Scraping by, Tommy Baldwin considers his race team as a life investment
Tommy Baldwin Racing owner Tommy Baldwin has struggled to field a competitive team this season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
Tommy Baldwin has made it through half of his first NASCAR Sprint Cup season as a car owner, so has it been worth it?
“I don’t know yet,” Baldwin said last week while waiting out a rain delay for qualifying at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. “At the end of the day, I’m a risk-taker, only because I’ve been successful at some things with risks, and I’ve failed at things taking risks.
“You can’t quit. I didn’t really have a choice but to do what I am doing. I wasn’t going to sit home. I was going to try to make something happen.”
It hasn’t been easy for Baldwin to try to make something happen after he bought cars left over from Bill Davis Racing as well as from Red Bull Racing and tried to make it on his own as a Cup owner/crew chief.
His team sits 42nd in the owner standings with 11 starts and six races where it failed to qualify.
“[It’s] a life investment,” Baldwin said. “It is a very risky thing that we’ve done. A couple of bad things and we could be out. But we’ve got to keep digging, scratching and clawing. … If we continue to miss races, we’d be in trouble.
“We just have to get better as a race team and make races and keep working on some things. We’ve got a lot of support from Toyota, which has been good.”
Baldwin has used three different drivers this year. Scott Riggs made eight of the first 12 events, while Mike Skinner, Patrick Carpentier and Brian Simo have combined to make three of the last five.
Skinner will run the remainder of the events where he does not have a Truck series conflict, while Carpentier will run the rest with the exception of Watkins Glen where Simo will compete.
The team, which consists of 11 employees, has eight cars and two others that it is preparing for next year’s Daytona 500. Baldwin wants to spend the offseason getting his cars better instead of trying to build them as he did this last offseason after Bill Davis Racing shut down.
“It’s probably tougher than I expected only because it’s unbelievable how the competition raised the bar over the winter,” Baldwin said. “Not being part of anything really all winter until going to Daytona, some of these people made so many gains and got cars so much faster.
“That caught us off guard. As a race team, parts- and pieces-wise, we’re way ahead of schedule. We’ve missed some races, yes, but we’re still here.”
Of the 42 teams that have competed every weekend, Baldwin says he believes his is the only one without a steady relationship with another Sprint Cup team. Of the new Cup teams this year, Nemco Motorsports buys cars and gets some information from Red Bull Racing, Prism Motorsports has a relationship with Michael Waltrip Racing and TRG Motorsports has been aided at times in purchasing cars from Richard Childress Racing and Earnhardt Ganassi Racing.
All of those teams have not been able to run full races this year, just like Tommy Baldwin Racing.
“When I announced this thing at the beginning of January, I said, 'I’m going to run every race until I run out of money, and then I’m going to load up and go to the next one,'” Baldwin said. “I can’t tell you if I can run 200 laps, 100 laps, 50 laps, but when I’m out of money, I’m out of money, and I load up and go to the next one. That’s the best we can do.
“I don’t consider myself a start-and-park team because we have raced seven or eight races this year. Every time we get enough money, we race another race.”
Maybe the biggest weekend besides qualifying for the Daytona 500 was the failure to qualify a few weeks ago at Infineon Raceway. The team had sponsorship from the California Outdoor Heritage Alliance and Simo, a road racer, in the car. The weekend was going well until Simo’s engine blew up in qualifying, and the team missed the race.
“That was a good-sponsored race for us,” Baldwin said. “We got the money in plenty of time like any other race team, and we were very well prepared. We built a really good road-course car, we tested, we showed up, we were way good in for making the race and had more left in for qualifying and we blew up.
“That showed us if we had the proper money, we can prepare for the races. It was a good feeling for us.”
As far as sponsorship, Baldwin said he is happy with the way things are progressing.
“We are in more good talks with people now than we were at the beginning of the year,” Baldwin said. “They like our story. They like our blue-collar theory, and a lot of these companies are companies that want to grow with us. Hopefully, they can come on board with somebody like us.”
Baldwin had Gary Bechtel, a former team owner in the Cup series, on board with him earlier in the year, but he said Bechtel isn’t currently involved with the team.
“He wanted to come in and help get us going, and that was it,” Baldwin said. “It wasn’t like Gary was going to come in here and throw millions and millions of dollars. He asked [me] what can we do, and we sat down and figured it out, and we did it.
“We fulfilled each other’s obligations. He’s not doing anything else anymore right now, which is fine. I don’t want to take somebody’s money if we’re not prepared anyway. … Working on the cars and getting better is what’s going to help us.”
