Franklin teen on wild ride to NASCAR success
Ahead. Always ahead.
Sam Mayer is looking, focusing, reaching.
The next gear, the next corner. Next race, next win, next opportunity, next level. There’s always something out there pulling him forward, some goal, some dream. And if it’s out of his grasp, well, history says it won’t be for long.
“The day we put him in a kid kart, I was with my mom, right behind him in a golf cart, and we thought we were going to follow him around the track really slow,” Scott Mayer said, recalling a day in the summer of his son’s 4th birthday.
“He took off and left me in the dust, and from that day forward I never worried about it.”
Since he first stood on the gas pedal, the prodigy from Franklin has pulled away from a lot more people than just Dad and Grandma. Mayer plowed through the competition while karting on tracks close to home, in Legends cars down south and full-sized cars around the country.
He hasn’t yet graduated from high school or celebrated his 18th birthday, but soon Mayer will be just one step
away from the highest level of stock-car racing in the country. And he has an 18month plan to make that final leap.
“(This) is definitely the biggest step I've had to make in my career so I'm looking forward to it,” Mayer said of the NASCAR Xfinity Series, on which he will begin to race full time after his birthday in June.
“I'm going to have good people around me that can teach me pretty quick and obviously I'm going to have good equipment and support through my team.”
How it all started
Scott Mayer was what is commonly referred to as a “gentleman driver,” someone who competes at a high level but as a sidelight rather than a profession. He drove Indy cars and IMSA sports cars part-time but primarily focused on running the employment agency he founded in 1985.
Using a portion of his long driveway and designing segments influenced by famous road-course corners, Mayer paved an elaborate go-karting track alongside his home on 100 mostly wooded acres in Franklin.
So Sam didn't have far to go for either inspiration or opportunity.
With help from Franklin Motorsports, a successful dealer of racing karts, and the support of his parents, Sam was up to speed quickly.
“At one point we'd be over at (Badger Raceway in) Dousman and the races would actually be boring because he'd be so far in the lead,” his mother, Susanne, recalled.
By the time Sam was 11, Scott was taking him to North Carolina, the hub of the NASCAR world, to race Legends cars – small-scale cars powered by motorcycle engines – and by 14 he was a champion. As Mayer eased into stock cars in 2017, he became the youngest winner at Greensville-Pickens Speedway in South Carolina and won his debut in the Midwest Truck Series at Dells Raceway Park, just outside Wisconsin Dells.
Mayer joined the development program of NASCAR industry veteran Lorin Ranier and was guided to JR Motorsports – co-owned by Dale Earnahrdt Jr. – and to GMS Racing, for which he competed and won in ARCA and the NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series.
“It is moving at light speed,” said Susanne, who has grown accustomed to not seeing her son and husband for stretches as Sam has pursued his racing career. “I try to keep up.”
But who is he?
Racing has brought more attention to Mayer than most 17-year-olds will ever have, but outside of the sport he describes himself as “a pretty boring person” and doesn't get an argument from his parents when he does.
Mayer, who spent his first semester of high school at Wisconsin Lutheran, is a semester away from earning his high school diploma online.
His 15-year-old sister, Sarah, tried racing for a bit but gave it up and is, by Susanne's assessment, the normal teenager.
“She doesn't watch Sam's races live because she thinks she's bad luck to Sam,” Susanne said. “But hopefully we can convince her otherwise and get her to watch the live presentations of these things.
“They do have a pretty funny relationship. It's funny up until all of a sudden it's not funny. You know?”
Mayer welcomed a winter break that left him time to hang out with his parents and sister and their dogs, to vacation in South Carolina with a family he met through Legends cars and to play Valorant and Fortnight on his own schedule. No racing games, though.
“I kind of got spoiled with how good real-life racing is that no racing games really satisfy me,” he said.
His sense of humor comes from Mom, his competitiveness from Dad.
Takes more than hard work
People marvel at the success Mayer has enjoyed and few seem to seriously question his potential. Still, this sport is quick to leave promising prospects behind.
“The sport needs to get fixed a little bit because there are a lot of talented drivers that don't have the opportunities Sam has because they don't have the resources and that's a lousy reason not to have the opportunity,” Scott said.
QPS Employment Group, Scott's company, has grown from a single suburban office 35 years ago to operate more than 50 branches in seven states.
“If you're good at basketball, if you're Giannis (Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks' two-time reigning NBA MVP), you don't have to have a dollar and you're going to make it in the business,” he continued.
“This is the one sport where you've got to have money, you've got to have connections, you've got to have good equipment, you've got to be marketable and the fifth … is you've got to have talent. … Now in this case, I think Sam has the talent, so we put all five pieces together.”
Sam gets it.
He appreciates how fortunate he has been to come from a family able to support his climb from karting to the big time with both time and money.
He understands not everyone grows up with a kart in the garage and a track in the yard, that he's had opportunities few get to show what he can do to the sport's biggest decisionmakers, that the varied schedules his father put together for him involved rentals and sponsorships, that he usually has better equipment than most of his rivals and that the doors at top-tier teams didn't open themselves. They all get it.
“If it wasn't for Scott, I honestly think we wouldn't be where we're at right now,” Susanne said. “He's blessed with his own talents the way he was able to network and meet the people he was able to meet and just kind of moving things forward.
“Even in the offseason things are changing. It's just constantly keeping up with the communication and understanding where are we now in the contract,
where are we now in discussions?”
Although Mayer is signed with JR Motorsports to race in the second-tier Xfinity Series, his parents' support continues.
He won't be eligible before his birthday on June 26, so Scott put together a schedule of Trans Am sports-car races and ARCA races and testing to keep Sam sharp.
The team would like to get Sam up to speed with meetings and physical training, so sometime this spring Scott will move him to an apartment in the Charlotte area. He'll split time there himself.
“I'm not going to just go out and move out as a 17-year-old, almost 18-year-old, and just expect to know everything that I need to know,” Sam said. “My dad's going to be there at least a little bit to guide me through this new chapter in my life. Thanks to him for doing that – he still has to run his business up here – and giving up his time to do that.”
The perils of parenting a racer
Susanne likens her son's move to a graduate going off to college. Sam will be gone mostly, but she'll see some races and he'll come home for holidays.
She has handled bigger challenges, not the least of which is coming to grips with the dangers of the sport.
The frightening Daytona 500 crash that sent Ryan Newman to the hospital in February hit Susanne squarely in the stomach. She knew Sam would be racing there before long. Then the images of Newman walking out of the hospital three days later reminded her how safe stock-car racing has become.
“Looking back at go-karts, I can't believe I allowed him to do those. They actually scare me now,” Susanne said. “He seems very safe in the cars he's in now. I know there's good helmets that stay on and the HANS device (head restraint system) and good suits and everything that goes along with it.”
In a sports-car race in August at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Sam was involved in a crash while racing near the front of the field, and the fuel cell ruptured on his car as it was hit by numerous others. The car burst into flames, but he was able to scramble to safety – with a fractured wrist – before either of his parents knew what was going on.
“I'm on the radio and he's talking and goes, well, we just got demolished, sorry guys, blah, blah, blah,” Scott said. “So he says everything is fine, and then the radio went dead and I assumed he just got out of the car.
“Thank God I actually didn't know what was going on until they were pulling up to the medical (facility).” Susanne was at home. “Scott's not going to tell me, oh, the car was on fire and this and that, about how bad it was,” she said. “As I learned more details my eyes got wider and wider and I'm freaking out a little bit. But Sam was fine. We learned a lot from that, and that's I guess what's most important.”
Sam shook it off quickly. He was thrilled to be credited with second place. And ultimately his parents were able to put the incident in perspective too.
“With 10 cars piling into him, somebody could have been on top of him or had him barricaded that he couldn't get out. That would have been different,” Scott said. “But something like that is a freak thing and driving home after the race was more dangerous.”
Looking back
While being a part of a fiery wreck was the most spectacular memory of Mayer's season, 2020 included plenty of highlights, just as 2019 had.
Two seasons ago, he won four of 12 races in the NASCAR K&N East to become NASCAR's youngest champion at 16 years 3 months and 8 days. Mayer also finished among the top five in seven of eight ARCA Menards national series starts and made his debut in the NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series.
In 2020, the regional series were repackaged as part of ARCA, and Mayer won nine races, five on the national tour (including two that also counted as an East race), three more East races and one of his two ARCA Menards West starts. He also won the NASCAR truck race at Bristol Motor Speedway, an unforgiving half-mile in Tennessee, in just his seventh start in the series.
Mayer took the titles in the ARCA East Series and the Sioux Chief Showdown, a crossover championship within the various ARCA series for drivers not yet eligible to race on the big ovals of the national tour.
More important than the numbers, though, was the learning process those seasons provided.
“Just the raw race craft,” Mayer said. “Understanding how the cars work and how they drive with the aerodynamics of the car.
“At faster racetracks like Dover, aero (dynamics) is pretty much the only way you can race people, and then you have the short tracks where you're beating and banging and trying to get every position and every inch you can. They race really differently, however you need to know both to be successful.”
And now looking forward
Two advantages Mayer enjoyed the past two seasons at GMS Racing was superior equipment – the team has won two truck titles and an Xfinity race – and the relationship he built with crew chief Mardy Lindley. The driver's ability to detail to his crew how his car is handling is an invaluable skill.
Mayer will start over this year in the JR Motorsports Xfinity Series program, although he is familiar with the organization from racing its late models in 2018. He'll be paired with Taylor Moyer, who will be in his third season leading the JRM No. 8 entry.
“Building that rapport, especially with my new crew chief, is definitely going to be very big,” Mayer said. “We've talked a bunch already.
“It'll take time, but we have a year and a half to get perfect and it'll be good.”
Josh Berry – a teammate of Mayer's in late models – will drive the car until Mayer is eligible to make his debut, while Mayer will go to the JRM shop a few times a week for meetings, work out with the team's trainer, drive the Chevrolet simulator and get a first-hand look at what's expected.
Then after his birthday, he is scheduled to make his Xfinity debut at Pocono, a challenging 21⁄2-mile triangle in Pennsylvania, followed by his second start in his home race at Road America.
“Everybody says he's going to adapt immediately,” Scott said.
“They said, no pressure … just learn the car, learn the tracks, learn the team and get ready because they have been very direct with me in saying 2022 our goal is to win the championship. When you put Sam out there and take away the pressure … that's going to make life easier for the kid and he's going to go out and do some pretty good things.”
Like win some more races. Challenge for another title.
Then the top-level Cup Series, now within view, would be within reach.