Mike Warn And Chuck Carruthers Are Cultivating A Two-Car Team To Compete In The NASCAR Camping World West Series. Stock Car Racing's Jerry F. Boone Will Go Along For The Ride
writer: Jerry F. Boone
photographer: Jerry F. Boone
Chuck Carruthers' shop is more functional than fancy, with an upturned milk crate serving as a resting platform for a ready-to-install engine. The rural shop will prepare six cars for the two-driver MJ2 team.
The 300 residents of Prescott sit in a valley surrounded by the gently rolling hills of Eastern Washington's high desert. There are no traffic lights along Prescott's main street. There's only one restaurant in town and almost every home or business has a monitor for the local volunteer fire department.
During the summer the arid landscape is covered with dryland wheat, shifting back and forth in the 100-degree breeze like the nap on an expensive coat.
Out here, pickups are the vehicle of choice, followed closely by tractors and combines and the half-dozen NASCAR Grand National Division cars Chuck Carruthers maintains for combat in the Camping World West Series.
When one of the unmuffled V-8s comes to life, the entire community hears it roar.
His shop is a steel structure built as a fertilizer warehouse. The six cars he maintains for the new MJ2 Racing team fill every work bay and rack. It is far more functional than fancy.
Mike Warn looks at the cluttered shop, the engine perched on a metal milk crate, and grins.
Veteran Jeff Jefferson, right, works with Jim Warn on adjusting the seat and steering wheel to the young driver. Jefferson won three Northwest Touring Series championships before NASCAR folded the division.
"I'm sure this is what the Roush shop looked like just a year or so ago," he says with smile.
Warn is the man with the money behind the two-car team. His family founded Warn Industries, which began making locking hubs for four-wheel drive vehicles and then expanded into winches and other automotive parts. He sold the company in 2000 and has used the proceeds for new business ventures and to go racing.
The team name -MJ2-is drawn from the first names of Mike and his two sons, Jim and John. Jim, with a degree in business, manages the family's dealership for exotic autos while his younger brother completes work toward a college degree.
This season, his MJ2 Racing is stepping up to the Grand National Division, with Jeff Jefferson and Jim Warn piloting the two cars. The team has agreed to let Stock Car Racing come along during its first year-from car preparation to the last race of the season-offering readers an in-depth look at what it takes to compete in NASCAR's highest amateur level.
If you don't have enough floorspace for everything that needs work, you stack the projects top and bottom. The cars were purchased from Kevin Harvick's Nationwide Series team.
Jefferson is a seasoned racer, the only driver to win three championships in a row in the NASCAR Northwest Elite series. Jim Warn, Mike's son, is still learning how to drive stock cars. He began in sports cars on road courses and moved to open wheel Sprint Cars in 2004 to find more wheel-to-wheel competition.
"I actually did pretty well in them," says Jim. But he had a short career in open-wheel dirt cars.
Mike Warn explains that "on one of the nights my wife was at the track, my driver did a triple roll right in front of her."
Mike repaired the damage and Jim went on to finish Second in the main.
"But it was a very quiet ride home," says Mike. "I think every guy who has ever raced has had one or two of those."
Warn said they were on the road for more than an hour, and his wife hadn't said a word.
"Then suddenly," he recalls, "I heard 'the voice of God'."
Jim Warn plays with adjustments for the steering wheel as he begins tailoring the driver compartment to his unique needs. The team has four short-track and two road course cars.
It was very measured, very controlled. And not as deep as he expected.
"She said she'd support any kind of racing we wanted to do, be behind us all the way, as long at it didn't include putting our sons in Sprint Cars.
"You don't second-guess 'the voice of God'," he says.
The next week the family was at South Sound Speedway, south of Seattle, looking at stock cars and asking questions.
That led them to Carruthers and his tiny shop in the desert.
The next year, Jim Warn joined the stock car ranks, racing in the Super Stock class at South Sound Speedway, where he adapted quickly and earned Rookie of the Year honors. He ran in the Late Model division in 2006 and then moved to the ARCA West series for 2007.