“I told him I had just committed to race with Ronnie. So, he asked me what I did when I wasn‘t racing, and I told him I was a machinist. He said, ‘Well, I have this oil well service company and we are diversifying and buying CNC machines.‘ The next thing you know I am on a plane to Louisiana to check out his machine shop and I ended up moving down there. They made me a good offer. He had a driver named Michael Dupuy driving for him, and Jeff Walker was his crew chief. Ronnie had an apartment and Jeff would fly down to Louisiana to work for him and stay with me. That year I would road trip up to Little Rock to race on
Saturday for Pitts.”
The Pitts car was a good ride, and his job was going well. Then, consistent with a repeating theme in his life, suddenly he was scrambling again, this time due to tragic circumstances. “Joe, Walker, and Dupuy went down to East Bay Raceway and won the opening night of the King of the 360‘s race. Things were going well on the track and Joe‘s business was going well too. Then the guy committed suicide. I mean it was a complete shock. This guy was a mover and a shaker and had all this positive stuff going.” After mulling things over, he decided to move back to Tulsa, he latched on to a job in a machine shop, and still raced on the weekends. Then a crash at West Memphis put the car on the sidelines, and Pitts decided it was time to take a break.
Once again, his networking skills came to the fore. He was contacted by Shawn Peterson, whose Print Place Motorsports team had Hall of Fame mechanic Kenny Woodruff as a consultant and talented Kevin Ramey was also on the scene. So, after an audition, Taylor was offered a chance to move to Dallas, take care of the extensive racing stable, and have a chance to drive at times as well. “It was a World of Outlaw program basically on the local level,” he says. “It was a pretty bucks up deal. I gave that deal a shot and it wasn‘t the best fit. I don‘t know how else to say it.
“Again, I am going to be making another move and for me it was going to be like my fourth in three years. I was getting to be 30, 31 years old and I realized that I had to go somewhere where I can live and race, work, and be happy and in a good environment. At the time I was a VIP over at U Haul and on their frequent user program.”
In 2012, Taylor attended the Performance Racing Industry show in Indianapolis and on the way back to Oklahoma decided to swing by builder and engine wizard Tim
Engler‘s shop in Princeton, Indiana. In his words, he invited himself to work there and found a willing audience. Amazingly, he found himself doing CNC work on custom pulling tractors. He found sprint car work when Justin Grant accepted a ride with Jeff Walker, leaving an empty seat in Mark Hery‘s car. Justin, who was great friends with the Herys, would return a year later.
Taylor was still working with Tim Engler when he headed to the Knoxville Nationals to scrape mud and help Dale Blaney on his car. The two had met through chassis builder George Fisher and had become good friends. In May, 2014 Blaney informed him of a possible deal. He said he had received a call from an owner who had designs on getting Dave Blaney to drive his sprint car. There was one problem. Dave was still active on the NASCAR circuit. In the most innocuous way imaginable, Taylor sent owner Jason Fausey a message via Facebook expressing an interest in the ride.
The next thing you know he is traveling to Fremont and Attica, Ohio on a regular basis. For several years they ran a full schedule and Taylor had a memorable night in 2015 when he ran second to Donny Schatz in a World of Outlaw tilt at Eldora.
It was great to be this active, but in the 2015 season he was slated to do 55 races and the trip from Princeton, Indiana to Fremont, Ohio was six and a half hours long. He did the math. The decision was made to move to the Indianapolis area where he found work with Chris Paulsen at C&R Racing. In 2016, Fausey decided to scale back his racing program to around 18 dates, and this time Taylor found it more difficult to fill in the gaps.
Then he got another unexpected opportunity. A friend from Texas named Kolt Walker was a car chief for Scott Speed, who was racing in rallycross for Andretti Autosport. They needed help and Walker asked Taylor to swing by and have a look. It got his attention. “I mean it was the Andretti shop and it was race car heaven,” he says. “It was an improvement in lifestyle, travel and money, so I decided to go to work there. I had always had jobs that worked around my race schedule. Now I was racing around my work schedule.
“I was working for a race team and that was a bit different. There would be 22 guys on the podium. I was getting flown to races and staying in nice hotels and not rolling around in the dirt working on a car.” Things went well, and there was plenty of success, but by 2018 the brass in Germany who were behind the program pulled the plug. Luckily, Gary had formed a relationship with Jarret Andretti and had actually lent a hand on his sprint car program. Jarrett was about to switch gears and Taylor was soon along for the ride. Andretti was making a move towards sports cars, and early returns indicated this fit him well. Taylor was soon working with Jarrett on his McLaren, and would become a chief mechanic on the LMP3 car.
Because the travel requirements were less onerous than what one finds in NASCAR or IndyCar, Taylor was still finding time to compete. Thus, in the early days of the 2021 season Taylor was racing Joe and Diane Seeling‘s winged sprint car, primarily in Ohio, and things were going exceedingly well.
He bagged a win at Waynesfield Raceway Park in April, and in the early going led the FAST series points. With crew chief Andy Porter getting his car ready, it was an unusual arrive and drive situation for a hands-on racer. Then work ramped up at Andretti Autosport and he was forced to step away from the car. It wasn‘t a fun choice to make.