BRAD LOYET FINDS A SECOND RACING LIFE

BY ASHLEY ZIMMERMAN

“RACING WAS ALL I ever knew, and I wouldn’t say that it was taken from me, but I never got to have that opportunity to get back out there and race at the level that I did. If I couldn’t go back out there and be that competitive, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to be the one who ended it on my terms, I wanted to be the one who said I was finished,” said Brad Loyet while sharing details about the injury that altered the trajectory of his career in open wheel racing. While Brad Loyet would shock the midget racing community in 2019 with a surprise return for one final entry in the Chili Bowl, it was the races that came before that began building the Loyet name to become synonymous with midget racing. Though his injury will continue to affect Loyet in ways outside of no longer being able to race, he has continued leaving his mark in the world of midget racing through his innovative perspective as owner of BP Fabrication where he’s building cars and parts for the very teams he used to find himself competing against each weekend.

Even though his driving career was cut short, Loyet made every lap count racking up numerous wins and championships. His experience as a driver has made him just as talented a fabricator, with BP Fabrication parts getting to play roles in helping other talented drivers turn laps into wins for their place in the history books. With BP Fabrication continuing growth in reputation just two years after Brad’s official retirement from racing, it was only fitting we did a little catching up to add some fresh ink to the story that is Brad Loyet.

Dirt Empire: While your family always had a large presence in the midget racing scene, you are in fact a first generation driver. Was driving something you always had on your radar?

Brad Loyet: When I was younger, I started in micros, it was a situation where my dad asked if this was something I’d want to try, and we knew nothing about racing. I used to call us professional race fans, we would travel all over the country to watch racing, we didn’t know anything about how to work on the car and I didn’t know how to drive a race car. The closest thing we had ever got was some go-karts that we had at my dad’s shop, which was the most experience I had getting into anything close to a race car. I was lucky my dad gave me the opportunity. When I was thirteen or fourteen we got a micro, and the deal with my mom was that we were only going to race once a month or so, but that changed really quickly. My second year racing, I ran something like 120 races across the country. It wasn’t just me that was bit by the bug, but my dad was, too, and it blew up from there. Midgets are where the passion lies for me; it’s what I had the most fun doing, and more or less the most success doing as well.

DE: Before we touch on the accident that took racing from you, has it been hard for you to go back to the racetrack since retiring from the driver’s seat?

BL: I had always told everyone that when I quit racing, I’m just not going to go to a race again. For me to not be out there competing is, it’s just, that’s what I was there for. I went from being a professional race fan, to a professional race car driver; it’s hard to go back after that. After I got hurt, I think we went to just Pevely every year, just because it’s ten minutes from home. I think I went to a couple races at little Belleville but I went from racing eighty times a year to going to maybe watch five. It was a big adjustment for me. This year, when an opportunity came up for me to work on a car again, it was something I had to think about because now I have a wife and kids, I have a business that I run, it had to be worth my time to go out and do this. It was a big discussion for me to do it, everything just worked out, and I actually really, really enjoy being back out there.

DE: Speaking of your business, in 2015 you starting to begin building your business BP Fabrication. Was it ever easy to balance your life once you were both driver and fabricator?

BL: At the time, when I initially started making cars, it was really just for us. It wasn’t a big consumption of time during the day or week. As it progressed, we obviously got busier and busier. I don’t know how we could have ever still been racing fulltime and me running my business at the point we are now.

DE: What do you feel caught your eye about fabricating and designing parts?

BL: I was always just a very curious person. I like to learn things even now. So, with having always been around Flea [Ruzic], seeing him weld, I wanted to know how to do that. He told me to start coming up here once a week and you can work for me. I didn’t get paid money; I was getting paid by the skills that he taught me. Throughout my entire racing career, I was blessed with the opportunity to be surrounded by some very successful people in the sport, whether that was fabricators, crew chiefs, or mechanics. I feel like I always had the opportunity to work with some of the best people. Flea was the guy that got me started welding; he was the guy who showed me why the geometry of a Jacob’s ladder works the way that it does. Most people might just have those conversations with someone at surface level. But I was trying to remember as much of that stuff as I could. Rusty Kunz, who worked for me as a crew chief, was super smart with setups, so I would sit there and literally take my own notes while he was taking notes; just so I got an idea of why does this do this. I owe a lot of my knowledge as far as what to do during the night to Rusty. I think a combination of all of those things you learn along the way makes you a bigger force.

DE: Is there anyone you go to now for mentorship?

BL: I’m big on the mentor deal, for me mentors are super important. I have four or five mentors, and that might sound like a lot, but I draw from different aspects of everyone’s life. I mentioned Flea, and Rusty, and there’s my dad. I read a study one time that said kids spend 90% of their time with their mom or dad by the time they are eighteen and then they only get about 10% after that. I’ve been lucky enough to see my dad every single day. My dad had a successful business all while driving me all over the country. We would have conversations going down the road that most father and sons never get to have. I appreciate all of that. A part of the deal for me to race, was that I had to go to college and get my degree, one of my mentors is one of my college professors who was in charge of the entrepreneurship program, he’s the guy who kind of keeps me straight, booksmart wise. The other guys are very, very street-smart. It’s these types of guys that I draw from daily, if I have an issue, I feel like I can reach out to them.

DE: The shop accident that caused your retirement from racing happened in 2018. Can you share what happened and how does it still affect your life now?

BL: I was supposed to be going down to Florida to take a kid racing, and we were getting tires ready to go. I can remember it like it was yesterday, I was airing up a tire, and the wheel failed. My hand was inside airing it up, and when I looked down, my hand was basically stuck to my arm. I broke both bones in my wrist, and spun my wrist around 360 degrees, and it was just sitting there. I’m the type of guy, I’m a positive person, and I have a good outlook on life, I never went into shock at the time, I just looked over at the guy in the shop and said I think we need to call an ambulance. I just walked into the office, and I sat down in a chair and waited for the ambulance to show up. It seemed like it took forever, and when the ambulance got there, I think that’s when I had maxed out on the amount of brain power I had to stay positive, and that’s when I started to realize this hurts a little. When they got me to the hospital they had to do emergency surgery the day of, and when I came out they told me everything looked great, looks like you should have full range of motion, six to eight weeks recovery, not a big deal. Like I said, I’m positive, I thought cool, this sucks, but well I could have lost my hand, worst case scenario they might not have been able to put it back on. I looked at it like at least it’s getting fixed. Six months later, I still can’t really feel my hand. I was doing therapy but not really seeing a whole lot of improvement, I still couldn’t bend my wrist. We were at Lakeside, because we had decided to rent my sprint car out for the year to try to keep money flowing for the race car deal, and Tony Stewart was there. He asked how it was going, and I explained to him this and that, and he told me to come see a doctor in Indianapolis. That was the tipping point for me; Dr. Fischer just looked at me and said well your wrist is still broken. I said, nah, I’ve got two plates in there still, it’s not broken. We did an x-ray, and he was right, the break was bigger that day than it was the day it happened, to the point that the plates were about to break from flexing. We scheduled surgery, and he patched me up better than I ever had been, I could instantly feel my hand again, the pain subsided quite a bit. There was another surgery six months after to get the plates taken out, as they were causing a bit of irritation. I don’t think people realize, even this morning I woke up and my wrist and hand look like a balloon and it hurts. I can throw as much Advil and Tylenol you want at it and it doesn’t feel better. I can’t bend my wrist still to this day; this is something I have to live with, it’s not going to get better, I have what I have. I don’t call it a disability or a handicap, it’s just who I am, I’m still going to make the most out of my life. It still hurts almost every single day, and some days more than others. Today, it was enough pain that I called to make an appointment to have it checked out. There’s still one more surgery that’s on the table and possible for us to do, I’ve avoided it just because I don’t really want to have another surgery but I don’t want to hurt like I do. Physically, everyone knows what happened, but emotionally, I was in a really bad spot after it happened. I don’t think I left my house for six months, it felt like forever, I was diagnosed with PTSD, and it was so bad. I don’t remember the exact noise it made that day but the concussion of the noise, it sounded exactly like a thunderstorm or fireworks, and to this day, if a firework goes off and I don’t see it, I’ll drop to the floor, it’s that bad. It took me a long time to get past it, and I think the only thing that got me back was getting back to the shop, working on stuff, remembering why I was doing all of this, but I lost my way there for a little bit.

DE: In 2019 you shocked the racing community by returning to racing and entering what would be your last Chili Bowl and first race after the accident. What was that week like for you? What were the emotions you felt throughout the week having made that decision?

BL: For me, as weird as it sounds, it was a transition in life. For me, it was almost harder to watch everyone else, because I knew this was it. I had already closed the book well before me strapping into that car, but I think a lot of other people kind of thought, oh he’s going to come back, he’ll get this going again. But when that week ended, it was just over, there was no coming back. I’m not the type of guy that’s going to come back out of retirement - that was it. It was a change; it was big transition for my entire family, so that was probably the most difficult thing. I was super emotional that last night, and it wasn’t just me, it was my crew guys, it was my dad, and my family. Even Flea, he wasn’t even working on the car, but he came by and said go give them hell; you know that moment is not ever happening again, it was moving into a different point in my life. That was why I never wanted to go back to the races after; I’m not here competing, I can’t do what I want to do while I’m here, so that’s off the table.

DE: Obviously the fabrication shop became your main focus after that. How has that evolved for you?

BL: Luckily, we’ve been very successful in a short period of time. I think a lot of that is how I build cars. I knew things that I liked about the parts that we use, and I knew the things that I didn’t like about parts that we used. I owe a lot to Chad Boat for jumpstarting all of this, he was someone who reached out early on and asked if I’d be interested in doing some stuff for them that kind of set the tone as far as the midget stuff for us. Now, a lot of the guys on the midget series run our parts in some form, and to me that’s rewarding. I’m always trying to innovate something, if I see a part that’s competitive, I’m going to try to find a way that I can make it just a little bit better if I can and that’s kind of been our main focus the last year, how can we make things just 10% better than our competitors. There are three of us here with just four machines, so we’ve grown a lot quicker than we probably thought we would, and we take on a great deal of stuff that’s non racing related that pays really well and takes up a lot of our time. But my passion is always going to lie with racing and making race car parts, that’s always going to be a division of BP Fabrication.

DE: Do you feel your experience as a driver gives you an advantage on the fabrication side?

BL: I think it does because midgets are a pain in the butt to work on. A sprint car you could build one off the shelf, but midgets always require a little bit of extra work to get right, and measuring to get right, which is something we try to do here. It helps that we have CNC machines, tubing benders, notchers, and welders; we have everything we need at our disposal to make really, really nice race cars. So, like this car that I’m building for Chili Bowl, there are details on this car that if the average Joe walked by, they aren’t going to notice them, but I know they’re there and I know the purpose they serve and I know how much easier it was for us to assemble this car. It definitely helps the business, because when we’re able to establish a new part or make one better, people are obviously going to want to buy it then.

DE: You’ve shared details here and there throughout our interview about being back out there and being a crew chief. How did this come about?

BL: I think most people probably already know that I’m back out racing. The whole deal transpired with Kyle Beilman, while I was out in LA for a podcast that I do and interviewing a guy; and he [Kyle] just so happened to have a car, and he said he couldn’t race because he was getting married and would I want to hire someone and go run Ventura. I land out there, did the podcast interview, and he calls me and tells me there is a little bit of work to be done on the car, he had sent me a picture the week before and it was a complete roller, he tells me he took it apart because he wanted to get it painted, so I get to the shop to a frame and body with a race in two days. We threw the car together in two days, finished it like three hours before the race, had Chase Johnson drive for us, and we set quick time by half a second. It had been three years since I was like a hands on crew chief at the races, so I was like okay well this feels good, maybe I do still have a little bit of knowledge. We set quick time by that much, I was like “okay, well, I’m not that dumb”. Kyle’s a super successful person; he hasn’t raced much, so it’s fun to work with someone who is a high achiever and trying to figure out something new to him. We click really well as a pair and are connecting as far as establishing a relationship, I’m pretty excited about what we can do because he’s given us the resources that we need to be competitive, so hopefully with some time and experience underneath him, we can be competitive.