During the height of the economic crisis that ravaged the U.S. economy in 2008, Tommy Baldwin was in buying mode.
Baldwin, a longtime NASCAR crew chief who had been with multiple teams over the late 1990s and early 2000s, had seen his most recent team, Bill Davis Racing, shut down a week before Christmas. Few other good crew chief jobs were available in the industry so Baldwin decided to take a leap of faith into the ownership world. He founded his eponymous team, which started racing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 2009.
“Basically, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. … I took a good look at the economy, which seven or eight years ago was going into the tank, and there were some teams closing up,” Baldwin said. “But I felt it also allowed the opportunity for me to buy some good race cars, good equipment and get some good people cheap to get started. So I felt that, yes, the economy was bad, but the timing was right to start something at that time.”
Eight years later, Tommy Baldwin Racing is still standing, and it just received a major boost by receiving one of NASCAR’s 36 charter member agreements, the new structure designed to grow enterprise value for owners.
“If you look over the last eight years since we started, a lot of teams have come and went since then,” Baldwin said.
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| Photo by: Jim Fluharty |
“It’s pretty hard doing this stuff, especially the way we started it. There was a lot of pride swallowed, a lot of humble days for sure. When we got in, we took a lot of chances, week in, week out, where there was no thought process on what was going to happen two weeks from now because we had to worry about what was happening this week. So now, we’re looking out four, five years from now already, and it’s really good to have those conversations with sponsors and prospective investors and NASCAR.”
Baldwin also once briefly owned a team in the former NASCAR Busch Series. The Long Island, N.Y., native’s love for racing comes naturally. His father was a former NASCAR modified division champion.
Baldwin said the stability offered by the charter member agreement is “allowing us to take chances to make our race team better. We’re 30 full people strong; there’s 500 people or 600 people at these big teams. You have to make sure you’re [living] within your expenses and budgets to stay alive, and I think we’ve done a really good job of doing that over the years.
“I’m not going to sit here and lie — we’ve had a lot of Mondays that were pretty scary. But we’re here, we know we’re going to be here for a long time now, so it’s time to talk business now.”
