed and kicked each other, I thought, ‘God has really blessed me that we can get along, working, and seeing each other every day sometimes,’” Dorton said.

Our sources were unanimous in believing that the best part of a family race shop was the closeness between family members through every stage of life. “I guess the best part is, how many people who are 50 years old get to see their dad six days a week? I’ve worked with my dad since I got out of college in the mid-1990s,” Maxwell said. “I’ve only quit a couple times, and that lasts for a couple hours. I would quit and go home and eat a sandwich, and come back, one of those kinds of deals.

“Over time it’s been really good,” he added. “We’ve got to watch each other grow as people, and he’s got to watch me grow up from a kid to a young adult to having a family of my own. We get to see each other and communicate every day. The plus is just that. I get to spend a lot of time with my dad that I probably wouldn’t if I had a different job or career. And we take family very seriously in my house. Family is my priority, and then everything else. My kids, when they were little, would come and go every single day and get to see their grandparents. To me that was important.”

“What I like about it the best is being able to see my family,” Dorton related. “I see all these people, long-time friends and acquaintances, their kids and grandkids are 2,000 miles away and only get to see them once or twice a year, or maybe not even that much. It makes me realize how blessed my wife and I are.

“For instance, when our first grandchild was born—and she’ll soon be 20—our daughter was full-time in our office. She was a flight attendant until she got pregnant, and we needed somebody, so we talked her into coming on full-time here. We took one of our offices that wasn’t used that much and converted it into a nursery. So I got to see my now-almost-20-year-old granddaughter daily and help take care of her. When our son Jeff, they had their first child—and she just turned 15—it was the same way. After they got to be five or six years old, we turned that office into a playroom for them.”

That appreciation for seeing family regularly runs from both ends of the age scale. “My grandfather is fixing to turn 91 in August, and he just lives a couple blocks away and comes by the shop a couple days a week,” Kaeding said. “He’s pretty involved in the properties and staying on us to keep stuff up around here. I’d say the pros of it are just being around your family, and having your family involved in the day-to-day is just pretty special and cool to me. Not a lot of people I know have the relationships with their dads that I do, and I think a lot of that is attributed to just being involved with the business and being here working daily.”

Besides the satisfaction of working alongside family members, there are other advantages to family businesses that aren’t always obvious. “We can trust each other,” Judy Wright said. “Some companies have to worry about people messing with your stuff or messing with your books. We don’t have to worry about that. It makes it really good to know it’s just us taking care of business.”

Family support at work also provides flexibility that is especially important when hard times hit. After Maxwell received some bad medical news, his family was there to cover for him at the shop until he was back on his feet.

“If I’d had a job working for somebody or somewhere else, it might have been a bit of a challenge,” he said. “But we talked about it, and what the doctor said was, ‘What you’ve got is curable, it’s just going to take some time.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘How flexible is your work schedule?’ I told him, ‘As flexible as it needs to be.’

“I had to go to treatment five days a week for seven weeks,” Maxwell continued. “So I wasn’t able to work. And then for the next two-and-a-half months I wasn’t able to work because of the side-effects of the radiation and chemotherapy. Just in the last six weeks I’ve started back to work every day, but about three days a week I still have to go to therapy or a doctor’s appointment. So my dad has stepped up and stepped in, and we’ve never missed a beat. If I worked for someone else, it probably wouldn’t have been as easy of a transition as we’ve gone through with this.”

Succession and Ownership

Family or no, business being business, at some point any small race shop will have to address ownership shares and succession for the next generation. For some, those topics stay quietly in the background, but it’s best for all concerned if a plan is put in place before it is too late.

“There was a succession plan, definitely. I think that’s something that’s probably overlooked by more family companies than anything,” Robertson said. “Or any company at all. The owner needs to have some type of succession plan, have somebody that they’re going to be able to groom to take this thing over, or buy them out, or assume the responsibilities. That is something that we had talked about.”

“That’s something that we’re going through right now,” Dorton said. “I don’t have any plans of retiring, but one day after church, my wife and I talked about updating our wills. And so we did. I’ve been president of the company since it started, and when Jeff got of age, he became vice president. But we don’t want to wait until I’m not here or no longer able to make decisions to give him what he rightfully deserves, and that’s to be in charge. He thinks he’s in charge now anyway, but that’s okay.”

Maxwell said his father was always very business-minded and put together a succession plan early. “As I got older, that plan was still in place, but the constraints got a little more unlimited when he saw that I was going to make it and that I was going to be able to handle it and the working was going to be okay,” he said.

“The succession then started being, ‘Well, do you want to buy this place from me? Do you want me to give this place to you when I pass? Do you want to buy part of it?’ We talked through all that, and so we’ve had a succession plan in place for a long time for me. With that said, I have a succession plan in place for my children the same way he did. It’s got some limitations on it, some age constraints—at this age you can do this, at this age you can do that—and they are about to reach those milestones. But to be honest, I don’t think either one of my kids will ever do what we’re doing,” Maxwell added.

Family Advice

That is another challenge that family businesses must deal with: It may be easy to have two generations working in a race shop, but there are no guarantees that future generations will want the same career path. To avoid potential problems that might discourage the next generation, our sources had solid advice for maintaining a successful family race shop.

“I don’t think you should force a family member, or try to persuade them so much,” Dorton said. “I think you should just lay out, ‘Here’s the opportunity, here’s what you can do if you want to,’ and let them make that decision, whether it’s a son, daughter, brother, whatever.”

“My biggest advice would be from two different aspects. The first is, communication is 100% the key,” Maxwell said. “We figured out a long time ago that communication is the biggest thing. Whether I want to hear it, or he wants to hear it or not, if you get it out in the open and talk about it, there’s never any shock. The repercussions are so much less if everybody knows what’s going on than if you have a big surprise or an ‘uh-oh.’

“The other thing is not to get greedy. If there’s a dollar laying on the table and half of it is his and half of it is yours, that’s the way it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be, ‘Well, today I really need 70 cents of that, and you need 30 cents of that.’ Don’t let greed interfere with your relationship.

“And greed can be with time and everything else,” Maxwell continued. “‘Hey, I’m going to be off today.’ ‘Well, if you’re off today, I’m going to be off tomorrow.’ Don’t play that game that way. Because you never know when you’re going to be diagnosed with throat cancer and be off for four months instead of a week for a vacation.”

Not letting work overwhelm every aspect of family life may be the biggest factor in operating a successful family race shop. “The biggest thing is separating business from life,” Kaeding said. “Being able to separate that is tough. It’s obviously hard work with any business you’re in. Just work hard and stay dedicated. I think that if you can do those couple things, you can see through any problems that might come across with anybody in your family as far as bumps in the road through the journey.”

The nature of motorsports will likely make it friendly ground for family-run businesses for some time to come. “I think motorsports is a great way to bring family together, remembering that motorsports can be dangerous,” Dorton said. “There’s nothing better than watching a family member win a race, whether it be because he was driving, or he built that engine, just being a part of that winning effort is very gratifying.” 

SOURCES

45 Race Shop
45raceshop.com

Automotive Specialists
automotivespecialists.com

Barry Wright Race Cars
barrywright.com

BR Motorsports
brmotorsports.com

Kaeding Performance
kaedings.com