Over the last ten-plus years, the name Bart Tobener has been synonymous with small-tire Mustang racing and NMRA Renegade racing in particular, although he has competed in other classes and sanctioning bodies as well. This year, he’s rededicated himself to racing in an attempt to win his first-ever season championship in the Renegade class. So far he’s on a tear, having won two of the four NMRA events to date and re-set the class record; in the process crushing the seven-second barrier that the Renegade faithful have been chasing for years.

Tobener isn’t just a racer, though – he’s a wrench, and proud of it. A career that started with Mark Mainiero at UPR Products has progressed through a number of other stops in the performance aftermarket to his current position as Tim Matherly’s right-hand-man at MV Performance in Winder, Georgia. Whether he’s wrenching on a car or in the driver’s seat, he’s happy; you could say that cars are his life, but he’s also got a family at home that supports everything he does.

It’s been a challenging season for him thus far; he made the switch over the winter to a new ProCharger F-1C-10.5 supercharger which presented a new learning curve, then crashed into the wall at the second NMRA race in Commerce, Georgia that had him scrambling to repair the car in time to make the third event just three weeks later at Maryland International Raceway. In Maryland he became the class record-holder as he busted into the seven-second zone, setting the class record with a 7.94 at 173 MPH.

He recently won the NMRA’s fourth race of the season at Summit Motorsports Park in Ohio, he leads Johnny Lightning in the points chase, and is on track to finish the season strong and maybe even win that championship he’s after. We caught up with him shortly after the Norwalk event to discuss his season, his life, and Mustangs in general. Read on..

StangTV: What made you finally say “I want that ring”?

Bart Tobener: When you have the will to win and the desire to do something, you just do it. I’ve never set out out to win the championship until this year. I’ve always just gone for race wins and not necessarily championships. I know I’m my own worst enemy with trying to run Xtreme Street [in NMCA], trying to run Ultimate Street, and Street Outlaw – I know I can build it all myself. I enjoy building the cars just as much and maybe more than I enjoy racing them. I told my wife I was going to focus on Renegade this year and that’s what I’ve been doing.

STV: What brought the 7 second pass to you this year?

BT: It’s a combination of everything – the blower, the program, the focus. The rules changed to allow intercoolers, and none of the other racers really upgraded their programs to minitubs, and intercoolers, and upped compression along with changing the camshafts. I had my car already set up – I’ve run plenty of Xtreme Street and Ultimate Street with the intercooler, and I’ve got more experience than most of the other racers in intercooled trim. They don’t know where the edge is, what their car likes. The supercharger change meant a lot, but having the experience with the intercooler meant even more – I can tune the car better because I know what it likes in this setup.

STV: How do you manage to keep your focus and come back from an accident like that so quickly? You crashed the car on April 12 and were racing it again on May 2 – 21 days later.

BT: The craziest thing about that was that I took the engine out at the track in Commerce – I knew that the heads were good except a few bent valves at that point. Tim and I put the engine back together in a matter of a day or so. Charlie Peppers fixed the heads up in a few hours – that wasn’t a big deal. But I had to wait until the following Saturday to get the frame pulled out, and on the way back from getting the frame straight is when my kidney stones started acting up and I was in unbearable pain. I ended up not really even working on the car until the following Wednesday – a week and a half after the accident. I’ve always worked well under pressure, so I just made it happen. It’s the desire and the will – when there’s something you want, you just have to go for it, and make sacrifices along the way – sleep, time with the family for a couple of weeks, whatever.

STV: Raising the question of family, you’ve got a young son and a wife at home. How does racing and family time mesh together?

BT: My wife, she understands. She knew before we got married that January to the beginning of March she wasn’t going to get much from me anyway. Chase will be four in a week and a half. A lot of times I’ll go home after work, and he’s in daycare until 5PM. We’ll go home and eat dinner and I’ll hang out with him until he goes to bed around 8, and then I’ll drive back to the shop to go work on the car. People like me are few and far between as far as work ethic, and I work better when I have no distractions – I crank up the radio so I can’t hear any background noise, no phone ringing in the office, nothing like that. I’ve always been that way. When you have that desire and that will, you just make it happen.

STV: You’ve mentioned desire a number of times during this conversation. Where does your motivation come from?

BT: It’s built into who I am. My mom and dad are very strong-willed people. They instilled those values into me. I know I work too much, but basically I’m just a mechanic, and a mechanic’s salary isn’t going to pay for a racecar like I have. So I either have to do all the work myself, or work extra to make the money to pay for it. So I do both. 

STV: Keeping a program like this at the top isn’t easy; you can’t possibly do it alone. What kind of support system do you have?

BT: I’ll work sometimes 70-80 hours a week at the shop and not on the racecar at all, but Tim is great about being there for me and very supportive of everything I do – he lets me work on the car in the shop after hours. Diablosport has been a product sponsor of mine for a long time. Prestige Mustang Parts has been helping me with hotels this year, which makes it so much easier since I don’t have to worry about that portion of my expenses, and Mark at UPR Products has always been there for me ever since I worked for him way back when.

STV: What’s your gameplan for the last two races of the year?

BT: I’m up 470 points over Johnny Lightning right now. The way I’ve got my car set up, it’ll go pretty quick down a hot and greasy track, and I’ll be able to run 8.0’s all weekend at Joliet and Bowling Green, and not push the car beyond its limits. I need to be consistent and just not do anything stupid.