From Pit Lane
Jason Willis, Fabricator and Tire Runner

2007.07.25: Jason Willis is the newest member of the AIM Autosport crew, responsible for fabrication and tires. He took a few minutes to talk about life on the road with the Daytona Prototype team:

I'm the team fabricator and tire runner. I fabricate close-out plates, gurneys, small brackets, anything out of metal that needs to be made up. At the track, I also run tires back and forth to Hoosier, making sure tire pressures are ready to go.

I went to Durham College, where I studied to be a welder/fitter, and I've branched off from there to race-car fabrication. I was making stuff for steel mills – the big metal – then I got into a company that had a motorsport department. I was in the shop building stuff for race cars, but I never got to work on the cars. I saw it go out the door and that was it. At AIM, I actually get to put it on the car and watch it work, so I'm learning more and more each time.

I like being around the cars and working on them. It's not 9-to-5, punch in, punch out. You can't call in and say, 'I can't come,' so you just show up and get it done. Eventually, you get used to it. You're all over the place, get to see different tracks. It's hard being away from home all the time and I don't get too much spare time, but I do what I can when I have time.

Before the race weekend, I check all the brackets on the car and go through the bellhousing and make sure there are no cracks. The check takes about two hours. I just basically run through the car and if anything needs to be made, I make it. If there are cracks, I weld them and fix them. You don't normally find very big cracks, but a little one can turn into a big one in no time.

Fabrication out of the shop is quite easy; at the track, it's not. But I'm getting used to doing it. We're limited with the stuff we can bring to the track – we can't haul all that equipment from the shop into the trailer to the track. Fabrication is much easier at the shop where we have all the equipment, but you find ways around it and get it done.

On the tire side, Hoosier transports all our tires. I start looking after them when we get to the track. It's a spec tire – everybody's on the same tires, so it's more of an even playing field. You can only really change pressures. The lower the pressure in the tire, the grippier it is; the higher the pressure, it's not as grippy. There is an optimum pressure, depending on how the car's handling. We go by whatever decisions the engineers make.

The biggest surprise in racing has been how little downtime we get! There's always something to do; there's never a dull moment here. There's a lot of setup stuff we need to do to the car, things we need to go over, things we need to prepare. A lot of man-hours go into these cars.

... But I'm loving it

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