“My passion is building teams of great people,” Meyers noted. “It really doesn’t matter if that’s a race team, construction company, manufacturing company. It could be putting a library together. It’s about people that work hard, work to be great and are good to be around.”
To scratch the wild side, the 44-year-old Meyers has taken up snow skiing with his wife and three children, ages 16, 13 and 8.
“What’s fun for me though … I have that competitive drive, that desire to be on the edge of things,” he said. “I found snow skiing to be that thing, of that thrill of being on the edge of out of control. And I can do it with my family. I can teach my kids what it means to be focused, control your nerves and get your breath right to do those things.
“We probably ski between six to 12 times per year. We really enjoy Mammoth. And then we go up to Northstar. We’ve gotten to do some stuff in Colorado and Utah as well.”
Meyers has also built a winning winged sprint car team with 17-year-old Corey Day as the pilot.
“That bug doesn’t really get in me anymore,” Meyers said about possibly putting on a fire suit. “To be in that race car you have got to be 100 percent fully focused. I can’t do that anymore. It’d be impossible for me to maintain that type of focus.
“Maybe three or four years ago there was this piece of me that thought maybe it’d be fun to go hot lap. I did that. I had my time in that where I was fully focused and dedicated. Now, I’m fully focused and dedicated on other things.”
The pairing of Meyers and Day has been fruitful from the start as Day became the youngest driver to record a podium performance with the World of Outlaws less than four months after he turned 16 years old — the minimum age required to compete with the series.
“We’re going about it and seeing where its natural direction goes,” Meyers said. “It’s not like we have a plan to build an Outlaws team, but it’s making its way there. It’d require some corporate assistance and sponsorship to get us to the Outlaws level.
“The unseen pieces that need to be there and it all starts with a team. You have to have a great crew chief, which we have in Shane Bowers. We don’t have a full, full-time crew. The guys are spending their weekends and vacations away from work to make it all come together. We’ve built a really good engine program. Our chassis program and our mechanical program is where it needs to be. The team piece has a really good foundation we can continue to build on. We have some great partners, some really good sponsors. I think we’re building it the right way, slowly and with a strong foundation.”
Meyers’ 58 World of Outlaws feature victories put him 16th on the all-time list, and Day recently picked up a monumental win, earning his first World of Outlaws triumph during the famed Gold Cup Race of Champions at Silver Dollar Speedway in Chico, Calif. It’s an event Meyers won twice as a driver.
He was also a National Open winner at Williams Grove Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Pa., and finished second in two other crown jewel events — the Knoxville Nationals hosted by Knoxville Raceway in Knoxville, Iowa, and the Kings Royal at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway.
“Definitely the championship years,” Meyers responded when asked about the highlight of his driving career. “We had a few other special times. 2008 was one of my most successful years. We had a string in that year where we finished in the top three like 23 or 25 nights in a row. We had a great year, won a lot of races, ran second at the Nationals. That was really a great year.
“In 2011, we had a string where we won five races in a row. One of those included the National Open.”
Interestingly, Meyers doesn’t focus on race wins or championships while reminiscing about his time on the road.
“We’ve never displayed racing stuff in our home,” he said. “The race shop has all that stuff. If one of my daughter’s friends came over, they’d never know I was a race car driver. We did a man cave eight or nine years ago. What we hung in there was pictures of people we spent time with and made friendships with and our crews, the people who were a part of our team. We hung every crew uniform we had in those championship years. To me that was the family we built on the road.”
The importance of relationships has carried over into the business side with Meyers leading two thriving companies and a race team that is on the cusp of winning the NARC 410 Sprint Car Series championship.
“There are multiple ways to be rewarded in life,” he said. “A lot of people measure success in money. That’s an easy scoreboard. There are people who are being paid to sit on a couch. You might be being rewarded monetarily, but that’s not what we’re called to do in life. I’d argue that that’s not fulfilling. It doesn’t fulfill the human mind. I have my beliefs in God and we’re here to serve. I heard recently, ‘Your fruits grow on other people’s trees.’ I want to be part of building great things.
“I want my legacy to be that everything we ever set out to do we did it as good and as professional as possible and that we were the type of operation you wanted to be a part of or be like; that we raised the bar.”
This story appeared in the Oct 4, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
