TRUCKS: Ballew Is The Quintessential Owner

Camping World Trucks

TRUCKS: Ballew Is The Quintessential Owner

Billy Ballew's Billy Ballew Motorsports NASCAR Camping World Truck Series team has 17 victories in its history...

Jared Turner | http://www.scenedaily.com | Posted December 23, 2009 Charlotte, NC

Billy Ballew will maintain an ownership stake in the team now known as Vision Aviation Racing. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

In a series featuring burly pickup trucks and hard-nosed drivers unafraid to push the limits, you might say that Billy Ballew is the quintessential NASCAR Camping World Truck Series team owner.

Low on sponsorship dollars but high on passion for the sport and his teams, Ballew has been forced to dig deep into his pockets on more than one occasion over the years to keep his Billy Ballew Motorsports organization afloat.

In that way, he isn’t different from many of his fellow team owners in NASCAR’s No. 3 division. That which sets Ballew apart is how much his teams have managed to accomplish with relatively little since entering the Truck ranks on a part-time basis in 1996.

In contrast to the roughly 75-employee Kevin Harvick Inc. organization of defending series champion Ron Hornaday, for example, Billy Ballew Motorsports employs fewer than 20 people. And those people do many jobs.

Take Richie Wauters, crew chief on BMM’s No. 51 truck. Wauters is also the organization’s general manager and competition director.

It’s not surprising then that the 50-year-old Ballew very casually says, “We don’t really go a lot by titles.”

“It’s everybody, they give 120 percent, not 100, not 110,” Ballew says. “Everybody on this race team works and does whatever it takes to be successful, and we’re also very prideful and love running up front. And if you look at our trucks, the way that they’re prepared, … our stuff is just as nice as any Cup car that you’re going to go look at in the shop. We spend our money not on the lavish things [but] on the race vehicles that we have to spend.”

Ballew spends most of his time during the season away from the team’s Mooresville, N.C., shop and at home in Blairsville, Ga., with his 12-year-old son.

“The guys are so good at what they do, I don’t have to be there,” he says. “I have one deal, and that’s trying for us to keep the money for us to race with. That’s my job. I don’t have to worry about the race car. I don’t have to worry about it being prepared. I don’t have to worry about them showing up because they all show up.”

A Georgia native who made his living owning and operating a handful of car dealerships in his home state for some 25 years, Ballew made his first foray into racing by sponsoring a dirt-track car at Georgia’s Dixie Speedway.

In 1994, he bought two Cup series cars that were retooled as entries for the Automobile Racing Club of America Series and finished third at Atlanta Motor Speedway in his first start with driver Mark Gibson.

“I was line, hook and sinker then,” Ballew says. “I thought that was really, really cool.”

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Jared Turner

SceneDaily.com

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