PILCHER IN PERSON

Continued from Yeah, It's Got a 'Chemi'

His first competitive pass came less than three years later at Atmore, AL—two weeks before his 16th birthday—and he also captured his first win that day. “It was just time for me to start driving, I guess.”

Pilcher eventually went on to become a six-time champion with the Dixie Pro Stock Association (a nitrous Pro Mod group) and now helps operate Pilcher Automotive and Machine alongside his dad in Chancellor, AL, a high-performance shop catering to the machining needs of street, strip, and stock car customers.

Johnny Pilcher comes from real racing stock as not only was his father a longtime Modified Production and Top Sportsman racer, but his mother was a class winner at the 1985 IHRA Winter Nationals at Darlington, SC, and his grandfather saw a little oval-track action.

A devout family man, Pilcher lives in nearby Enterprise with his wife Kelly and daughters Sierra, 12, Lindsey, 8 (“going on 40”), and Shelby, 6. He also is a Royal Ambassador director for the youth group at his church.

“In our classroom we’ve set up a track with our small-scale derby cars and we’ve actually got a full-size Christmas tree in there to practice on, so the boys there keep me in tune on the reaction times,” he says.

Beyond his family, church life, and racing, Pilcher says he derives great satisfaction from just working on cars. One of his proudest moments came in 1983 as the U.S. representative in Auto Mechanics at the WorldSkills Competition, held that year in Linz, Austria. WorldSkills is a vocational competition similar to the Olympic Games in that every four years it pits teams and individuals from all over the world against each other in trades-oriented events. Pilcher finished third overall in a field of more than 40 international entrants.

“You had to do all kinds of things,” he recalls. “Each day for a week you had different stations you had to go through and each station would take a full eight-hour day. For example, they had one station that was a five-cylinder Mercedes diesel and you had to disassemble it, put it back together, fire it on an engine stand, tune it, and describe any problems it had, if any. Then they had a chassis station and you would have to rebuild the suspension, align the car, do the brakes, every day it was something different, transmission, electrical, the whole thing.”

While Pilcher says he would consider going NHRA or IHRA racing “if the right deal came along,” as long as he’s with his family-financed team he’ll stick with eighth-mile match racing and Outlaw Pro Mod competition.

Pilcher calls drag racing “therapy” for him after working long hours at the shop and says the family time that racing affords is the best part of being at the track. He also credits Michael “Muddy” Rivers as being an indispensable part of the team. “He’s the only other person who has a key to the shop and he goes in there and works on the car to get it prepared. He’s my right-hand man and anybody who races can respect that.”

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