While Labbe works with all of Toyota’s race teams across multiple disciplines, he spends most of his time focusing on Toyota Racing Development’s NHRA program. Toyota’s NHRA effort is spearheaded by Kalitta Motorsports, which fields cars in the Top Fuel and Funny Car divisions.
“One of the main things was to look over the NHRA program,” Labbe said. “They’ve had good success, but obviously they wanted someone to come in and just help the teams get better and make sure the teams are utilizing everything TRD had to offer.
“I try to go where there are issues, where I can offer up the most help, but the NHRA is my main objective.”
Labbe will be the first to admit he endured a steep learning curve when it came to NHRA drag racing.
“The cool thing about NHRA is when I started two years ago, I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “I was very, very vague to it and I walked into a time bomb. I had to learn a lot quick. So I realized I needed to talk to a lot of the mechanics, the crew chiefs and all the crew members just to understand how it all works.”
To help shorten the learning curve, Labbe worked with Kalitta Motorsports to build a Funny Car for the Toyota Racing Development team to have in its North Carolina headquarters.
“I worked with Chad Head and the people at Kalitta and I talked them into giving us a full Funny Car; chassis, body, engine, the whole thing,” Labbe explained. “So when I wanted to work on something as simple as the gas pedal, I could grab the design engineer, bring him out into the shop and say here is what I would like to work on and we’d have a discussion.
“That way they could see with their own eyes instead of trying to imagine it,” Labbe continued. “Things like that helped speed up the learning curve and it really drew a lot of interest from the people from the office when we first rolled that thing in there. They were seeing something completely different than they’d ever seen and they were really enamored with what they were seeing because it’s completely different.”
Labbe says the person that previously held his position prior to him was heavily focused on the electronics within the race cars. Labbe believes while that is an important part of any race car, his focus has been on other ways to improve performance.
“I’ve come in and taken a whole different mindset,” Labbe said. “Yes, I care about engines, but I really worry about all the other things to help them perform. We’ve done a few things (that Labbe declined to discuss) that have helped the teams excel and get better reaction times and better E.T. times.”
Obviously, the overall goal for Labbe is to improve the performance of the Toyota-supported NHRA teams. The opportunity to do so was one of the main reasons — outside of the lighter travel schedule — that made the TRD job appeal to him in the first place.
“The main thing for me is it’s great to have the opportunity to help all these teams with my knowledge and experience that I’ve had from the school of hard knocks, of living it and helping these guys succeed,” Labbe said.
Labbe’s hard work paid off last year when Kalitta Motorsports and driver J.R. Todd earned his first Funny Car championship. For Labbe, the chance to be part of winning a championship is a testament to the work ethic he brought with him when he moved to North Carolina.
“I moved away from Maine in 1989. I was a dumbass kid that had no college degree. I just knew that if I came south with my work ethic, that I could outwork everybody and I could learn really, really fast,” Labbe said. “So I took the chance. I moved away. I just wanted the opportunity to work in NASCAR it worked really, really well.
“I was fortunate to win championships. I’ve been fortunate to win the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 at Indy. To move over to NHRA and to be part of winning a championship was just something I never thought of.
“I feel very lucky to be a kid from Maine with a high school education … if you put your mind to doing something, you can accomplish anything.” n