Odle got out of the race-promotions business to concentrate on running a successful body shop in Newtown, Indiana, his hometown. "When I started out, I had just a tiny corner of a pole building," he says. "I heated it with a wood stove." Now he has four people working for him. "We're still out in the middle of nowhere, on a road hardly anyone drives on, in a city of about 300 people. The shop's surrounded by cornfields, but we keep busy." For the past two years the race cars have been prepped next to the repair jobs, but this year Odle is taking a corner of the building and dedicating the space as a race shop.
While Odle was building his business, Ross was building his reputation. He went on to run a host of racing series and picked up two championships in the Indiana-based Kendall Late Model Series (where he gained the nickname Flyin' Brian) along with a Fourth-Place finish for the season and the '00 Rookie of the Year title in ARCA. "I've run just about everything but Sprint Cars," he says. "Late Models, Modifieds, dirt, and pavement-I've been in 'em all at one time or another."
The pair got together in 2000 to run in the ASA. "I had only $100,000 to spend," says Odle. "We ran three races and I ran out of money. We burned through cash at a ferocious rate. But then Brian came back and said he really wanted to try the Hooters ProCup. We took the ASA car and I told Brian the team would have to pay its own way. Our deal has never been more than just a handshake. It never needed to be more than that." Odle has picked up some sponsorships along the way, and the team keeps costs down by doing almost all the work on the car.
Ross and Odle live about two and a half hours from one another, so it is typical for Odle to do the basic car prep and repair at his shop and have Ross do the suspension tuning at his. "We meet in the middle and unhook the trailer from his truck and put it on mine," says Ross. "I grew up working on cars and knowing that this is what I'd like to do for a living. Because Darin's so fussy, the car always looks great when I get it. It sometimes doesn't look so great when he gets it back."
"When Brian's done with a race car there's not much left," agrees Odle. "I think his advantage is that he's raced for so long without much money that he uses up everything before he's done with it."
The team doesn't have much of a testing budget "so most of the time we use the practice sessions to do the testing the better-funded teams do on test days," says Ross. "Guys like ['03 Hooters champion] Shane Huffman had the sponsorship and budget to test at about every track we raced on. It paid off. He kicked everybody's butt. Sometimes it means we start out behind the other teams, so we have to work harder to catch up."
"Brian has an advantage in that he's driven for so long and in so many cars that he really has a good feel for the car," says Odle. "And he's the kind of driver that if the car isn't perfect when he gets into it, he just drives harder and better to make up for what it lacks."
Ross will need to draw on that adaptability this year as the Hooters ProCup switched from bias ply to BFGoodrich radial ply tires. "It means changing a lot of what we have done for the past two seasons," he says, "but I think it is good for the series."