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Start Me Up
How alumnus Kevin Mahl delivers for NASCAR
Kevin MahlPHOTO: Champion Tire/ Craig Bakstad
The NASCAR season consists of nearly 37 races a year for the premier CUP series at tracks spanning from Los Angeles to Loudon, New Hampshire. And crews from Champion Tire and Wheel are the first to arrive at the track for every one of them. "We deliver essentially all the teams' tires, wheels and pit equipment they need to run the race," said Kevin Mahl (MGT '96), the North Carolina-based company's president and CEO. "There is a lot of trust, responsibility and pressure that comes with that, as you can imagine."
Mahl launched the company in 2002, and the business soon found a market. "We are the only company left that does what we do," said Mahl, who also founded and owns Hyde Park Storage Suites, which provides storage space for luxury cars.
He credits a Case Western Reserve course taught by the late, legendary professor Richard "Gorilla" Osborne with honing his passion for entrepreneurship—a passion he wants to spread: Two years ago, Mahl launched First Turn Innovations, an incubator designed to help startups in the racing industry bring their vision to reality. He spoke to Think about his path to entrepreneurship and why he wants to help others with theirs.
What impact did your family business have on your career?Growing up on a farm—1,500 acres, 500 hogs, 100 sheep—provided me with a great childhood and a chance to build a strong work ethic. It also provided me an op- portunity to develop some entrepreneurial skills. I had a small livestock enterprise as a teenager that was separate from my family's business, and I had to pay attention to costs, efficiency, productivity, sales and profits—all of the things that any business of any size would need to manage. That experience really stoked my entrepreneurial spirit.
What does a race week look like for Champion?Each NASCAR Cup team uses over 2,000 tires and wheels throughout the race season, so between the three professional NASCAR series, we are transporting, handling, dismounting and managing well over 100,000 tires and wheels per race season [Goodyear Racing does the mounting]. Some weeks, we are dismounting more than 3,000 tires and wheels. The work, the hustle and the show never stop from mid-February until mid-November.
How challenging are logistics?Each week presents its own set of challenges. For instance, new to the schedule in 2023 was a street race in downtown Chicago. Getting 30 of our tractor-trailers into the race venue, unloaded, parked and then restaged to load after the race was a big, big challenge, as you can imagine. Throw in some rain, and it made it even that much more of an adventure.
What was the founding vision of First Turn Innovations?NASCAR introduced a new race car in 2022 to make the cars more similar in construction and to put the competition back into the hands of the drivers. With that move, there was no longer a need for legions of engineers and scientists that the teams typically employed. First Turn Innovations was put together to harness some of this displaced talent to create new ideas and businesses. We have some really talented people with a ‘racing' mentality—speed, efficiency and access to capital. There is no reason that First Turn Innovations can't be a major contributor to our pocket of the country, creating the same reputation, in a sense, that Silicon Valley built with software. We can build with performance and engineering.
