Stock car racer Shelby Williams proved that you can win with a home-built chassis—even if it sat around since 2019. Williams debuted the car in December at the South Texas Race Ranch in Corpus Christi. He won with it in its first race. Now, Williams seeks to repeat the feat during the IMCATV Winter Nationals at Central Arizona Raceway.
Williams started in four-cylinders 16 years ago. He grew up watching his father, Gary, compete. Back then his Ford Pinto drew attention. Williams eliminated the right-side leaf springs en route to winning 17 out of 20 features that season.
When he moved to stock cars, he had always raced commercially built chassis, but always wanted to try his hand at constructing his own. Williams completed the cage and frame on his home-built car in 2019, before he got a deal to race cars for B&B Racing Chassis. At the end of last year, he revisited that car he had started to build five years ago.
Williams collaborated with his father on the home-built car. They focused on reducing as much weight as safely possible. That way they could move ballast to obtain the balance they desired.
“I wanted this car to be more free and maneuverable so it could run the top, bottom or middle of the racetrack,” said Williams, of Bonham, Texas. “We use the same shocks and springs as we do on the B&B. The goal was to get the car to rotate so I can get on the gas quicker when coming out of the turn. We also jacked the rear end a little different, which helped.”
They also worked hard on other aspects of the chassis.
“We did things to make working on the car easier, like welding the shock bolts to the chassis so you only need an impact wrench to change a shock,” Williams said.
If the home-built chassis works well, Shelby Williams might consider building a clone of it. However, he does not intend to get in the chassis-building business. Williams built the car, including its body and interior tin, for his own purposes.
At Central Arizona Raceway, he placed 12th, sixth, and seventh in the features, among a field of 46 entries. After spending time in the Southwest, he’ll race in Florida before returning to his native Texas.
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.
