CONCORD, N.C. — In the 35-year history of the American Sprint Car Series, only a handful of names have remained consistent in each decade. And even fewer in the modern era.
But visit any national ASCS event and you’re likely to still see veteran mechanic Bobby Craft working with the best sprint car talent in the country.
Since the mid-1970s, the Oklahoma City native has been a sprint car crew member and car chief, helping to squeeze the speed out of sprint cars from the Saturday night speedways of Oklahoma to the ironmen of the World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series.
In his 50-plus year career, he’s collected numerous feature wins and earned multiple national sprint car series championships. Many of them coming with some of the biggest names in the sport – Kinser, Bell, Maier, Wright, Hafertepe, to name only a small selection.
Today, Craft follows the American Sprint Car Series schedule as crew chief of the BG Automotive No. 16, driven by Colorado racer Austyn Gossel. Before establishing himself as one of the most reliable hands in the pits, Craft began forging his love for the open-wheel machines as a youngster himself.
“As a child, there was a car down the street. I’d go down there and hang out,” Craft said. “I just got interested in it and started going to the racetrack. I got to be really good friends with a guy there at home. He had a car and we worked on it at night and we’d go and race it, and I just went up from there.”
Craft mostly kept his wrenches around home until the mid-1980s when he joined the Nance Speed Equipment house car team, then driven by Texas native Bob Ewell. The famed No. 1n machine was a competitive force throughout the 1980s in an era of booming sprint car mechanical engineering.
“All the major chassis brands back then were involved, and all of us raced against each other,” Craft said. “We gained a lot of respect for each other doing it, just the local guys. Shane Carson drove one of the cars, Bob Ewell drove one, Mike Peters drove one. It was pretty tough competition.”
Craft’s next big ticket came in the early 1990s, when he went to work as part of Garry Lee Maier’s operation. The Cimarron, Kan.-native rode a wave of success at the local, regional and national levels in that time, highlighted by a season of over 40 feature wins in under 60 starts during the 1991 season. That year also brought championships with NCRA and IMCA as well as seven track championships.
“We really just couldn’t do any wrong, it was a phenomenal year,” Craft recalled. “We just had everything together.
“[IMCA] was a claimer deal, and they claimed your engine if you won, usually. I think we lost 14 engines that year.”
Another banner year for Craft and Maier came in 1992, when they won 17 features in the inaugural season of ASCS, in addition to the second annual 360 Knoxville Nationals — one of the biggest accomplishments in both of their careers to that point.
“We struggled on that deal a little bit; we had a magneto go out and had to go to the back,” Craft said. “We just had a lot of trouble. But we pulled it off. After we won that deal, Gaerte [Racing Engines] gave us an engine and Maxim [Chassis] gave us a car, and that’s how we got to go run ASCS. We wouldn’t have been able to run ASCS if that hadn’t happened.”
After climbing to the top of the 360 sprint car world, Craft earned perhaps his biggest role on the crew of Karl Kinser Racing in 1996. Craft helped wrench driver Mark Kinser to a career-high 35 feature wins with the World of Outlaws that year and his first championship, as well as his first triumph in the world’s most prestigious dirt track race — the Knoxville Nationals.
Little introduction is needed with a last name like Kinser, but Craft vividly recalls the ways of Karl — often regarded as one of the brightest minds in sprint car racing history — and the genius of the cars he put on track.
“Mark was a really, really good guy. Karl was a Superman,” Craft said. “He wanted to race and win, and that’s all it was about. Everything was about winning.”
Craft returned to Kinser’s team for the 1997 World of Outlaws season, which saw Mark compile another impressive total of 29 feature wins in 87 starts. That year, Mark also took up an opportunity to go NASCAR Truck Series racing and did not race every event on the World of Outlaws schedule.
This situation produced a memorable night at Tri-State Speedway in Indiana, when Karl tapped another Kinser family member, Kelly, to take Mark’s place in the seat of the No. 5m. Craft recalls the May evening well — which turned sour quickly and never quite recovered after crashes in the Heat Race, B-Main and the Feature — but he mostly remembers Karl’s never-give-up leadership, especially during the most stressful nights at the track.
“We’re leaving out of the pit area and Karl starts shaking our seats in the truck he goes, ‘Man, that was some fun racin’ right there. That was as fun as it could be,’” Craft recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean, have you lost your mind?’
“We went home, built a new car, and later on that week he said, ‘Man, I had to get y’all cheered up somehow. It ain’t every night we get to go to the race track and front ends in our car, rear ends in the car and race. There are other sides to this deal than just winning all the time.’”
With sharpened skills from the grind of the World of Outlaws circuit, Craft returned to the 360 ranks at the turn of the century and joined four-time ASCS champion Gary Wright’s team for the 1999, 2000 and 2001 seasons. These years were as fruitful as ever for the native Texan, earning 25 ASCS feature wins.
“He was just a natural talent,” Craft said. “Anything he did — playing pool, golf, racing. He was just so good.
“That Gary Wright, he was just in a class of his own.”
In addition to the legends of sprint car racing, Craft has also worked with the next generation of motorsports stars. The most notable of which is Christopher Bell, who was only a teenage rising star in the open-wheel world when he went to drive for car owner Brandon Berryman in the early 2010s.
Craft was working as the crew chief for Berryman’s operation when Bell was racing his first full seasons in sprint cars. When Bell hopped in the seat of the No. 31B, they took on races at many different tracks and with multiple series, including ASCS, most notably winning the 2014 running of the prestigious Short Track Nationals at I-30 Speedway.
“We tried to go hit all the big money races,” Craft said. “I think Bell was through the NASCAR Truck deal before we won the Short Track Nationals, he won $15,000, and I think that was more money than he had made running any truck or anything until he had got in our car. We had a really good time racing together.”
Before they had joined forces in sprint cars, Craft helped build the Midget that Bell raced in his Chili Bowl Nationals debut. Bell has never forgotten the time and effort Craft put into helping develop his skills from the beginning of his rise to superstardom, and to this day, is not shy about taking care of his fellow Oklahoman.
“We went to Las Vegas (Motor Speedway) this year and I went down on pit road with him and all that,” Craft said. “We were out there and there were quite a few people standing around and he introduced me as being the first crew chief he ever had. That was pretty special.”
After Bell ascended into the top divisions of NASCAR, Craft concluded the 2010s with a fruitful stint as car chief for Sam Hafertepe Jr. during the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Hafertepe, riding the momentum of three consecutive national ASCS championships, hired Craft and won 18 ASCS features and two more national championships in that span.
“He works so hard,” Craft said of Hafertepe. “What he gets done is because of his work ethic. It helps his driving, it helps everything. He can do anything on that car. He can weld it; he can do anything he needs to do to keep it going.”
Now at the half-century mark making a living on the wrenches, Craft continues to pursue his passion at the track. For as many miles as he’s traveled on the open-wheel racing highway, he’s learned a lot of things.
But none more than about the grind of motorsports. And life itself.
“When you’re winning, it’s easy,” Craft said. “But if you’re crashing and working on the cars, building cars all the time, that’s when it’ll eat at you.
“It ain’t all glory.”
