Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: Kroyer, Gaughan rev their engines

Friday, Jan. 11, 2002 | 10:36 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand's motor sports notebook appears Friday. Reach him at bh@lasvegassun.com or 259-4089.

When Brendan Gaughan turned down a full-time ride this season with one of the top NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series teams in favor of his own Orleans Racing team, some racing observers thought the 26-year-old may have been guilty of wearing his helmet a little too tight.

After all, Gaughan was turning down a team that won five races and had 16 top-10 finishes in 24 races in 2001 and was a contender for the Truck Series championship.

But Gaughan said he has a secret weapon in his Las Vegas-based team that he wouldn't have had at any other organization: The top engine builder in racing.

Kevin Kroyer, who is a partner with Michael Gaughan in Kroyer Racing Engines, has been building the younger Gaughan's engines since he started his racing career in 1991 with Walker Evans Racing. Besides having a hand in 16 championships in 12 years with Evans' team, Kroyer built all the engines for Gaughan's NASCAR Winston West championships in 2000 and 2001.

During his two championship seasons, Gaughan won eight races and -- amazingly -- did not suffer one engine failure. As a result, Kroyer has won the series' Clevite Engine Builder of the Year award each of the past two years.

"In my entire time with Kevin, in 10 years of racing with Kevin Kroyer's engines, I can only remember probably three motors that have blown up in a race," Gaughan said. "I know that Kevin is one of the best at what he does.

"Before he came here, he was entertaining offers to go be the number-two guy at big (NASCAR Winston) Cup shops, big Indy Car shops, but ... Kevin is better than a number-two guy. I definitely would not be as comfortable (racing) if he wasn't building my motors."

Kroyer, who works out of a 10,000-square-foot shop in the Las Vegas Motor Speedway Research and Development Park, said his success as an engine builder comes from his 13 years of experience in the field -- and a little luck.

"There is a certain amount of racing luck that you can't explain, so the racing gods have to be on your side," Kroyer admitted. "But we also put a lot of work into what we do. Most of it is a knowledge base; you pick up a lot of knowledge and experience over the years."

Gaughan, on the other hand, said that Kroyer makes his own luck.

"In racing, luck is a lot of it but you've heard the saying 'you can make your own luck,' " Gaughan said.

"Jeff Gordon looks very lucky but they make a lot of their luck ... and we like to think we've been able to do some of the same things here. We've built a lot of our own luck. The guys work hard to make sure that if you have a problem, there is a backup plan."

In addition to being the lone supplier of engines to Orleans Racing, Kroyer also does outside engine work for local race teams, Winston West and Southwest Series teams on the West Coast and has contracts to do engine work for several racing series, including the Toyota Atlantic Series and the Shelby Cobra Challenge Series.

His state-of-the-art shop is set up to do all of Gaughan's Truck Series engines this season but can handle virtually any racing series that is interested in his services.

"We can do anything with this shop -- all the way up to (the Indy Racing League)," Kroyer said. "That's our intended goal, to do NASCAR Winston Cup, IRL or any of the upper level series, and we can do it here with the facilities we have. (With a few more) engineers, we can do anything that anybody can do anywhere in the country."

Gaughan has said that his ultimate goal is to move up to the Winston Cup Series and run the team out of Las Vegas -- something Kroyer said is possible with today's technology.

"It's more realistic today than it was five or ten years ago," Kroyer said. "With the computers and the way you can transfer data across country ... it's certainly possible. The only thing you lose being in Las Vegas as opposed to being in Charlotte is the fact that there are 60 other teams doing it within an hour's radius of Charlotte.

"That's both a plus and a minus. The plus is that all the parts are readily available in that area but it's also a minus in the fact that if an employee gets mad at you in the morning, after lunch he might have a different job because there are always people looking for work back there. It also means that none of our secrets go down the street."

As far as Gaughan is concerned, Kroyer is the best-kept secret in the business.