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Build In-House Fabrication and Engine Capabilities

12:00
56:44
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At 12:00 in

Jimmy Means Shows Us His Historic NASCAR Race Shop! 40+ Years of Racing Under One Roof

What happens here

Establish in-house capabilities for engine building, parts fabrication, and specialized tooling. The shop includes dedicated engine assembly rooms, a parts storage area stocked with repurposed components (like valuable old distributors), and a dyno for testing. The owner also demonstrates custom-made tools, like a clutch bleeding tool fabricated from a slave cylinder and a shifter. This self-sufficiency reduces reliance on expensive external vendors, ensures quality control, and allows for rapid, customized modifications. By performing these tasks internally, the team retains more capital and can allocate it to other critical areas, reinforcing the shoestring budget philosophy.

Goal: Achieve self-sufficiency in key technical areas to reduce costs and increase control.

Tools and materials

  • Clutch Bleeding Tool DIY — Custom-made tool for bleeding clutches, demonstrating ingenuity
  • Cooling Tower SuperFlow — Cooling the dyno system
  • Dyno — Testing engine performance and tuning
  • Engine Assembly Room N/A — Dedicated space for assembling and maintaining race engines
  • Parts Storage Shelves N/A — Organizing and storing new and used race car components
  • Used Distributors General Motors — Example of valuable old parts kept in storage

What they say

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me $500 a Race So You Know I moved to it's hard to move somewhere in nobody vouches for but I fortunate that stud Murray and and Mike and and David Biv you know they were known so I I had a little bit of uh people that spoke for me highly so you know it was a little bit easier do you think that uh moving to a place that's a little bit farther off the beaten path helped you find volunteer help because the people around here didn't have any other access to this world probably so and then at the same time you know uh if you're if you're working back then you know most of the race drops are around Charlotte not morisville and you could quit one place and go you know block or two down the road and get a job here you know we're kind of isolated so you're working for me or you got to move and that's it's got it drawbacks too because you have to move from Charlotte where you can probably go 30 minutes and have a job if you've come here you got to drive an hour and a half yeah so that's but we also like I said you know we even bought a a trailer we put in a lot up here that people could come to work and it didn't cost them anything you know they had free room and board and stuff we paid the utility so they just come go to work have a place to lay down and clean up so huh that's pretty cool so you had like a whole little uh ecosystem out here well I mean you had to because like I said it was hard to get PE personnel and that just made more enticing to them that it's not going to cost me to come to work yeah if you don't have as much living expense then the money you're making is you know so to speak worth more right doesn't go away right as soon as you get it s so much like normally when we walk through these places there's just you know the building that has history is something else now it's not full of new stuff that I'm looking at like a the kid in the candy store wanting to like ask questions about so I'm like flip-flopping between you know back then and right now hopefully you're following along or being entertained by all this yeah this this is going to be a that's an RCR car that's we've got all the updates and safety stuff done we're just waiting for an appointment with NASCAR it's kind of hard to come by right now with those uh new new cup cars all the inspection stuff they do on them so think we've got the first inspection date we have is January the 2 you know and that's only a month you know from Daytona and that's a day to on the car so we'll be up you…

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