Dirt Mod Hall of Fame Honors Builder Randy Williamson
By Buffy Swanson
A founding partner in Bicknell Racing Products, Randy Williamson will be honored with the distinguished Mechanic/Engineering Award during the 2023 Hall of Fame ceremonies, on Thursday, July 13, at the Northeast Dirt Modified Museum and Hall of Fame on the grounds of Weedsport Speedway in New York.
Williamson was a 13-year-old kid, trying to hitch a ride to Merrittville Speedway, 10 miles from his home in St. Catharines, ONT, when he got hooked up with future Hall of Famer Pete Bicknell. At the time, Bicknell was just getting his feet wet, racing a home-built Late Model, and asked Williamson to give him a hand after school.
“At first, I was painting side-bar bumpers or cleaning up the floors—nothing mechanical,” Williamson said of his start. “In 1975-6, we built a two-bay garage at Pete’s mom’s house, to work on the race car. And when we had downtime, we would make some cash on the side, changing engines on street cars for a wrecking yard. I was maybe 15, would ride my bike from school to Pete’s house and I would start taking an engine out of a car until he came home from work at the GM dealership. Usually, Mrs. Bicknell fed us supper.”
In 1977, Bicknell established a shop in town—Pete’s Automotive—and Williamson, age 17, formally went to work for him, summers and after school. At night, the pair would be back at Pete’s family garage, building race cars—Late Models, and then Modifieds.
“The first car we ever sold was in 1977 or ’8 and it was to Merv Winfield,” Randy remembered. “Pete told me, ‘I just sold this car. But I’ll give you some money to help build another one.’ I was still a high school student—pumping gas for $2.75 an hour. And Pete’s handing me a thousand, maybe 1500 dollars! Which was a lot to a kid working at night, building a race car.”
By 1981, Bicknell was making a name for himself as a driver. “That’s when we built a really sweet-looking Modified, and Pete won his first race at Syracuse. A July 4th small-block race. I think he won eight total there.”
The car-building business began to gain traction, with Auto Finishers in Syracuse acting as sales agent and distributor. But to get bigger, you had to be bigger—and those economies of scale proved daunting.
They were operating out of the back of Pete’s Automotive, had two CNC machines, when Bicknell Racing Products was formed in March 1988. “We really thought by March of ’90, we’d be making a profit,” Williamson admitted.
“The problem was that the two machines we had—we had to get a saw, we had to get inventory, we had to get tooling. So we each had to throw in $40,000 of our personal money.”
It was money Randy and his wife Tracey didn’t have. They’d been planning to put their meager savings toward a down payment on a house. He told his wife, “Everything looks good on paper but we’d still be living in an apartment, we won’t be able to get a house for a bit. Do you want to take the gamble?”
Tracey was a believer, so they borrowed their stake in BRP from Randy’s uncle. “The first two or three years were tough—we were paying off machines, not making any profit. Those first years we weren’t taking any money out of the company. Tracey and I were surviving on pork and beans, had one car between the two of us.”
Then came Doug Hoffman.
At the tail end of ’88, promoter Alex Friesen put Pete and Randy in touch with the star driver, who was looking to make a change. Hoffman debuted a new Bicknell car in February during the 1989 Florida swing—and promptly went out and won two of the five races.
That proved to be the tipping point. In the late 1990s, BRP began perfecting a mid-rail design with less flex than their previous downtube car. That R&D really paid off by 2003: sales skyrocketed to 237 cars that season.
The introduction of a “tall-cage” car further expanded their market share.
“We hooked up with Rex King Sr., who was a bigger guy. He had been with Troyer but Troyer wouldn’t build a car to fit him. So we built what we called a tall-cage downtube car in the late ’90s, special for him,” Williamson said. In 2004, they did the same for Ricky Grosso. “We were already building ’em for Rex, so we built Ricky what we called our ‘big boy’ car. Jimmy Horton got in that car and won a lot of races at New Egypt and Bridgeport with it.”
The design became industry standard. “Now, you won’t go back to a standard cage car—it’s all tall-cage driver-back cars now.”
Which haven’t changed all that much in the past 20 years. “Our competitors keep trying different things,” Williamson pointed out. “We stayed pat with our cars: you could take the body panels off our 2000 car and put them on a 2023 chassis and vice-versa.
“The engine location has not moved. Did we work with different engine locations? Yes, I worked with Alan Johnson back in ’06-7,” he said. “Alan doesn’t like to do minor changes—he wants major change! So we did a car for Alan where we moved the engine location 10 inches, which is a lot. We tried it, it didn’t work. So we went back to basics.”
Today, everyone and their brother is driving a Bicknell—in just the past two years, even during the COVID shutdown, they’ve produced and sold a market blitz of 749 Modifieds. Success breeds success: aside from BRP’s cutting-edge equipment and computerized production systems, the company has one secret weapon—the BRP setup book, which is open to every customer.
“I probably talk to 30 drivers a day about setups, so my information log is pretty big. I keep very good notes on when I talk to customers and what they do. Because next week they could call me up and tell me it’s no good. On the other hand, if they go out and win four-five races in a row—their notes are in my head,” Williamson explained.
“We’ve gotten to the point now where we have all the really good drivers in our race cars.” Randy rattled off the formidable roster, past and present: Doug Hoffman, Jack Johnson, Dave Lape, Alan and Danny Johnson, Jimmy Horton, Matt Sheppard, Billy Pauch, Frank Cozze, Stewart Friesen…
Include in that list his son Mat—“Money Mat” to Modified fans—who’s been cashing in at the high-dollar extra-distance events on the circuit.
Since 2002, Bicknell cars have averaged over 600 wins per season in big-block, 358 and Sportsman competition across the U.S., Canada and Australia.
It’s a 50-year body of work to be incredibly proud of. “I’m very fortunate to have all those people in my stable and be able to learn from them,” is Williamson’s takeaway.
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