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SCCA: Making It - Jesse Prather's secrets to success

Sunday, 17 July 2016


Philip Royle (words and images)
What follows is an excerpt from the cover feature that appeared in the August 2016 issue of SportsCar magazine, the official member magazine of the SCCA. A subscription to SportsCar magazine is one of the many benefits to joining the SCCA – the other being the ability to compete in any of the more than 2,000 competition events the SCCA sanctions year round, from autocross to professional road racing. Kick start your motorsports dream by heading to www.scca.com and joining now...

"My dad started Club Racing in 1979 – in the same MGA he has today," Jesse Prather explains as we sit down to chat in Jesse's race performance shop, Jesse Prather Motorsports. His shop, located in the southern end of Topeka, Kan., is not only a stone's throw from SCCA's National Office, but also Heartland Park Topeka, the racetrack where Jesse claimed all three of his SCCA National Championships, two in F Production, one in E. It's also not far from the race shop his father owns. Ultimately, all these elements worked in tandem to build Jesse's dream.

"We went to the races ever since I was a baby, so I grew up at the racetrack," Jesse continues. "That's what we did. We didn't go on vacation – we went to the races." Around 1990, the Prather family moved from Virginia to Topeka, which is where the family, both older and younger, set up shop, so to speak. Kent, Jesse's dad (and now eight-time SCCA National Champion), opened Prather Racing, serving the British racecar community and, after some bouncing around through Idaho and Minnesota, Jesse came home to work with his father.
"My dad needed help in his shop in Topeka, so [my wife and I] came back and I worked for him for 10 years," Jesse explains of what was the beginning of his own rise to SCCA racing notoriety – ironically, not in British cars.
"I had a guy in town who was running a GT3 RX-7 convince me to take a rotary engine apart," he says. "I thought it was fascinating, so I started building his engines. Then around 2000, I bought an RX-7 for E Production and started developing that, and that's how it all started."
From there, Jesse expanded his father's British car racing business to include Mazdas, with almost instant success. The rotary engine business was going well, then Miatas showed up in Production and life for the Prathers changed. "Chris Bovis wanted to build a Miata, so we built that for him," Jesse says. "He ran it for a couple of years, then I bought his car in June 2006, ran my first race in that car in July, went to the Runoffs in September and won. That was my first year in a Miata, and it was awesome."
With SCCA Production-class Miata business ballooning, Jesse was forced to make a difficult decision. "In 2009, I decided it was time to take my Mazda business and go out on my own," he says. He rented a shop in town and took the plunge, being careful not to compete with his father's business. After a few years, however, he felt his business could do with a change ("I decided I wanted to stop paying rent," he admits), so he and his family moved to the edge of town to a house on 11 acres of land. Behind the house was a large metal structure perfect for the future of his business. "The building was just a metal exterior and dirt floor. I came in and designed it the way I wanted."
The building, where we're talking, is indeed nice. A dyno, a lift, eight cars, and enough tools to build championship-worthy racecars surround us. One of them, a third-generation MX-5 Jesse built for E Production, is arguably the racecar that started Jesse Prather Motorsports down its most recent journey. "Mazda was keeping an eye on some of the parts I'd developed over the years," he says. "They then approached me about selling some of my parts through Mazda Motorsports. We're over a year in on that now and there have been no problems." The reason? Everything that comes out of his shop has Jesse's touch. "It's all stuff I developed and tested on my cars," he says. But while he's now selling more product than ever, he still aims for quality first. "It takes me time to provide Mazda with the big orders," he admits. "Even if I have someone make something for me, I inspect it all. Like the shocks; I assemble the shocks and put a base setting on every single one before sending them to Mazda."
To continue reading this story, join the SCCA (if you haven't already), log into www.scca.com, and download the August 2016 issue of SportsCar magazine. The most recent print version of SportsCar will appear in your mailbox soon thereafter.