Venturini Motorsports

Repping some VMS gear after joining VMS for the 2021 season.

2017 - 2018: Internship

When I started college, I had a hard deadline of needing to find a motorsports-related internship for the summer after sophomore year. I didn’t particularly want to do a co-op, as I didn’t want to stretch my semesters past 4 years, and with how involved I was with FSAE/solar car, it would be hard to walk away from the teams for a full semester. We were also in the early stages of prepping for the big cross-country solar car race in 2018, so I knew that it would be harder to commit to a full internship later. 

Cold emailing, unfortunately, can be pretty brutal, especially when you are a completely green college student with no true stock car experience. I sent many emails out early in 2017, all to no response. While frustrating, it would only take one yes to finally turn things around. Thanks to a tip from Ben Rhodes, who came by to visit the car teams during the spring semester (very long story but a big shoutout to Dr. Molly Fisher for making that happen), I reached out to Venturini Motorsports hoping for something. VMS was one of the most competitive teams in ARCA, a feeder stock car series for NASCAR. Imagine my reaction when, after radio silence for months from everywhere else, I got an email back from Emily Venturini about an hour later. 

While they didn’t have a true engineering role back then, Emily explained that due to my camera experience I had on my resume, I could help them out with their DartFish usage. DartFish was basically a primitive version of SMT, where the software can overlay videos taken of the cars going around the racetrack and can show the teams where one car was stronger over the other. Since they knew I wanted to work on cars more directly too, we worked it out to where I would help the DartFish group (mainly Emily and Frankie Kimmel at the time) during practice, then go shadow and help out a specific car for the rest of the day and through the race.

My dad and I drove to Salem Speedway later in April to check the team out during a test. While I had been to Kentucky Speedway before (I’d only seen a race in-person twice at this point), there is nothing like seeing a car whiz by on the rev limiter and ripping the fence at Salem. Throughout the summer of 2017 and 2018, I worked with the group at many classic tracks across the Midwest, getting familiar with how race teams operated at the track and making connections with Billy and others. I also started providing help with photography for content for social media and public articles; this also assisted with some quick analysis of their vehicles on track.

2020: Coming Back to ARCA

As the 2020 Cup Series was winding down, Billy V called me up and asked if I would be interested in coming back to VMS to be an engineer. While ARCA is still considered to be one of the more “entry level” series for national stock car racing, the technical side has continued to develop significantly, and vehicle simulation and modelling has worked its way into it too. After finishing the 2020 season with Rick Ware Racing, I decided to join VMS again in order to become more immersed on the simulation side and work with some of the sophisticated tools and resources provided by Toyota Racing Development (TRD). Over the next few years, this decision to come back to ARCA proved its worth many times.

2021: Laying the Foundation

With a completely blank slate on ARCA simulation, we needed to get up to speed fast in order to make the most of our new TRD tools. Billy and our crew chiefs - Shannon Rursch, Kevin Reed, and Kevin Jr., gave me both plenty of guidance and a lot of freedom in order to get things working properly. Being the only engineer there, it was critical to figure out how to translate our “hands on” approach to the sim world. 

2021 was also when ARCA saw two future star drivers go head-to-head - both Corey Heim, our driver, and Ty Gibbs, grandson of Joe Gibbs, were set to compete against each other for the Driver’s Championship. While Ty was the favorite, Corey was able to take the fight to him, ultimately losing the championship but still racking up 6 wins in our 20 car. 2021 also saw a first time winner in Jesse Love, winning at Salem Speedway in the 15 car. 

While we had a few wins, we knew we needed to close the gap further to the Joe Gibbs Racing team. What ultimately proved to be the best long term gain was operating the sim with Heim, as he laid down much of the fundamental groundwork for us when it came to baselines, tire scaling, and post-matching our setups to what it felt like in real life. Without his feel and feedback, we likely would have fallen further behind.

2022: So Close!

The 2022 season felt like many woulda-shoulda-coulda’s for us. The season started off strong at Daytona, as VMS won its fifth in a row at the track and its 80th team win - breaking the record for team wins in the ARCA series. While we left Daytona on a high, there would be some hurdles to get through throughout the year.

With Heim now in a part time role (as he was splitting duties between us and Trucks), it was imperative to keep improving our notebook with him in his few races while preparing drivers such as Jesse Love and Toni Breidinger for full-time campaigns down the road. In some cases, our raw speed was plenty good, but the execution is where we got bit - spring Kansas and Michigan come to mind, where Heim had the lead but was involved in incidents on restarts that cost us the wins.

Despite some setbacks throughout the year, we were still in contention for the Owner’s Championship with the 20 car - split by Heim and Love. However, this also turned into heartbreak, as in the last race at Toledo, Love sat on the pole and almost led all the laps. A late race move by the 18 driven by Sammy Smith saw him drop to second, and as a result, we lost the championship by a single point. This was a tough pill to swallow, as if some races had just gone slightly more our way, we could have had that point bagged. That is the nature of the beast though, and that left us hungry for another shot.

The last few races in 2022 were also significant for myself, as Billy allowed me to officially crew chief my first few races with Toni Breidinger and Landon Pembelton. He knew that crew chiefing was my long term goal, and despite my age and overall lack of experience, he trusted me enough to get some races under my belt late in the year. 

2023: Ending on a High Note

Going into 2023, we had Love slated for a full championship run for both Driver’s and Owner’s points. ARCA also had a slew of rules changes, allowing bumpsprings for the first time and overhauling some front end aero regulations. This opened up a whole new can of worms, and we needed to hit the ground running if we were going to have a shot at competing against the 18 JGR team.

This is where the last two year’s worth of sim development truly came into play, as we were able to trust our notebook in sim and figure out what areas we needed to focus on the most. Learning more about bumpsprings after each race was changing our philosophy on the fly as well. 

In addition to the full main ARCA schedule, we added the extra East and West races to our plate - partially due to pursuing a West championship with newcomer Sean Hingorani. This meant that we were working flat out to field our four full time main entries in addition to these additional races, and we needed to make sure we were on top of everything that we needed to make speed off the truck. While the first few races didn’t quite play out in execution, we started to pick our momentum up in April with wins at Irwindale, Talladega, Kern County, Dover, and Kansas all in a row.

Kern in particular will always be a special one for me, as it was my first win as a crew chief. With our hectic schedule and small-knit team, Billy entrusted me with handling the west race while the rest of the team was in Talladega on the same day. When we got the word that our guys finished 1-2 at Dega while pushing through tech at Kern, we knew we had to follow up and deliver as well. It wasn’t easy - we had a pass through penalty on lap one for jumping the start - but with Billy’s coaching from the spotter stand, Sean unlapped himself and drove through the field the old-school way. 

Through the summer months, we felt pretty solid about Jesse’s driver points, as he had a comfortable lead for the majority of the year. However, owner’s points between the 20 and 18 stayed pretty tight with the season winding down. Heading into the final three races, we knew we had to finish strong to stay ahead - with a close second at Bristol and a win at Salem, we were in grasp of the owner’s championship. This time at Toledo, we were able to run a bit more conservatively and make sure we finished the race with the points in the bag. 

After Toledo, we had a few races left on the west coast to wrap up our driver’s championship run with Sean as well. Headed to Phoenix, the final race on the west schedule and for our season as a whole, we were in a similar position of having a decent lead but needing a mistake-free day at the track. We were fortunately able to execute and help Sean get his first driver’s championship. 

Halfway through 2023, Billy and I both knew that it was going to be time for me to try to move up from ARCA at the end of the season. Normally, navigating contracts and team-jumping can be a pretty stressful experience in motorsports, but I am extremely lucky to be able to say that my boss worked with me to make my next career move. After a few conversations (and with some recommendations from Toyota Racing), I decided to stay in the TRD pipeline and head over to Joe Gibbs Racing - a move I hadn’t planned on given how much work just went into beating them that season! 

Despite our rivalry, this was one of the easiest career transitions I have had so far. Across these three seasons of ARCA, we were able to win 27 times; in the short time I was crew chiefing, I am lucky to have had 2 wins and 3 poles as well. Regardless of the series, it is freaking hard to win any race, and being at VMS made me learn that sometimes it comes down to how bad you want it and how much blood, sweat, and tears you’re willing to put in to get to Victory Lane.

For more information about VMS, please visit venturinimotorsports.com.