Braun Racing flourishing in Nationwide Series; expects to expand to four teams in 2010

By Lee Montgomery - Associate Editor

Monday, December 07, 2009

Part-time Braun Racing driver Brian Vickers has his car serviced during the NASCAR Nationwide Stater Brothers 300 at Auto Club Speedway in February.

David Griffin
NASCAR Scene

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At a time when many NASCAR teams are shrinking, Braun Racing is expanding, and at a time when independent Nationwide Series teams are struggling to keep up, Braun Racing appears to be flourishing.

In a series that has seen more than its share of car owners come and go in the last several years, Todd Braun has somehow managed to survive – and grow. Next year, he plans to field four full-time entries in the Nationwide Series, all with full sponsorship.

How does Braun Racing do it? What’s the secret? Why has owner Todd Braun been able to make it when others like Greg Pollex, Fred Biagi, Clarence Brewer and others have gotten out?

The answer isn’t simple. In the business of NASCAR these days, nothing is simple. Like the complexities of trying to get race cars to go fast, trying to get race teams to survive involves leadership, hard work, sacrifice, dedication, loyalty, lots of money – and even more luck.

Braun Racing has all of those, even if it comes in a smaller package. But that’s probably part of the reason it succeeds.

Starts at the top

As with any successful business, success tends to start at the top, which appears to be the situation at Braun Racing. And that’s a guy who often towers over people he meets: Todd Braun. He can be an intimidating presence in the Nationwide garage, with a large 6-foot-3 frame that commands respect.

But the Winamac, Ind., native doesn’t get respect because he demands it. He gets it because he earns it.

“He really is a tough guy to get to know,” says T.J. Puchyr, one of Braun’s right-hand men. “He’s kind of quiet. You think he’s not paying attention, and he’s off thinking. You talk to him for about five minutes, and you’ll be like, ‘Hey, do you hear me? What are we talking about?’

“But it has been my experience that guys in those positions are thinking that many steps ahead. You’re still trying to get caught up to that. You’re behind. He’s that way.”

Braun gets a lot of his leadership characteristics from his father, Ralph. Ralph Braun is one of the great America success stories. After spinal muscular atrophy left him unable to walk at age 15, he built a multimillion-dollar company.

“What his father has made of himself for his family is an incredible story,” Puchyr says. “Todd has a lot of qualities in him. He’s got a big heart and is a really generous guy.”

BraunAbility converts mini-vans to fully-automatic wheelchair-accessible vehicles, as well as wheelchair lifts for minivans.

Todd appears to have captured some of Ralph’s entrepreneurial spirit. Todd spent a year at Landmark College in Vermont, a school for students with learning disabilities. Braun had dyslexia, but he wouldn’t let it slow him down.

After a year there, Ralph asked his son to go to work, and Todd ended up in the Clearwater, Fla., area, running a hobby shop with 40 employees. He was 19 years old.

Five years later after selling the business, the Brauns got together in the car business. Though Todd had never sold a car before, he was a natural, running dealerships for his dad in Winamac.

“I grew up a lot selling cars, I think,” Braun says. “It taught you the hard part of life. You saw everybody from the guy who could come in and write a check to the guy who had five kids and could barely afford anything.”

A few years later, Braun “kind of got bored” with his life, and remembering his younger days when he drove quarter-midgets in Indiana – once racing a 12-year-old Jeff Gordon – turned his eyes to stock-car racing.

Braun’s dream was to race at Daytona, and he figured the Automobile Racing Club of America would be a good venue to get there. He started in the ARCA truck series, a Midwest-based racing league.

Braun admitted he wasn’t much of a driver, but Daytona beckoned. He met Bobby Blount through his ARCA racing, and Blount wanted to put his son, Chad, in an ARCA car.

Knowing ARCA stock cars ran at Daytona, Braun figured he could help the Blounts – and race at Daytona.

“Well, I went to the race track and actually liked owning the car better than I liked driving it,” Braun says.

The dream of driving at Daytona – and anywhere else, really – would have to disappear.

“I thought I could make something out of myself in this sport that way,” Braun says. “I was not an above-average driver. I was probably below-average, and I knew it. I could see it. I wanted to stay in the sport. I love racing.”

For 2002, Braun Racing was formed, initially as an ARCA team with Chad Blount as the driver. The following year, Braun ran a handful of races in what was known as the Busch Series.

In 2004, Jamie McMurray won in a Braun car at the old Rockingham track in North Carolina, and the team was off and running. David Stremme ran full time for Braun in ‘04, with a handful of drivers sharing Braun’s car in 2005.

Lean times

In October of 2005, Braun sat in Puchyr’s office, talking about the 2006 season.

One of Puchyr’s many duties is to help find sponsorship for the team. That day, he had to tell Braun the bad news that there simply weren’t any for ’06.

Braun had Jason Leffler as its driver for 2006, but the owner admitted then he didn’t know for how long. The team was forced to make cuts, with as few as seven employees remaining.

“We figured our days were numbered,” crew chief Trent Owens says, and Puchyr says the team “should’ve been out of business.”

But in what Braun calls one of the turning points of his team, he merged with Akins Motorsports just before the start of the season. Akins owner Doug Stringer had sponsorship from Great Clips, and Braun had a team he knew he could grow.

“It was bleak, absolutely,” Braun recalls. “We were in trouble, for sure. Doug came in. We both had our strong points. He had a great relationship [with Great Clips]. I had an organization that we could grow with. It ended up to be a great marriage that has blossomed more and more.”

Leffler completed the 2006 season with Great Clips sponsorship, and Braun ran a second car, the No. 10 entry, in a handful of races. In one of those races, Dave Blaney won at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

When Puchyr looks back on that season and his relationship with Braun, he gets emotional.

“This is my life,” Puchyr says. “I think the people who work here, too – this is what we do.

“We’ve been to hell and back together, this group. Family.”

One team, one chassis, one way

Along the way, Braun realized he had to “standardize” his team, if you will. Braun Racing grew to two full-time cars in 2007, but extra cars don’t automatically mean extra wins. Sometimes they mean extra headaches.

“Everybody has had to change their attitude,” Braun says. “This is not a ‘me’ sport anymore. This is about everybody. That’s where your bigger organizations have been successful because they build their product based on this one thing. Their mass of information is so much that they can make it work. That’s the theory we work on.”

If two teams are working in separate directions, the shop can become “chaos,” Braun says. That’s not what is happening at Braun, crew chiefs Owens and Scott Zipadelli say.

“It all boils down to people,” Owens says. “If you get 35, 40, 50 people all working for the same goal – there’s not a credit pull here. We all just want to race and run well and make our sponsors happy. If you share that from the top to the bottom, the results will be there.”

Braun hires people who share that goal, who are willing to work in that environment. Zipadelli says he knows exactly what Owens has in his cars and vice versa. The teams don’t get caught up in trying to beat each other.

“That gets stirred up, usually, by the front office,” Zipadelli says.

“That will put you behind the competition when you get caught up in internal mess like that,” Owens says. “I realize that without healthy Great Clips and 38 program, the 32 Dollar General program wouldn’t be as good.”

Braun expects his teams to work together and share information, but he also puts faith in his crew chiefs to make competition decisions.

“The environment is what I like, and that’s what makes you the happiest,” Zipadelli says. “Money can’t make you happy. Trophies can’t make you happy. You come to a good environment, and you’re comfortable with the people you’re working with, and you feel like you’re going in the right direction and making a difference. That’s how I get motivated.”

Within that environment comes one standard chassis, built in-house. Braun builds everything in-house expect engines, but the chassis are all basically the same. Why?

“We kind of got together and said, ‘The only way we can compete against these guys is to work off each other,’” Owens says. “We still need to gain a little bit to win races. But it’s only going to get done by all of us together, not just one of us.”

Having one chassis means anything learned to make the car go faster can be quickly fed through the other teams. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier to fix one chassis rather than four.

Plus, Braun simply doesn’t have an abundance of employees to justify building a bunch of different chassis.

Zipadelli says every employee has “two or three jobs,” and each team’s road crew helps get the cars prepared for the track.

“If 10 guys came down with the flu, we might struggle to make it to the race track,” Owens says.

He’s kidding, but only slightly. Besides, it’s not as if Braun has surrounded himself with multiple layers of management to make his life easier.

Hardly. In the front office, you have Braun, Puchyr and Stringer. And that’s it.

But that’s by design, too, for Braun said that helps with overhead. Instead of salary for executives, money goes back to the competition side.

“We know it’s going to be done right if we do it ourselves,” Braun says. “We have great personal relationships with each and every one of our sponsors. We spend a lot of our time meeting with them, being with them.”

Each of the three has the freedom to make decisions without consulting each other. Yes, that could open the team up to problems, but the three trust each other implicitly.

“It’s nothing for us to get an e-mail from the [chief executive officer] of Dollar General at 11 o’clock at night – and we answer it at 11:02,” Braun says. “That is nothing for us. That is a common thing. … That’s our seamless process that we deal with here, and it’s because there’s very few of us, and we make our decisions quick and deal with our problems even quicker.”

Braun knows this sport is a customer-service business, and he treats sponsors as partners, knowing they have put a lot of trust in his hands – along with big checks.

“I don’t look at it as a business,” Braun says. “I look at it as a personal relationship. They’ve put their trust in me, and the people here … take care of everybody.”

Jerry Maguire?

In the movie “Jerry Maguire,” a sports agent loses his job with a fictional agency because he wants to cut back on the number of clients in order to provide them with more personal service.

Maguire – who was played by Tom Cruise – develops a deep, personal relationship with his one remaining client, flamboyant wide receiver Rod Tidwell. The two become so close that other players and agents notice.

Braun sees a parallel in the way his team treats sponsors.

“I can tell you that a lot of the newer relationships we have right now have been because people we weren’t happy with personal services they got before,” Braun says. “I can tell you this: We do it no matter what. I’d give them a pint of blood if I had to. These people put their trust in me. That’s what it’s about.”

For 2010, Braun’s lineup of sponsors include Great Clips, Dollar General, ABF Freight, Beringer Wines – and others.

His lineup of drivers is still in a state of flux, though Leffler and Brian Scott will compete full time. Sprint Cup driver Kasey Kahne will do a handful of races, and Cup driver Brian Vickers could be back, too.

The team recently moved into a bigger shop, and Braun will attempt several Sprint Cup races this year, with an eye on a possible move there for 2011.

For now, though, the goal remains the same: Win races, but win races in their own way.

“I think he’s just starting to scratch the surface, where we’re trying to go,” Puchyr says. “If you look at this place, last year vs. this, we’ve gotten a little bit better every year – on everything, our bodies, our motors, our personnel, our drivers. The business side has gotten better, the cash flow has gotten better, our marketing partners have gotten better.

“It’s an every-day, 24/7 grind to do that. It for sure starts at the top.”