SOUTH BOSTON, Va. — Race fans see a highly competitive Bobby McCarty who appreciates the opportunity to race against the best-of-the-best in Late Model Stock Car racing.
What they don’t see is the intensity and complexity of the Bobby McCarty that deftly navigates a pressure-filled world battling well-financed teams with full-time employees while trying to bring his family-owned race team victories and the status enjoyed by top-tier teams.
McCarty has driven for teams like Nelson Motorsports and R&S Race Cars, teams with solid finances and full-time employees.
Among his achievements are being a two-time winner of the Thunder Road Harley-Davidson 200 at South Boston Speedway and winning the Virginia Late Model Triple Crown. He has won three CARS Tour championships, is a two-time winner of the Rodney Cook Classic, and has won the Thanksgiving Classic.
Life is different today.
Since forming McCarty Motorsports in November of 2024 and moving from a 20-by-20-foot building to a 7,000 square-foot shop with a surface plate, McCarty continues to face a different set of challenges, battles, and pressures from those when he drove for other teams.
“The biggest difference is if I don’t do the work, the work doesn’t get done,” McCarty explained. “If I don’t get the work done, we show up at the racetrack unprepared, and when you’re not prepared you can’t win races. I don’t care if I’m tired or not, what needs to be done needs to be done at 110 percent of my ability.”
That translates into a grueling schedule for the veteran racer.
“I’m pushing 15 to 18 hours a day at work, and then go work on the racecar. I function on very, very minimal sleep. Sleep and I have never really gotten along. I average three to four hours of sleep a night, but it’s been that way my whole life. It’s just the way I am.”
He has transformed physically by working out in the gym and staying in shape. His continued physical conditioning helps give him the stamina to sustain the long hours and exhausting work.
“There is no way I’d be able to do this if I was at my old weight,” he pointed out. “At my old weight, it basically wouldn’t happen.”
There is also the advantage the bigger teams have regarding car chassis setup notes.
“I’m on page one of my book, and those guys with the big teams are on page 10 or 15 or whatever, so to speak,” McCarty noted. “Those other guys have been running their own deal for many years, and they’ve had the same guys building and working on their equipment. They have more notes, more information to go off of in setting up their car.”
The differences McCarty faces extend to the pressure to perform.
“I put a ton of pressure on myself from the aspect of just being in some of the best equipment that is at the race track,” he said. “When I was in the Nelson Motorsports car or the R&S house car, everybody knew this was top-notch equipment, and you should be winning. I would keep telling myself that over and over.”
Today’s pressure is different, and it’s ramped up to another level.
“The pressure I put on myself is way higher than anything I’ve ever felt before,” he noted. “I’m extremely hard on myself. I hold myself to a different level of accountability because of my past results. It’s just knowing what you’ve done, the past results, the wins, the championships — what you’re capable of when you go out there.
“It keeps coming back to the same sentence – you’re better than that,” he continued. “The next week or so, or at least until the next race, I’m constantly kicking myself. I’m not in the right state of mind, extremely upset. I keep coming back to that same sentence – you’re better than that.”
McCarty could have raced more aggressively at times but refrained.
“There have been a ton of scenarios this year where I could have gotten a little bit more aggressive and picked up a couple of spots,” McCarty pointed out, “but I go back to that same sentence – I’m better than that. I don’t need to use my car as a weapon to increase spots on the race track.”
To some fans, McCarty has been seen as driver that wears the “black hat” – a hardcore aggressive driver with an attitude.
McCarty owns it. He explains it has resulted from his earliest racing experiences while racing go-karts. Younger than a lot of his fellow competitors, he won more races than many of his counterparts.
“I’ve had other kids’ parents, when I was eight-years-old, cuss me like a dog, following me around the infield, and shoot me the rod,” he explained. “That left its mark on me, and I decided quickly I really don’t care what you think. I’m here to race, and I’m here to win. I don’t care about your feelings. I don’t care what you think about how I race.”
“I’m going to race you hard and I’m going to race you clean,” he continued. “I don’t go out there looking to cause issues with people. I’m here to race, and if I get the same treatment back, I’m all for it, let’s race. Once I feel you’ve disrespected me on the racetrack I can’t let go of it. It’s always in the back of my mind.”
It was that way with his attitude about racing fans.
“I don’t care if you like me,” he added. “If you cheer for me, great. If you boo me, I promise that makes me better. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it’s been. When I see somebody hanging over the fence, cuss me, or whatever that just lights a fire. I think it just comes from the stuff that was going on at a very young age and I really didn’t know how to process it.”
The “black hat” image is progressively fading.
“There are a lot more cheers now,” he pointed out. “It’s kind of weird. I’ve never been a guy that got cheered for. I don’t know how to feel about it, but it’s a good thing.”
The pressure also follows McCarty home.
“People just don’t really understand, but you put so much time and effort into this stuff, and I’m not in the greatest moods all the time,” he noted. “I’m tired. I’m ill. I’m being frustrated with some of our results and unfortunately my wife, Brooke, catches the blow of a lot of this stuff.
“She’s a trooper,” he continued. “She grew up in racing, her dad raced, her brother raced, and her grandmother was really big into racing. She knows the drill, but it doesn’t make it right.”
The struggles and sacrifices of a racing wife are not easy. Brooke works and takes care of her husband and two children, six-year-old daughter, Hadley, and 15-year-old son, Conner.
Racing has been a part of her family life for 30 years. She knows what to expect and deals with it accordingly.
“I’ve grown up in it,” she explained. “It’s been my life the last 30 years.”
She takes a step back when her husband is not in a good frame of mind.
“I fix his favorite dinner and hope he has time to eat,” she said. “When he’s ready to talk, he will talk to me about whatever it is. I don’t push him because he gets irritated even more. He gets irritated with himself trying to figure out what he can do to make the car better or what he’s doing wrong. He puts a lot of pressure on himself. That’s when I struggle because I don’t like to see him doubt himself whenever it comes to the race car.”
Simply being there for her husband works wonders.
“He will be at the race shop, and I can tell he’s having a rough week or whatever,” Brooke said. “So, I go down to the race shop. Whether it’s me cleaning the car, letting Hadley run around and play, as long as we’re there his whole demeanor changes. As long as I’m there and Hadley’s there, and he has somebody to just throw out random questions to, he’s good.
“I try to get us all down there to the shop at least once a week so we can just kind of chill,” she added. “I’ll go get dinner or something. I like being down there, so it’s a very big family thing now.”
When the wins finally came along, it was an emotional experience for McCarty. Tears welled up in Bobby McCarty’s eyes as he brought his car to a stop in Victory Lane after winning the second race of the twin 75-lap races at South Boston Speedway on April 4. He sat quietly in his car for a couple of minutes sharing the victory with his wife on an emotional Facetime call. It was his first win with his family-owned McCarty Motorsports race team which was formed in November, 2024.
“Since I work on Saturdays, I was unable to go to the race,” Brooke said. “It was emotional for me just because I could see how happy he was. It made me really proud of him and the team, just because of how much they put into it.”
When McCarty won his second race in July, there was another emotional Facetime call.
“I was dog-sitting for a friend at work,” Brooke explained. “So, I watched that one on Flo. Our daughter wasn’t there that day. She had been watching the race with me and was getting very emotional because she loves being at the racetrack. Seeing her dad in victory lane made her very emotional. She wanted to Facetime him, so we Facetimed him after the race and let her talk to him. Whenever we’re not there, we watch on Flo. If he wins, we call him. If not, we text him.”
McCarty has put together a solid 2026 season at South Boston Speedway. He stands fifth in the track’s Hitachi Energy Late Model Stock Car Division point standings entering the 100-lap race that will headline the Davenport Energy Race Night on Saturday night, August 22.
He has earned three wins and now has 11 career Late Model wins at the .4-mile oval. In addition, he has seven top-five finishes and 13 top-10 finishes in his 16 starts this season.
“After the first win it was kind of like ‘wow, we did it,’ McCarty said. “The second win was ‘alright, now we have a multiple race win season.’ If you get one win in a season it’s easy to look at the stats and say ‘well, we probably got lucky.’ But, when you start stacking two, three, or four wins in one season people see it as ‘well, you know, they’ve got good stuff.’”
With two wins in his last three starts the feeling is that the car is headed in the right direction.
“It’s hard to say for sure we’ve got it figured out,” McCarty said. “I have a gut feeling that we’re close. We’re knocking on the door now versus still being out in the front yard.”
While McCarty’s goal is to produce good results for the 2026 season, he also has his eyes cast toward the future.
Noting previous injuries, two rotator cuff surgeries in the past three years, and being banged up in the recent Hampton Heat, he said “I really don’t know how much longer I can do this. I just know that if I take a pretty good hit it is going to do me in for a while.
“It is for my future, and really for our team, for me to be able to go out there and win races. I want to prove to everybody that our program can win races. I know my days are numbered, and, at some point, I want to get out of the seat and put somebody else in it. You’ve got to prove your stuff is good and capable of winning to do that.”
