Will Kimmel Racing News

Fans of ARCA know that, for the most part, the months of October, November, December and January are slow. There isn't much going on for them to take in. Yeah, there was an ARCA test at Talladega earlier this month and there is a Daytona test in January. But those aren't for the fans. Those are for the teams. And for those teams, the aforementioned months can be just as busy as the May-June-July stretch.

Kimmel Racing was unable to take part in the Talladega test this month after tearing up their super-speedway car in the race back in May. "We've got a smaller team and our focus had to be on the races in front of us," said team owner Bill Kimmel Jr. "With that being our last super-speedway race of the season, there wasn't much of a rush to attend to that car." But fear not, the guys in the shop haven't just been sitting around. There are many ways to improve performance that don't require on-track time.


With the help of Ricky Sanders at PitBoxes.com, Kimmel Racing has acquired a brand new pit box and tool box for use at the races. "This is going to be huge for us. It gives us a bigger presence at the track, and when we do take the new pit box, it almost eliminates the need for the second tool box at the track. This thing is massive, both on top and in drawer space. Of course, when we don't take the new pit box, we'll have the new tool box with us," said Kimmel. The best part about it? "They're both Kimmel Red."

The new pit box has room to seat five people on top with a covered area down below for people to stand. It also comes with six TV monitors that can be wired to display anything. "We can run timing and scoring, telemetry, the race broadcast. I think one of our guys even mentioned running Days Of Thunder on a loop (laughing)."

One thing Kimmel mentioned is telemetry. ARCA teams aren't allowed to have any telemetry devices hooked up to the car on race weekends, but they are free to do it at open test sessions or private test sessions. Racepak is one of the major providers of telemetry software/hardware for racing teams both drag racing and closed/open course racing. It provides the team with real time data as well as recorded data from long runs. That's what Kimmel Racing will be using in the 2018 season and beyond.

"This will give us a much better idea what our car is doing, hard data, rather than having to rely solely on the driver. We can place sensors on the steering column, throttle, brakes, and shocks to monitor travel." All the data compiled goes into the computer, called a data logger, which can also monitor variables itself such as G-Force and acceleration rate.

These aren't the small steps that the team has taken in the past. These are big moves, innovative moves that should help vault Kimmel Racing squarely into that top tier on a consistent basis. They've shown the ability over the last few years; out running high budget teams at intermediate tracks, competing at unique tracks like Pocono and Road America, and winning the pole at DuQuoin in September.

The 2018 schedule for Kimmel Racing hasn't been quite set yet, but be prepared to see more than just ARCA on the schedule.