Jeff Spraker knew from the time he was 12 years old that he wanted to spend his life working on cars. He’d grown up around cars—his father was a car dealer and his mother sold advertising for car dealerships. He became a race fan and worked on cars with his friends.

After high school, Spraker got his degree in mechanical engineering, focusing his studies on automotive design and vehicle dynamics. With this background, Spraker decided to start his own business at the age of 19.

“In the business of racing, it takes capital, and I really couldn’t find anybody that wanted to back me so what I did was I sold stock in myself,” he said. “We started with a few people that bought stock in us and over the years I’ve managed to buy everybody out but one gentleman who [still] owns a small percentage of the company.”

Spraker Racing Enterprises got its start in upstate New York, doing design, development and engineering work for race teams and the automotive industry. Within a few years, clients started asking Spraker if he could do street rod builds for them as well.

“A fellow approached me about doing a 1934 Willys sedan with a big-block,” he said. “That’s just where it all took off.”

Today, muscle car and street rod builds account for 50 percent of the business at Spraker Racing Enterprises, which relocated from upstate New York to Mooresville, North Carolina, in 2001 after the shop was hired by Dale Earnhardt Sr. to develop a laser alignment system for his race cars. The company still operates a small location in Schenectady, New York.

Parallel Business Units

For Spraker, the work on muscle cars and street rods is a natural extension of the work his team has been doing on race cars for more than 30 years.

“Quite frankly, when somebody walks in your shop and they see your cars go to Daytona and go 200 mph, that really gives them a good bit of assurance that, ‘He has some idea of what he’s doing if he’s going to build my ‘69 Camaro,’ because the two things parallel each other,” he said. “The braking systems, the suspension components, the aerodynamics, a lot of the chassis and fabrication work that we do is a spin-off of what we do in the racing industry.”

Customers benefit from the skills and equipment the shop has on hand.

“We’ll do a Camaro for a customer that wants something very unique and we can do that because we have the fabrication equipment, the people and the computer,” Spraker said. “We do an AutoCAD, we do vehicle simulations in racing, vehicle dynamics, so we know what a car does on the racetrack.

“We can plug those same points into a street vehicle and apply that same technology over on the street rod side and give a customer a car that they’re not going to get over-the-counter from [a] chassis builder that has a basic package for everybody,” he added.

It’s not just the shop’s skill set that crosses over between the two sides of the business, it’s also the customer base.

“As anybody will tell you that’s in racing, they love their street rods and muscle cars,” Spraker said. “One thing kind of leads to another and what’s happened with us is that we do a tremendous amount of work with team owners and drivers that we’ve done [race car] work for, and it’s really worked out well.”

Though they may not be building race cars, many of the shop’s muscle car and street rod customers are fans of racing, too. As customers of Spraker Racing Enterprises, a company that works for race teams and operates its own, they get to take advantage of various perks.

“One of the things that we can do as a company is we may have a race at Daytona at a NASCAR event [and] we can bring our street rod customers there,” Spraker said. “They have the opportunity to not only interface with the car people, but they’re at a race, a major event, and they’re still interfacing with us and that gives us a huge advantage over our competition.

“Very few companies can say, ‘If you come to us for your car, we can take you to Daytona, you’ll be part of our crew, you’ll be one of our guests,’” he said.

A Multi-tasking Staff

The shop has a dedicated street rod/muscle car staff, but will bring in its race car staff to work on restorations, and vice-versa.

“We have a group of seven people dedicated to the muscle car business, and we can have anywhere from seven to 15 people dedicated to the race car business,” Spraker said. “There’s a lot of crossover, one day we might have a guy working over in the race shop and he’s putting the motor together or putting an engine into a car or setting a car up, and then the next morning we’ll have him come over and he’ll be wiring a muscle car for somebody.”

Spraker prefers his workers to be able to handle a variety of tasks as opposed to being specialists.

“There’s a core group of seven people here that [have] been with us quite a while,” he said. “Those guys can pretty much do anything. If they need to weld, they can weld; if they need to turn on a lathe, they can turn on a lathe; if they need to fabricate, they can fabricate; and if they really need to paint, they can paint. That is what has made us work where we don’t need 50 people do what seven or eight people should be able to do.”

That small staff is kept busy, sometimes even broken into two shifts to meet the deadlines Spraker guarantees his customers he’ll reach. Keeping those promises can often mean turning away work.

“You’ve got to be very cautious that you don’t overcommit yourself,” Spraker said, giving the example of a customer who recently came in wanting to have a project completed in less than two months, and money was no object.

“I said, ‘I can’t do it. I have 24 hours in a day, five days in a week, I have seven people. They are committed [but] I cannot make that promise and keep it,’” Spraker said. “You have to have enough business sense to say no. Today, too many businesses will say, ‘Sure, we’ll do it,’ and not deliver, and now you’ve got a customer that’s unhappy, a business with a bad reputation and nobody’s ahead of anybody.”

That’s a lesson Spraker picked up from the race industry.

“When I started out in the race car business, I would go to my friends that were chassis builders and say, ‘I want a car,’ and they would say, ‘We just can’t do it,’ and I would get them to do it and, inevitably, they couldn’t do it,” he said. “I’d given them the money, they can’t fulfill the commitment and now I’m on the short end of the stick. I wouldn’t want that happen to one of my customers [because] it happened to me.”

Spraker has applied that lesson to every part of his business and believes that has helped him succeed for more than three decades.

“My guys are notorious for saying, ‘You know, when I started with you and we had to buy these parts from other people, nobody did them like that for us, nobody finished a rearend off the way we are. Why are we doing that?’” he said. “I [tell them], ‘For the very thing that you said, nobody would do it for us, nobody went the extra yard for us, we’ve got to go the extra yard for them.

“That’s what will put us above the rest of the competition and that’s what it’s all about,” Spraker said.

Spraker Racing Enterprises

Address:   305 Performance Rd., Mooresville, North Carolina 28115 (The company also operates a smaller shop in Schenectady, New York.)

Phone:  (704) 799-1300

Owner:  Jeff Spraker

Services Offered:  Complete car fabrication, restoration, chassis components, 9-inch and 12-bolt rearends

Number of Employees:  6 full-time and 3 part-time

Number of Current Projects:  4

Current Project Cars Include:  1934 Packard, 1956 Ford truck, 1967 Chevelle, 1969 Camaro

Website:  www.sprakerracing.com

Approximate Shop Size:  12,000 square feet

Years in Business:  31

Tags: Managing Employees, Muscle Cars, Racing, Restorer Profile