Kyle Larson enjoyed one of his best days on Nov. 3, 2012.
The 20-year-old Elk Grove, Calif., native concluded his first year of asphalt stock car racing by winning the ARCA Menards Series East championship in fortuitous fashion at Rockingham (N.C.) Speedway.
A last-lap crash knocked Brett Moffitt out of the lead on the track and in the standings, enabling Larson to claim the title in his first foray away from dirt racing.
The sun-drenched autumn afternoon was equally as memorable for John Dodson, who had plenty of reason to celebrate. Dodson was thrilled because one of his engines powered Larson to the series championship.
More specifically, it was an engine built by his students.
Dodson, a NASCAR Cup Series championship-winning crewman for Rusty Wallace in 1989, had long since given up the weekly grind of NASCAR’s top echelon. The 2012 campaign marked Dodson’s 10th year at NASCAR Technical Institute, a Mooresville, N.C.-based school known for its exclusive status as a proving ground for prospective NASCAR crewmen, engineers and technicians.
Larson’s championship marked the first time a student-built engine from the Dodson-designed spec engine program won a title.
“We’ve had hundreds of winners — more than 100 wins through the years,” Dodson told SPEED SPORT. “Since Kyle won that title, hundreds of students have gone through the program to experience this.”
The “this” to which Dodson refers is a three-week program designed for the best of the best at NASCAR Tech, a division of the Universal Technical Institute. It’s “Top Gun” for aspiring NASCAR folks: students with a minimum 3.8 GPA and 98 percent professionalism grade are eligible for the program, which started in 2009 when students assembled an engine for Tom Busch, the father of NASCAR champions Kurt and Kyle Busch, as a favor to the racing patriarch.
Three years later, Dodson — the institute’s vice president of business alliances and NASCAR — spearheaded a program that enabled college-aged students to assemble, from the ground up, an engine for a championship-winning driver.
Things have only gotten better for the program — and, of course, for Larson — in the nine years since both claimed their maiden crown.
“I mean, we just feel like we’re a target (for great students),” Dodson said. “We also feel like we’re a target for Cup teams and engine companies. Years ago, (the late NASCAR Hall of Fame engine builder) Robert Yates would call me when we would start winning (with student-built engines) and tell me we were beating his guys. We were beating Joe Gibbs Racing’s guys. That’s a big deal for the students and the program.”
Perhaps no one realizes the magnitude of the engine program more than Darrell Hoffman.
A dirt racer and award-winning engine builder who traces his roots to Belleville, Ill. — home of the historic Belle-Clair Speedway — Hoffman joined NASCAR Tech in 2018 to teach the spec engine program.
Fittingly, the man who could build a racing engine faster than anyone else took on the responsibility of leading a comprehensive program which teaches its pupils to assemble the same machinery quicker and better than their counterparts.
Hoffman honed his power plant-producing skills with Pro Motor Engines, another Mooresville-based NASCAR engine builder. In 2008, Hoffman and colleague Dennis Borem took on 22 two-man teams of engine builders in the Mahle Engine Builder Showdown — a competition among dyno duos to see who could put together a fragmented 357-cubic-inch, small-block Ford NASCAR Cup Series racing engine in the shortest amount of time.
Hoffman and Borem didn’t simply win. They set a world-record time of 15 minutes, 59 seconds — eclipsing the previous mark by 26 seconds.
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