Some, such as Lavon Sparks, enjoy doing it all. With the first late model he built himself, Sparks won with it on his second night out. The 604 late model triumph occurred at East Alabama Motor Speedway in Phenix City, Alabama.
“I’ve been racing for 30 years [and] for years my goal was to build my own chassis,” Sparks, of Phenix City, Alabama, said. “I bit the bullet and did just that that.”
Sparks builds his own bodies for his cars, as well as super late model engines. With his latest endeavor, he made just about everything on his homemade chassis. The only exceptions were the lower A-frames and spindles, which came from Longhorn Chassis.
“It took four to five months to build the chassis,” said Sparks. “When you build a one-off, you build each piece individually. A lot more work goes into building [a chassis] than you would expect.”
While Sparks typically runs his own engines, he found his time limited after building the chassis. So, he bought a Chevrolet Performance 604 crate engine to power the car.
“I couldn’t concentrate on the chassis if I had to concentrate on building a motor at the same time,” Sparks said. “[In addition, using a crate engine] was for consistency when I tuned the chassis. Week in, week out, it is maintenance-free, so I could concentrate on the setup.”
In his first race with the car, he finished third at East Alabama Motor Speedway.
“The car was super tight in the slick,” said Sparks. “So, I freed it up a bunch. The next week, the track got drier, and it was windier, so I freed it up more when everyone else was tightening their chassis up.”
He also changed the shock mounts on the left rear.
“When you build your own car, you don’t care about the powder coat,” Sparks said. “I cut it, fixed it, and went with it.”
One of the rare components on a race car Sparks doesn’t touch are the shocks. Instead, he entrusts his longtime friend Kirk Loudy, of Envy Suspension, to handle that part.
“Kirk builds my Afco shocks,” said Sparks. “We’re constantly bouncing ideas off each other.”
With a penchant for finding speed, Sparks applies that to his day job, too, where he works 55 to 75 hours a week at a M&M’s packing plant. He sped up a machine that packed 110 units per minute of mini M&M’s to 400 units per minute.
“They said that machine couldn’t get faster, but we fabricated parts and made it faster,” Sparks said. “We can’t have it go down from a parts failure. The same concepts went in to the chassis — it’s faster, and we fabricated the parts to make it so.”
On the track, Lavon Sparks finds speed, too. In 2011, he won 11 features and the track championship at Senoia Raceway in Georgia. He hopes to top that record this season. Early in the season, he’s one win closer toward that goal. However, his success has already garnered attention.
“People are asking if I would consider building [them one of my cars],” said Sparks. “That’s a no. I simply don’t have the time.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
