JAY COX
I’m a full-tilt,
wide-open-with-
my-hair-on-fire
kinda guy.”
rewarding and very satisfying. I
got two really good kids that at a
young age are still into stuff like I
was into stuff at a young age. My
dad kind of laid the groundwork,
showing me how to do things.
Stuff he did with me, I kind of
just make a big circle with it and
give it back around to my kids and
show them a lot of the stuff my
dad did with me.
Has it always been you and
your dad going racing?
Yeah, I grew up really close with
both of my parents. Believe it or
not, they never missed a baseball
game growing up, all the way from
Little League up through college.
In pro ball my dad didn’t miss my
first 10 games. He was always there in person.
I always grew up with a really tight, close-knit
family. My whole life I’ve been around family and
friends, keeping everybody close. Me and my dad
have a really good relationship.
Believe it or not, my dad probably loves racing
more than I do. He lives, eats, sleeps and dreams
this stuff. It’s real satisfying to me to be able to
do it with him, but it’s even better for me when I
can go out there and do well because it’s like my
dad is living his dream of racing through me. It’s
really good to be able to do that.
The rest of your team is a pretty consistent
cast of characters too. How did that group
come together?
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It’s actually a pretty cool story. It was just me
and my dad. Five or six years ago, I was a little
younger and my dad was a little younger. Rac-
ing was a big task on race day to get it all done.
Dennis [Bennett] was probably my first crew guy
that came with me. He called me one day and he
was running Renegade. I had run Renegade and
done real well. He actually done real well too. He
was like me, he just didn’t have a lot of experience,
where I’d had two or three years of experience
over there. He asked me what it would take for me
to come help him at a couple races since I wasn’t
running Renegade anymore. To make a long story
short, we kind of worked a deal where he’d come
racing with me and I’d go racing with him the
first year. It just so happened that Doug [Askew]
and Andrew [Morton] that are
with Dennis, I got to meet them
going with Dennis. They liked me
and my dad, so his guys would go
with him and then when we’d race
they’d come with me. Doug Askew
and Andrew Morton and Dennis
Bennett, they’ve been with me all
five years.
I gotta mention Charlie Buck.
Without him being behind me
and giving me the best motor that
I could get and Mark Micke giv-
ing me the best transmission we
could get and Rick Jones with the
chassis, those parts are key parts
to making a fast race car. But at
the end of the day, I really gotta
give a lot of credit to my crew
guys. You can look up and down
PDRA and if you look at the top two or three
cars, they have the same crew guys there day
in and day out, not just for one or two seasons,
but for the long haul – four or five years. That
consistency of having the same guys there every
time and the guy that’s willing to work and go
the extra mile, that’s what makes me have a lot
of the success that I’ve had. We still get the job
done when one of them’s gone, but it’s never the
same because you get so comfortable after four
or five years with those guys doing the same
thing over and over again.
Talking about Charlie Buck, have you run
his engines since the beginning?
Since day one. Believe it or not, the first motor
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