Drag Illustrated Issue 148, September 2019 | Page 78

Billy Stocklin
G
rowing up, education was a
priority in the Stocklin house-
hold. His parents grew up in a
poor area of central Missouri,
and they saw education as the
key to breaking free from that.
Stocklin’s mother was a teacher and his father,
William, had a degree in mathematics and a mas-
ter’s degree in mechanical engineering, working
at IBM for a number of years. “He very much
was a super-duper numbers analytical guy, and
I think that’s where I got it from,” Stocklin says.
Stocklin and his four older sisters all followed
that path, graduating from Texas, earning his
degree in mathematics. Stocklin later received
a master’s degree in deaf education and audi-
ology, but his passion from drag racing came
much earlier.
Stocklin’s family moved to south Texas when
Stocklin was eight, and a year later he met a
neighbor, Bill Langham, who had just moved
into the area and was involved in mud racing.
Instantly, Stocklin’s mind started racing and by
12 years old, he was part of the Langham’s team
– much to the chagrin of his father.
“(Langham) taught me like how to work on
cars, how to put a distributor in, how to assemble
an engine, how the transmission works, like all of
that kind of stuff. That wasn’t my dad,” Stocklin
says. “My dad, even though he was a mechanical
engineer, he wasn’t into motorsports. He just
went, ‘What makes you think you know more
about a car than Chevrolet?’ Which I get it. He’s
an engineer. So, from his mind, a team of dudes
worked on this car, they made it what it is, why
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"I look for patternS, and statistics
and things," Stocklin says. "I keep
track of a lot of data, a lot
of variables on THE car, and so
basically, I try to systematically
look through the different results."
are you (messing) with it? But as I became more
active in his deal, in his program, we started
building trucks from scratch and we did really
good for a while.”
Mud racing, though, couldn’t compare to his
first drag racing experience, mostly because of
the numbers. In mud racing, it was all too vague
for Stocklin. Even before he became a teenager,
analytics and numbers were becoming promi-
nent factors in his life. He made his first trip
to Little River Dragway just outside of Temple,
Texas, at 12 years old. It was his first look at a
time slip – and the first realization that he need-
ed all this data, all these times and conditions
in his world.
“You know, like they tell you how fast you went,
and what your mile per hour was, and how quick
you were, and I’m like, that’s way better,” Stocklin
says. “And then we’re walking around in the pits,
and I was like, wait a minute, on those little slips
of paper, they have like all these little numbers
on it. You know when you took off and how fast
you went at different increments on the ground,
and I was like, yeah, this is great.”
A few weeks later, Stocklin was at the Texas
Motorplex for the first time, seeing drag racing
on a grand stage. He was struck by how many
people were making a living in the sport, planting
the first seed that wouldn’t be revisited for more
than a decade.
After college, Stocklin returned to the sport,
racing in Outlaw 10.5, achieving an impressive
amount of success with a nitrous-assisted com-
bination. He eventually sold all his nitrous parts
in the mid-2000s, left to decide what he wanted
to do in the sport.
With his parts gone, a group of guys, includ-
ing Cory Wheat, offered Stocklin the chance to
earn some money – which he initially planned
would go towards a new car – if he would help
tune their cars.
It was then that Stocklin came to an important
and life-changing realization regarding his talents
and where they could be best utilized. Instead of
Issue 148