Lifelong Friend
While Scelzi was still on training wheels, Jimmy Carr already had years of accomplishment behind him as a sprint car driver. A native of Vancouver, B.C., Carr began his own driving career at Washington‘s Skagit Speedway and also made forays into Northern California to race with the Northern Auto Racing Club, now known as the King of the West/Fujitsu Series.
“I would go down to California when they raced two nights in a row and then would make the drive back to Vancouver (a 16-hour tow) to go back to work on Monday,” Carr explained.
The soft-spoken Carr modestly describes his record as a driver as “all over the place, a lot like Dominic‘s in his early years.”
A year on the road earned Carr the rookie-of-the-year honors with the World of Outlaws in 1991, after he finished eighth in the standings, one spot ahead of Sammy Swindell and one behind Steve Beitler.
But among top-flight racers, Carr is well known for his talent as a sprint car whisperer. As a crew chief, he has won races with some of the best in the business, including Chistopher Bell, Kyle Larson, Carson Macedo, Paul McMahan, Johnny Herrera, Kraig Kinser, and most notably Danny Lasoski, who is responsible for Carr‘s relationships with the Scelzi family.
“I go back to before he was born,” said Carr. “I met Gary at the same time as Lasoski and we‘ve been friends of the family ever since. I remember Dominic playing in the dirt with Brandon, Danny‘s kid.”
One of Dominic‘s earliest baby pictures is of him sitting in the seat of Carr‘s sprint car, an almost mystical foretelling of their future together.
For most of the last 20 years, Carr lived in Indianapolis managing the sprint car shop for Tony Stewart Racing and working as his crew chief on the road. But after nearly four decades in the sport, Carr was looking for a slower pace and a change of scenery. He was interested in returning to the Sierra Nevada mountains near Fresno, a landscape similar to the semi-rural environment of his native western Canada. He envisioned rides on mountain roads on his Harley with a fishing rod over his shoulder.
“My wife, Judy, is from here and she wanted to come back home and that was fine with me,” Carr explained. “I have a lot of attachments to the area I‘m in now. I drove for Don Berry couple of times. I drove for Morrie Williams and for Dennis Roth, so I have lots of friends nearby. We knew we wanted to come back west, maybe Arizona,” he added. “So, when they (the Scelzi family) approached me, it was a no-brainer.”
By then, Scelzi the driver and Scelzi the dad realized they needed someone to rescue a racing program that was as lost as a sled dog in a blizzard.
“In 2012 and ‘13 I had a really good years,” Dominic Scelzi said. “I won some races and beat some good guys in bigger events. In 2014, my brother (Gioivanni, now racing sprint cars full time with the World of Outlaws) and I were doing it on our own with fill-in help and didn‘t really have crew chief.”
Peter Murphy stepped in to help near the end of that year, which got the team on more stable footing before Scelzi‘s momentum came to a crashing halt. His car came to a thudding stop after flipping across turn one at Tulare‘s Thunderbowl, ironically during the Peter Murphy Classic.
“I fractured six vertebrae in my back while I was leading the NARC championship,” Scelzi recalled, marking a low point both physically and emotionally.
“Even when I was leading the points I just couldn‘t win,” Scelzi noted. “I just felt like I was wasting my time. I was pretty much at an all-time low point and didn‘t think I was ever going to have any success.”
By then, he had seriously discussed quitting by the end of the year with Gary and Julie, who technically owned the team.
“I told my parents that we need to stop wasting money and do something else because I‘m just not getting it,” Scelzi recalled. “At that point I had gone a year and a half without winning a race and anybody that knows my dad knows he can be pretty freaking abrasive and it‘s not easy for him to lose and not win races.”
Shortly after that conversation, the fog began to lift just enough to encourage Scelzi to see a bit further down the road. He won a feature at Stockton.
“I thought maybe we keep going,” Scelzi added. “Then the next race I broke my back and lost the championship.”
In his first race back following the injury, he won at Hanford (Keller Auto Speedway). With a tailwind of two wins, Scelzi was encouraged again.
“I thought I got enough to be competitive, so how can I build on it? That was the turning point for me,” Scelzi admitted. “I figured out I couldn‘t do it on my own. I either needed to find the right people to put me in position to be successful or I have to figure out what it will take to be successful.”