With four teams working on setups, it stands to reason that Williamson’s success translates to more knowledge for his father to share with the hundreds of others who race Bicknells, sort of a “house car times four” setup.
Williamson cracks a big smile when the subject is broached, saying, “Yeah, I try to tell my dad that. He mostly agrees. There’s some stuff, obviously, that you want to keep to yourself and don’t want to tell the customers, but, basically, you have to have an open setup book.
“When we travel, my dad is just a phone call away and he helps me out as much as he can. At the big races he’s busy with customers, but so far we’ve been good and haven’t had to rely on him that much.”
With his home a long way from the central New York dirt tracks, Williamson surprised many a few years ago and got his feet wet in big-block modified racing by heading south.
“We went down to western Pennsylvania and won four Lernerville championships in five years,” Williamson recalled. “It was the easiest option to go big-block racing close to home. We had to choose between Lernerville and Brewerton and we chose Lernerville. It’s a beautiful track and I miss going there.
“It puts a hindrance on everything when you have to drive two-and-a-half hours to race in central New York,” Williamson noted. “It takes away a lot of time you could spend in the shop. And that’s on top of the time we spend crossing the border. They’re good to us because we always have all the right paperwork, but you still have to get in line and go through the process.”
Orange County Fair Speedway is even further away, but Williamson’s August ride to the five-eighths-mile track in Middletown, N.Y., more than paid off as he claimed an unheard of prize for a modified race, one that most pundits had ceded to pre-race favorites Hearn, Sheppard and Friesen.
“I wasn’t surprised at all that we won,” Williamson related. “Jeff and Harry gave me the best car we could have and made all the right calls. You need some luck in racing and that night, things fell our way. I knew we had a good motor in a good car, though, I have to say that I was nervous when we had the big crash and the rain delay.
“You get worried about how the car will work when the surface changes, but it turned out we were as good after it rained as we were before the long delay.”
Like archrival Eric Rudolph, Williamson runs both the Super DIRTcar Series big-block and 358 modified series, though, he prefers the big blocks.
“I like the big block better, just because you can get yourself out of trouble with the motor, which makes the racing more fun,” he said. “But the small blocks are fun, too. Every series has its own little niche.”
With longtime DIRTcar stars Hearn and Billy Decker winding down great careers, many see Williamson and Rudolph taking their place atop the DIRTcar hierarchy.
But a query on that point puts Williamson into high gear.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Matt Sheppard will be here for a long time. Stewart Friesen is great and it’s not like they’re old. Right now, when you get to a race track, they’re the two you have to beat. Eric is very good and it’s fun to race with him most of the time. Fortunately, we get to do it every Friday night at Ransomville with our small block.”
“Mat was good early in the year, but from mid-August on he’s been tremendous,” offered Rudolph. “His dad brought him up the right way. He knows how to race and being there at the factory sure doesn’t hurt.”
Sheppard has dominated the big-block series in recent years and he also runs a Bicknell chassis.
“Matt’s good everywhere he unloads and I think people expect him to win, whatever he drives, so it’s tough to sell cars off his record,” Williamson added. “But people don’t expect us to win the big ones, so when we do, it definitely helps sell cars.”
It looks like the Bicknell shop crew should gear up for a big winter fabrication season.