What does Sean Corr, a Daytona pole sitter in ARCA do for a living? School buses. What does he do for fun? Races a school bus. He wins, too, in school bus competition, including recently at Lebanon Valley Speedway.
“It is not often that you get to mix your profession with your hobby,” Corr, of Goshen, New York, said. “I’m a school bus nerd and a race car driver.”
He started racing his trusty No. 2 1985 Blue Bird bus, in 2006, winning in its first time out at Orange County Fair Speedway.
“It has a GMC 366 big-block engine, with an Edelbrock four-barrel carburetor — and that was how it was powered when it was in service,” said Corr. “The No. 2 bus has a perfect record — it never was in a mishap. It was suggested I run it with my ARCA number, 8, but why mess with mojo? I [always] raced it as the No. 2 bus.”
Over the years, Corr has made some upgrades. He replaced the fuel tank with a 22-gallon fuel cell. Corr also installed a fuel regulator to prevent the carburetor from flooding.
“I used my ARCA racing experience to set up the bus as a race vehicle — I had to offset the weight of that big-block engine up front.,” Corr said. “I took some seats out in the middle of the bus, but kept the rear seats in to attain the right balance and have rear weight for traction.”
No. 2 is the oldest bus in the field — and it’s the only one with black fenders.
“That’s because my grandfather, John Corr, had the fenders painted black [on roadgoing school buses] back in the day when buses had butterfly hoods,” said Corr. “It kept the busses classy — there were no mechanics’ black fingerprints or smudges visible on the black fenders. Black fenders became our company’s signature.”
When not racing school buses or in ARCA, he competes with a dirt pro stocks along with his wife, Roxanne.
“In a pro stock or school bus, you try to catch the banking,” Corr said. “You won’t have as much traction if you aren’t on the banking. Too much on the banking and you will have to hold [the bus] from flipping over.”
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.
