That was the only financial figure Mullins was willing to divulge when discussing how much it really costs to run the ARCA race at Daytona. The total bill likely far exceeds the amount of money most regular Americans will see in a year, perhaps even two.
Can Mullins afford to spend that kind of money? He works hard. He’s the owner of an automotive repair shop called Bugsy’s Auto. The business does a lot of work on local trash trucks for a company called County Waste, which keeps Mullins busy when he isn’t thrashing on his race car.
In reality, Bugsy’s Auto is what allows Mullins to race at Daytona once a year. Without the money his business generates, Mullins likely wouldn’t be at the race track at all.
“The guys are back in the shop right now trying to get these trucks turned around,” Mullins told us in February at DIS. “That’s our main objective. We’ve got to get the trash off the street so we’ve got to make sure the trucks are running. We’re very fortunate with Mr. Scott (Earl) from County Waste that we’ve been able to have a good partnership. They believe in us and they trust us, so we work hard to give them the product that they want and have people there to fulfill what they need.”
Venturini says he tries to run his team like the small operation it once was.
“We still use a lot of the same stuff that helped us survive,” Venturini said. “We use a lot of that in just a bigger team mentality now. A lot of teams that are multi-car, each team kind of runs separate. We kind of still have that small family approach where every single person in my shop works on every single car that goes out the door.
“We communal everything we do, from setup, we have one guy who paints all the cars, we have two guys who do all the decaling, we have one guy who makes sure all the trailers are loaded,” he added. “It’s just a communal approach and I think that’s the big difference on this big team than a lot of other big teams.
“When you’re a small team you have to do everything because it’s just forced on you. When we took the big- team approach, we just multiplied what we all did, but took a lot of the mentality and philosophy and passed it on to a bigger team.”
Another challenge Venturini says is balancing the books to make sure he can keep all of his employees paid year-round.
“If you’ve got 20 or 21 total employees here, how do you keep 21 employees employed for 365 days? It’s easy to keep them employed for 280. The point is how do I keep them employed for 365,” Venturini said. “That’s the most challenging part.”
In reality, the Venturini Motorsports approach is similar to that of Mullins Racing.
“We sit here and we’re thankful for all the people we have around us,” Mullins said. “That’s why I can’t get on these guys and I can’t be an asshole to them. These are guys who give up their free time to help me. They don’t have to do this for me.”
Venturini isn’t about to give up any secrets to help the little guys catch up.
“Let ’em go figure it out. It only took me 20 years,” he said. “I say that a little bit in jest. Some of those up-and-coming teams, they can put race cars out there that are really, really good and fast and can become comparable in speed with us. Not usually at every race track, but at certain race tracks.
“Usually, where we always seem to get ahead of them is all the other intangibles that go along with it,” Venturini added. “Pit strategy, pit stops, the limited amount of failures, those upstart teams have a lot more of those problems. They can get it right on a certain day and run really well, but I think where we’ve always been able to one-up them is just knowing where everything can go wrong because we’ve been doing it so long. We may not know everything to do right, but we know where things go wrong.”
Mullins knows he’ll never be a full-time racer and he’ll never chase an ARCA championship. The few races he is able to run require hard work, with long hours tacked on to a day where he’s already worked a full shift at Bugsy’s Auto. He’ll even admit he often hates spending the money it takes to race, but life is about more than money.
“It’s frustrating that we have a budget, we can’t spend more than we can afford because all of our bills come first,” Mullins said. “It’s something I wrestle with every day when we’re down here racing. I hate spending the money, but I like the camaraderie and the competition and being able to be competitive.”
It takes a lot for Mullins Racing to hit the track and be competitive against teams like Venturini Motorsports, but doing so may be the best reward. For Venturini Motorsports, its teams like Mullins Racing that serve as a reminder of where they came from and why they have to keep working harder.
Both teams have their place in the ARCA Menards Series garage and the series is better with them in it.