McEntyre’s not slowing down any time soon
His love of racing cars keeps him on the go.
As long as Mike McEntyre is doing something with cars, he’s generally happy. Sometimes that means he’s supervising his staff members during a workday as they rotate and balance a customer’s tires, and other times it means he’s roaring down a racetrack in a custom-made dragster on the weekend.
“I’m just glad to get to do what I do,” he says. “I love doing it every day for a living. Not many people can say that. I don’t dread going to work because I enjoy cars ... I get to work with them all day, get to fool with them of a night, get to hear about them at supper and get to talk about them at breakfast.”
It’s true: McEntyre’s life revolves largely around automobiles, whether he’s behind the desk at McEntyre’s Auto and Discount Tire Service or he’s traveling to a race. It becomes apparent over the course of a conversation with him, though, that racing is his love when it comes to cars. He’s spent considerable time hauling his cars to tracks around the Southeast and even building and selling the highly-specialized vehicles out of his shop in the Newtown area.
A start in racing
The son of Emory and Sylvia McEntyre, Mike grew up in Calhoun, and cars have been a part of his life since he could remember. His father ran an old-fashioned filling station for years here near the interstate.
“I was born and raised in basically a filling station,” Mike says. “We were full service … when I was young, we just fooled around with cars, and that was our living.”
His father was lightly involved with drag racing, and that’s where Mike’s interest in fast cars began to develop.
“I started helping him out with his stuff when I was little, when I was 5 or 6 years old, and that was just the highlight of the weekend if we got to go to the races,” he says. “But Daddy never was quite into it the way I’ve gotten into this stuff.”
His father fixed up one of his own cars for Mike when he was
10 years old.
“He would take the fourbarrel (carburetor) loose and let me drive it, and I would run in a little class called the trophy class,” Mike recalls. “I was driving a full-sized car when I was 10 years old. It was kind of dangerous, but it wasn’t fast, and that’s how I got involved in it.”
Building cars
His interest soon evolved from racing the cars to actually building them, and up until recently, he sold cars fairly frequently.
“For the last four years, I was doing one to two cars a year that I was building and selling,” he says. “I’ve got cars in Florida, I’ve got cars in Texas, I’ve got cars in New England … it’s pretty neat to see a car that you’ve done and see it going down the track in New England or something.”
A well-built rear engine dragster can sell for between $35,000 and $55,000. Door cars (i.e. race cars with a sedan body as opposed to the single-piece body of a dragster) go for $35,000$45,000, depending on the options included.
Mike recently took some time off from the endeavor when it began to interfere with actual racing, however.
“I was having to work day and night to get cars done because I had deadlines,” he says.
Passing on the tradition
Last year, he built a junior dragster for the first time. The car went to his son, Braxton, 11. The unveiling was emotional.
“We actually brought it over here and sat it in the building one day, and his sister kidnapped him … we had it stashed somewhere (during the building process),” Mike says.
Braxton began to ask questions about his father’s unusual hours as the car came together, but ultimately, the big reveal stayed a surprise. Mike has a video on his phone of the first time Braxton saw his dragster. The boy enters the garage and immediately bursts into tears at the sight of the car.
“He’s very smart, so once he saw it, he knew what had went on,” Mike says of his son. “He was like, ‘I see now why you were gone.’”
He says Braxton had a good first year racing the car
Racing rules say that until he turns 12, Braxton isn’t supposed to go faster than 8.90 seconds in an eighth of a mile, a speed which repre- sents the index, or optimal performance speed of the car. The max speed Braxton is allowed to run falls between 79 and 80 miles per hour at this index, Mike says.
“He’s hovering around his index now,” he says. “There are a lot of street cars that aren’t running that fast.”