Time For A Change
Gary Scelzi, whose fiery competitiveness burns as red-hot as a branding iron, shared his son‘s frustration.
“Unfortunately, there are winners and losers and I refuse to be a loser. I hate losing more than I like winning,” he admitted, expressing the same intense chase for perfection that took him to four championships in cars that are more like rockets on wheels.
“I‘ve been at this game a long time,” Gary Scelzi said. “I‘ve set records that have never been broken and won more races in a season than anybody. I‘ve won championships in the fastest classes that NHRA has. But I don‘t care how good you are, there is somebody out there finishing 10th or fifth that‘s working day and night to kick your ass, and someday they will do it.”
It‘s a philosophy that also carries over to how he runs his truck manufacturing business, Scelzi Enterprises.
“We have developed the best truck body, but it can‘t only be the best, it has to be perfect,” said Scelzi, who still wears one of his NHRA championship rings to work every day, not for his ego, but to remind him of the effort it takes to say on top.
He made the call to bring Carr into the fold, knowing he was looking for a change.
“I had always watched him and Danny and they always ended up in the top five or the top 10 no matter where they started,” Gary Scelzi said. “I needed somebody to be a crew chief who knew what they were doing.” Over the eight years that Dominic Scelzi had been racing, he had been through several, he recalled “and I felt none of them were willing to take the blame for the effort to give Dominic what he wanted because I knew what he could do.”
It was that environment that Carr stepped into when he agreed to join Scelzi in 2019, after the team had mixed success, as well as some astounding bad luck. In 2018, Scelzi broke his leg at the Dirt Cup at Skagit, losing a second realistic shot at the KWS title.
Despite the expectations and the optimism around Carr‘s arrival, the struggles continued into 2020 as the pair searched for a combination that would work.
“When I came in, I didn‘t want to tell Gary we couldn‘t race with his stuff, so we just took everything he had and tried to make it work, but we weren‘t getting any success at all,” Carr recalled. “Everything we tried just felt the same. There‘s a recipe for every car, but I had no recipe for the stuff he had.”
By midseason, they gave up and built a new car with a 410 engine that fit Dominic‘s driving style that Scelzi says, “immediately changed everything.”
Scelzi parlayed a fast race car into victories with the American Sprint Car Series, MOWA and the All Star Circuit of Champions.
There was also a second-place finish in the $20,000-to-win return of racing to South Dakota‘s Huset‘s Speedway.
“I should have won the damn race,” Scelzi said. “At that point, I was so happy to be running good, I didn‘t want to take any chances of crashing in the last couple of laps so I didn‘t take the chances I should have.”
Returning to California in September, the success continued, setting the stage for his championship year.