Q&A: JPC Founder And Ford Wiz Justin Burcham

In the world of Ford and Mustang drag racing, few individuals have earned the accolades of Justin Burcham. The founder of Justin’s Performance Center, better known as JPC Racing, in Millersville, MD, a former NMRA champion and now part-time racer, a sponsor of several NMRA competitors, and the man behind one of the industry’s elite horsepower factories – Burcham and JPC Racing have become virtually synonymous with Ford Mustang drag racing. powerTV recently sat down with Justin to learn more about his introduction to racing, his current and future racing endeavors, and the foundation and evolution of his business.

powerTV: How did you get sucked into the addiction of Mustang drag racing?

Justin Burcham: “It was when I was a teenager that I really took a liking to speed and got into cars. I had some friends that lived nearby that were into drag racing, and they had a Vega that they’d take to the track and race. I’d tag along with them and before I knew it, I was hooked. I just couldn’t get enough of the sounds, the smells, and the speed of it all.”

PTV: Was your family involved in your formative years in cars and racing?

Burcham: “My family was really never into cars, believe it or not. My mother was a principal for the school system and my father works in finance, and so it wasn’t ever a family thing that was passed down to me. I always had a fascination with speed though. It was the rush of going fast, and drag racing will certainly give you that.”

The JPC Racing nine second, 850 RWHP 2011 Mustang

“I actually had a Pontiac Trans Am when I was in high school. I’d done all kinds of work to it, including installing nitrous oxide, and I raced it on the street and at the track. Once I got out of high school, I started working on cars at a repair shop before moving on to work for an engine builder. I started working there as an apprentice sweeping floors and cleaning blocks – essentially I was working for free – and spent a couple of years working my way up through the ranks. Before long, I was porting cylinder heads, machining engine blocks, assembling engines, and performing dyno tuning. At the time, I was only about 20 years old. Working at the repair shop, then then the engine shop, and all the while having Mustangs on the side to play with was what really got my fire burning.”

PTV: How did the founding of JPC Racing come about?

Burcham: “During the late 90’s and into the early 2000’s, I was working with high performance marine engines, building big block and small block Chevrolet’s, and also worked on cigarettes, fountains, skaters, and other types of boats. I ran the service department at a marina and built, rigged, tuned, and tested the boats, and then raced my Mustang on the weekends.

During that time, my name had gotten out there to people in the area from my side work with the Mustang’s and soon, I was working on cars out of my house and selling parts here and there while working full time at the marina. I had developed the idea for the business and even had a name in mind, but it wasn’t until 2001, around the time that I first went heads-up racing, that I finally incorporated the business. So it all really came together at once.

I made a lot of great contacts in the industry by competing with the NMRA and that opened several doors for me to supply and sell parts, and in the last ten years, it’s snowballed into what it is today.”

PTV: JPC is housed in a pretty impressive facility today, but did you have pretty humble beginnings?

Burcham: “We started out in a 1,200 square foot building that had a 600 square foot showroom in the front and a shop in the back that had a seven foot ceiling and just one bay. On one side we had parts and on the other we had the single bay to work out of. I didn’t have a lift, so for the first four years that we were in business I was working on my back with jackstands and a jack.

We later expanded and took on two additional units in the strip mall that we were in and finally installed lifts. After that, we really started to see the  growth and took on more work. Along with the lifts, we purchased our first dyno in 2005, but prior to that, I’d been renting a dyno when we needed one. Even at that point, I was still doing some of the work out of my house because we had so much overflow at the shop.

When we took on the two extra units we were at 3,500 square feet, which was both the first and second floor combined. Today, we have nearly 13,000 square feet in all.”

PTV: Have you always been a Ford man?

Burcham: “I’ve always been partial to Ford’s because I like the Mustang, but I’m one of those people that’s into anything that’s fast. Sure, I’m a diehard Ford guy in the sense of supporting Ford and Ford Racing; everything in our driveway is a Ford. But I’ve worked on, driven, built and tuned a number of GM and Mopar products. I don’t turn my nose up at people that drive Chevrolet and Chrysler vehicles. I’m into horsepower and speed, and if someone pulls up with a 600 cubic inch big block Chevrolet that makes 1,500 horsepower, they have my respect.

Of course, owning a speed shop in this day and age, you can’t turn anyone down. You have to take what you can get and you have to be diverse and able to work on anything and everything; so that’s always been my motto. We’re best known for the Ford’s because we race them and that’s primarily what we work on. If you were to walk into my shop any day of the week, about 85 percent of the cars we’ll have in there are Mustangs.”

PTV: Does a significant amount of R&D go into the products that your company builds and sells?

Burcham: “When we see a void in the market or inferior products on the market that don’t work, we try to step in and fill that hole or try to improve upon what’s out there. From an R&D standpoint, I’ve always had a number of companies that send me parts and say, ‘we just came out with this: can you make sure that it fits; can you make sure that it works; can you test it on the track and make sure that it doesn’t break?’ So we have a chance to work with a variety of different products on the market. We’re always trying to push the envelope on these cars, and so it all falls into place.”

“When I bought my ’05 Mustang, there weren’t any parts available for it. So we had to manufacture our own fuel system and numerous other parts. So, we definitely perform a lot of R&D, testing, and retrofitting at JPC.”

PTV: What challenges do you face in keeping up with so many cars on a race weekend, while occasionally getting behind the wheel yourself?

Burcham: “It’s tough, but it was certainly tougher in the mid-2000’s when I had ten sponsored cars to take care of when I went to the track. I’d try to help everyone with advice, line them up, and make sure they had everything they needed. Today, most of the racers that we back can run their own program. When Tommy Godfrey ran Factory Stock, he had a really good handle on his program and needed minimal input. And Bruce Hemminger, Brandon Alsept, and Ryan Hecox all run their own programs for the most part now, so it’s not near as much work as it once was.”

The JPC-backed NMRA teams of L to R: Ryan Hecox, Tommy Godfrey, and Bruce Hemminger.

PTV: Do you take more pride in your own racing accolades or in seeing your customers succeed?

I’m very competitive by nature and I hate to lose.

Burcham: “I actually gain a lot more satisfaction and gratification seeing my customers go down the track, and although I hate to say it, it’s more of a thrill watching my guys win than it is to do it myself. I’m very competitive by nature and I hate to lose. I expect to win, and I hate to lose. So when I do race, I want to do whatever it takes to win, but I get a lot of pleasure out of standing on the starting line and watching the win light come on for the racers that I help. It’s certainly a lot less stress away from the drivers seat.

Trying to run the business and race is a combination that just doesn’t work. You could ask anyone out there that’s tried to race heads-up and operate a business and they’d tell you the same thing. For those that compete in the index and bracket classes, it’s a little easier to do because the performance of your vehicle doesn’t matter to the same extent. But in heads-up racing, you’re always testing, always trying to think outside the box, and you’ve got to have your head in the game 100 percent.

I told myself years ago when it started getting busier at the shop that if I couldn’t compete at the highest level, then I didn’t want to compete at all. I don’t want to put my car in the lanes and say, ‘hey I’m here,’ because that’s not who I am. If I’m going to be out there, I want to win, period.”

The JPC 3-Valve S197 is a mean competitor in True Street, boasting solid single digit runs.

Basically, I’m challenging myself. I get enjoyment from limitations and boundaries being placed in front of me and overcoming them.

PTV: You’ve been known to tirelessly go after records in the Ford and Mustang arena. What motivates that?

Burcham: “Basically, I’m challenging myself. I get enjoyment from limitations and boundaries being placed in front of me and overcoming them. It makes me feel complete as a person, when there’s something that I believe I can conquer and then go out and do it. It’s a sense of accomplishment.

When I was racing, I wanted to be the world champion and the best in the world at the class for which I competed. I’m very driven and passionate about winning, and to me, breaking a boundary or being the first to accomplish a feat that no one else has ever done is another way for me to exercise my competitiveness. While my time with the business has kept from being able to compete the way that I’d like to at this point in time, I can go out with a new platform and try to be the first or the fastest at something.

Attaining goals make my life complete and worth living. I always have to challenge myself because I’m not one of those that can just sit on the couch and watch television. I can’t have idle hands: I’ve always go to be working or doing something.”

PTV: Of all the performance milestones you’ve achieved, which one stands out most to you?

Burcham: “The 3-valve in the eights stands out the most. That was a really, really tough and long road to achieve that goal. Of every mission that I’ve gone after, I spent the most time trying to knock down that eight-second wall with my ’05 Mustang. I actually spent a week in Florida by myself, like a gypsy, traveling around the state from track to track just trying to knock that wall down. It was wintertime in Maryland and Florida was one of the only places where tracks were open, so I headed down there and went from Moroso to Bradenton to Orlando and back and forth between them. I kept driving around the state trying to click off an eight-second pass, and it didn’t happen. My wife finally called and said ‘get your ass home’. ”

A couple of months later I went to a shootout in Englishtown and ran a 9.05 and the balancer came off the engine, doing some damage to the crankshaft. Following that run, I knew I was really close to getting there. After that I called Jesse Kershaw at Ford Racing and told him that I needed an engine, to which he responded that he had an Eliminator short block in stock. I promised him that if he sent it to me, that I’d put it in the eights. He said, ‘yeah right, we’ll see.’ So we were going from a 322 cubic inch engine to a 281.

Jesse shipped me the engine and a couple of weeks later we went to Maryland International Raceway and ran an 8.89.”

PTV: Is there a really heated competition between speed shops to break performance barriers that the public doesn’t necessarily see or understand?

Burcham: “I’d be lying if I said that claiming records and setting benchmarks doesn’t help from business standpoint. It’s not just a challenge we take on, there’s some business to it. Anytime you can claim that you were the first to do something, people automatically deduce that you must be better than the next guy, that you must know more, or anything else one could extrapolate from that.

But there’s definitely a rivalry there to be the first – it’s something to hang your hat on. Other shops have tee shirts and such stating they were the first to do this and the first to do that, and the people may not know all the details, but they see the press and it makes the phone ring. It’s certainly a case of race on Sunday, sell on Monday. Our goal is to be better than the competition and we want to beat them, so if they’re doing something that we’re striving to accomplish and they do it first, we lose. And we don’t like losing.”

We have some mutual customers with other shops and occasionally there are things said that get back to you, and that can sometimes create a bit of a grudge. I used to do a lot of street racing, so I enjoy the smack talking and seeing who’s better on the racetrack. For the most part though, I get along with most of them. People out there probably think I have got to hate JDM, Brenspeed, or whomever, but it’s not like that at all.

PTV: So what’s the next milestone on the radar for JPC?

Burcham: “I’d like to get my 2011 Mustang into the eight’s with the factory manual transmission. It’s got the Tremec Magnum six-speed, synchronized, regular old drive-it-to-work transmission in it, and it’s been my goal to put it in the eight’s in that configuration. I could probably throw an automatic transmission in the car and do it, but to me, that’s not a challenge. I’d rather dump the clutch, bang some gears, see an eight-second run pop up on the scoreboard, and still be able to drive the car on the street. I don’t have a lot of time to drive it because of the business, but I’d like to be able to say that I drive an eight-second stick shift car on the street. I think that’d be pretty cool.”

PTV: Do you have the desire to get back into racing full-time, or are you content with your current role

Burcham: “I’d definitely like to race on a regular basis again at some point in time. The new Coyote class that the NMRA is proposing is definitely an interest to me because it would be heads-up and a driver and tuner class, and I think it’d be really competitive with a lot of participation from the racers. I love heads-up racing, and it’s not something that you can just get out of your system by not going to the track. So, I definitely have the urge and I’m sure at some point I’ll get back into it, but right now I really need to focus on the business, because if that doesn’t succeed, then there isn’t any money to go racing.”

There is perhaps no one in the high performance Mustang arena more methodical in their approach to excellence in every facet of their racing business and racing efforts and the pursuit of victory than Justin Burcham. And he’s got the championships, world records, and a legion of satisfied customers to back it up. And we here at powerTV believe that as along as the almighty Ford Mustang roams the earth, Burcham will be under the hood, tirelessly working to make it faster than the competition.

Article Sources

About the author

Andrew Wolf

Andrew has been involved in motorsports from a very young age. Over the years, he has photographed several major auto racing events, sports, news journalism, portraiture, and everything in between. After working with the Power Automedia staff for some time on a freelance basis, Andrew joined the team in 2010.
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