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“My wife, Betsy, recently gave me a speech. She said, ‘You need to slow down. You’re 50 years old and you’re still trying to do things like you’re 30 years old,’” Stuebgen said. “I really just have a kid that works part time at the shop, works at the counter, because he’s in college. He works maybe 20 hours a week, if that. At the end of the day, I don’t really know how I get it all done.
“Sometimes, unfortunately, I drop the ball a little bit and I forget about somebody who sent me a message at 9 o’clock at night needing something and then a couple days later they call and say they never got that thing, whatever part it was. I tell my wife all the time you’ve just gotta make shit happen. That’s basically what I live by. Sometimes you work eight hours in a day and sometimes you might have to work 14 hours in a day to make it all right.”
When asked what differentiates Indy Race Parts from its competitors, Stuebgen points to one simple goal.
“We just try to make sure everyone is happy at the end of the day,” he said. “If you have disgruntled customers, obviously, they’re not going to come back and they’re going to tell their buddies don’t ever go over there. We try to make sure we take care of everybody like they are family.
“You’ve got to enjoy what you do, and I love sprint car racing. I’m a fan of sprint car racing and I’m lucky enough to get to do something that I love and that makes it easier to take care of our customers. At the end of the day, every sprint car shop sells the same pieces and parts and the prices are virtually the same, so you’ve just got to offer some kind of a good-spirited sales pitch. We simply try to make sure everybody is happy.”
At times this season, fans may think they are seeing double with a pair of No. 71 Indy Race Parts sprint cars on the track. Stuebgen plans to have teenage sensation Gio Scelzi back behind the wheel of his car for select races. The car driven by Parker Price-Miller is not owned by Stuebgen, but sports the familiar green-and-black colors as part of a business arrangement.
“One day I want to run 10 races and then you get excited and you want to run 30 races,” Stuebgen said about his No. 71 sprint car. “We did 44 races last year and I just don’t know if I’ve got 44 races in me again, because I feel like if we do that many races I’m sacrificing some of my business time. Obviously, my business is the most important thing.
“We’ve got a couple of deals for Gio where we can go run a couple of different guys’ cars. We just show up, bolt his seat in and run their cars for them,” Stuebgen continued. “I’ll just be the crew chief and that will be a bit of relief for me because then it’s not like we have to get the 71 car ready.”
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