MOORESVILLE, N.C. (March 24, 2022) – JR Motorsports’ Late Model team is the bedrock the company is based on.
It was started, in part, because Late Models were the launching point for both Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Earnhardt Miller in their racing careers, and the two vowed that it would be part of whatever they did going forward at JRM.
After more than 100 victories, two track titles, a pair of CARS Tour titles (driver and owner), a NASCAR Weekly Series national championship and a record-setting victory at Martinsville Speedway in the biggest Late Model race of them all, it is still a vital component of a very successful racing organization.
One of the constants in all this success is Bryan Shaffer, the crew chief and team manager who makes the Late Model program run.
The 57-year-old Pennsylvania native has guided the team since the 2014 season, and in that time, all of the above was accomplished…except a handful of the race wins.
The big ones—the 2019 ValleyStar Credit Union 300 at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, three $30,000 Old North State Nationals triumphs and the Myrtle Beach 400 among them—came on Shaffer’s watch.
He’s been racing a long, long time, and among the items on his resume are two victories of historical proportions.
As a crew chief for Dennis Shoemaker Racing, Shaffer led NASCAR legend Dick Trickle to the only two national series victories of his long and storied career, at Hickory (N.C.) Motor Speedway in 1997 and Darlington Raceway the following season.
JRM Vice-President of Motorsports L.W. Miller worked with Shaffer at Shoemaker Racing as a car chief, and he spent two years under Shaffer’s tutelage. A few years later, Miller moved to JRM to run the Late Model team and eventually moved up the ladder into the NASCAR Xfinity team structure. When that happened, Miller needed someone to run the Late Model team.
That someone was Bryan Shaffer.
“My past experience with Bryan, working under him and him being a mentor to me, I knew he was the perfect person for the job,” Miller said. “I knew he was one of the people in the sport cut from old-school cloth. He knew how to make hotel reservations, knew how to build and set up the race car, get it to the track and everything in between. One person having all those skills, in this day and age, is uncommon, but all those skills are necessary to run our Late Model team.
“With Bryan, I knew he could run that program and I wouldn’t have any questions about what he was doing. He can run the budget, the team and they’re going to have success on the track. All that was instant success.”
A man of few words, Shaffer isn’t one to toot his own horn much, but he started racing at a very early age. His cousin, Tom Peck, was a racer and at the tender age of 10, Shaffer began making the rounds of tracks in his native Pennsylvania.
So what is the secret to his considerable success?
“All I’ve done all my life is race, so it’s experience, I guess,” Shaffer said when talking about his career. “My cousin (Tom Peck) raced back home, and Mark Thomas owned our cars when we went Busch racing. We ran out of Pennsylvania for the first three years, in Bedford where Mark is from.”
Thomas, owner of All Things Automotive and a string of dealerships begun by his family, was the owner sponsor for Peck’s cars in the Busch Grand National Series well before he came to JR Motorsports to sponsor Shaffer and driver Josh Berry during their incredible two-year run in 2019 and 2020, which culminated in the NASCAR Weekly Series national championship.
In 2014, when Shaffer moved to JRM and took over the management of the team, Berry was a young driver from Tennessee looking to make his name.
That pairing set the groundwork for what was to come.
Berry said Shaffer was a huge influence on him and his career from the moment the two met.
“I think he and I really clicked from the start and we got along really well,” the now-31-year-old said. “I really needed someone like Bryan to help give me some direction where to go. At that time, I was really motivated and trying really hard to get better, but just didn’t work in the right areas. Bryan came in, and with me, Bryan and L.W. together, we just kind of clicked, really made a lot of strides in making the program better.”
In 2012, Berry won the track championship at Virginia’s Motor Mile Speedway, and he and Shaffer followed with the track title at Hickory in 2014. Shaffer oversaw the two-car program, which included Berry and a young Charlotte driver named William Byron.
“It was a huge relief for me,” Berry said. “It was the second year for me and we had expanded to two cars. Bryan was working with William while I kind of ran my own deal. Bryan kind of oversaw the whole program, and he really made our stuff a lot better. He helped focus me on where I needed to work with the cars. He never really questioned me a lot when it came to driving it, but he tried to help me get better and smarter when it came to working on the race car.”
Asked what made Shaffer’s approach so successful, Berry wasted little time in answering.
“He has so much experience, he’s really smart,” Berry said. “One of the most important things to having fast race cars is making sure they are fundamentally assembled and built correctly. Obviously, the setup and things like that are important too, but having everything work like it’s supposed to work…a lot of people don’t put a lot of thought into that. Bryan puts a lot of thought into that, and he’s very sharp in making sure it’s put together right. He wasn’t ever afraid to go and say, ‘hey, we need to upgrade this or that.’ He wasn’t afraid to speak up.”
The results speak for themselves.
“I just think we get our cars better than most of the other people,” Shaffer said. “Our handling is better and it’s easier on tires.”
That makes a difference in longer races, as evidenced by the success the team has had in them, most recently Carson Kvapil’s triumph in the Old North State Nationals at Caraway Speedway two weeks ago.
“I’ve learned a lot about racing in general from him and the way he sees things,” Berry said of Shaffer. “We don’t have a lot of extra-distance races (like Martinsville or the Old North State Nationals). A lot of them are based just around the pace of the car. The race at Caraway is a good example. Bryan’s thing is kind of like, sometimes you have to do the opposite of what the leaders do to give yourself a chance. I learned that from him and it paid off with a victory for Carson.”
Kvapil will run the full CARS Tour Late Model Stock season for JRM in addition to the big races like Martinsville and others this season as he begins his climb up the ladder.
Shaffer said the CARS Tour fits what he and the Late Model team want to do.
“The CARS Tour is the best thing going, money-wise,” he said. “It’s expensive, it costs you twice as much as it would going to Hickory to race in the weekly series. But the payoff is worth it.”
Racing, in all its forms, costs money. Shaffer’s philosophy is that racers who are smart and buy the right equipment often are successful.
“It’s always been about money,” he said. “The people behind the wheel who run good enough were smart enough to have good engines and good cars. Dick Trickle had Prototype engines and brand-new Dillon race cars. They had the best engines and cars.
“Trickle told me he had titanium-rod engines back in the 1970s. They had what they needed to race well. It’s the same way now. If we think we need something, we buy it. It’s easier to race now because people don’t build anything themselves. You can buy everything.”
What you can’t buy is more than a half-century of experience. Shaffer has that, and he’s passing it along to drivers like Kvapil in the same way he did with Berry and Byron.
Shaffer, Kvapil and the No. 8 iRacing Chevrolet team will be in action this Saturday, March 26 at Hickory for the second race of the CARS Tour LMSC season, looking to make it two straight victories for the team in 2022.