DirtonDirt.com exclusive
In sync with Rayburn, Pierce will miss legend
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt.com senior writer
C.J. Rayburn behind the wheel. (DirtonDirt.com)
Years and years of friendship — and oh-so-many memorable stories — whirled through Bob Pierce’s mind on New Year’s Day when he heard the news that Hall of Fame chassis builder C.J. Rayburn had died at the age of 81 from complications of Covid pneumonia.
“I’m sad as hell inside. I miss him,” said Pierce, a former standout Dirt Late Model driver from Oakwood, Ill., who now constructs Late Models and modifieds. “I’ve known this guy forever. Buddy, it’s been a long time. I’m gonna be 70 and I was 28 when I met him.”
Pierce doesn’t claim to rank among the Dirt Late Model titans most associated with Rayburn — guys like Billy Moyer, Jeff Purvis, Charlie Swartz, Don O’Neal and Shannon Babb highlight that group — but few people in the sport were closer to the legendary Hoosier over the past 40-plus years. Before and after Pierce’s two extended stints driving Rayburn-built cars (1982-1990 and 1999 through the end of Pierce’s racing career in 2006), the two men had a special connection.
“Me and Rayburn … we clicked somehow,” Pierce said the day after Rayburn’s passing. “I don’t know how to explain it. He had so many people who probably won way more races than me in his race car, but I don’t know if they were really his friends, you know what I’m saying?
“Like I was telling Bobby (Pierce’s 25-year-old son) last night, you’ll pick up your friends in racing as you go. But car builders have certain guys that they just cling to. Like Purvis was Rayburn’s person, he really was; probably of all the drivers, I think he thought more of Purvis than about anyone. I know him and Purvis’s relationship because I always was there when they talked, when Rayburn had him on the phone. I could tell that he liked him. And he always thought the world of Moyer.
“I was that guy that, if I called him up at 7 o’clock at night and I said, ‘Rayburn, I gotta come over and do this or that,’ he’d be like, ‘Well, get your ass over here.’”
Pierce figures his success racing locally in the Land of Lincoln certainly helped endear him to Rayburn.
“You gotta remember, I could win around here in my home-built stuff at Farmer City, Fairbury, Peoria, Charleston, Danville,” Pierce said. “But then when I get something like Rayburn’s (and win) everybody’s gotta have one, so I kind of helped kick-start him in this area. I didn’t have to go win the World 100. I was selling the Friday and Saturday night cars for him when I first got his stuff in ’82.”
Nevertheless, Pierce’s relationship with Rayburn went beyond his exploits on the racetrack. They just seemed to be on the same wavelength.
“Rayburn knew nothing about a (Late Model) race car when he got started (building cars); he was a motor builder and a drag car guy,” Pierce said. “So, I wasn’t Charlie Swartz and I wasn’t Billy Moyer, but in ’82 and ’83 I was good enough that Rayburn wanted to talk to me. Like, when he’d pull out of Putnamville or pull out of Eldora or pull out of Brownstown, he’d say, ‘Hey, you got somebody to drive your truck?’ I’d go, ‘Yeah,’ and he’d say, ‘Well get your ass in here and talk to me then.’
“He always rode around in his motorhome. He wasn’t pulling no race cars around, he was just going around helping everybody, and I’d get in there with him and we would drive for, s---, I don’t know, two or three hours or better sometimes if the next track was a long way away, and he’d just ask questions: ‘What’s the right-front spring doing? What’s up with the spindle?’ It was just chassis questions that I knew enough about, and I was decent enough, that he confided in me about it. And then when he was done he’d pull to the side of the road and say, ‘OK, get out, we’re done,’ just about as quick as it happened.
“I’m sure he’s done that with other guys too,” he added. “But for him to do that with me, that’s how we got so close, and that’s how we always stayed friends.”
Pierce’s history with Rayburn dates all the way to about 1980, when Pierce made his first visit to Rayburn’s soon-to-become-iconic shop alongside his home in Whiteland, Ind. The reason for Pierce’s trip was to buy a 355 short-block engine kit because, at the time, Rayburn was building motors rather than cars.
“He started drag racing; when he lived in Kentucky that was his thing,” Pierce said of Rayburn. “So he brought his motor building business up to Indianapolis, and I found out about it and I went over and I probably bought four or five (355 short-blocks) from him. They weren’t real expensive for back in 1980 and they worked. You could have any garage guy who knew how to put a set of bearings in a motor put it together for you, and I had a couple guys here that knew how to do that.”
Pierce had become acquainted with Rayburn from several visits to Indiana when, while making one of his last short-block purchases, he learned that Rayburn was about to enter the Late Model game. He clearly remembers the moment he glimpsed the raw rails of the car that would launch Rayburn’s Dirt Late Model business.
“If you pull into his house’s driveway and go straight, you’ll head right into the original shop that was there when he first got there and that’s where he did all the motor work,” Pierce said, setting the scene. “So you walked in the small service door and right there was a counter … you didn’t have 10 feet. You could look behind the counter and see all the machines and stuff pretty much in the place, but way on the very, very end of that shop was a big door that went to the outside, and that was the only big door in the whole place. Well, I’m looking back there and I see this frame, this roll cage, sitting back there, and I said, ‘Rayburn, what are you doing there?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’m gonna build a Late Model.’ I go, ‘You’re gonna build a Late Model?’ He goes, ‘Yeah,’ and go, ‘Well, why would you do that?’
“Now this is the honest to God story — Rayburn did motors for sprint cars, and he says that Grant King (a well-known USAC and IndyCar builder based in Indianapolis), was there the other day and (King) said, ‘Rayburn, are you stupid? Why don’t you build Late Models? You got all these tracks right here (in Indiana) — you got Paragon, Brownstown, Haubstadt.’ He named a ton of ‘em, and he said, ‘All these guys around here got Late Models. You ought to build one of ‘em.’
“Well, he knew nothing about it. Didn’t even care nothing about it. And he goes, ‘All right.’ ”
Pierce recalled that Rayburn collaborated with Dave Dayton, an ARCA stock car racer with a part shop in Indianapolis, to obtain a Stock Car Products front end that was “basically a rear-steer Ford steering box type front end made out of square tubing.”
“He’s gonna put this thing, believe it or not, on the front of one of Bob Glidden’s wrecked Pro Stock (drag cars),” Pierce said, noting that Rayburn was close with the champion Pro Stock racer who lived nearby. “So I said, ‘Can I get a look at that?’ He said, ‘Yeah, come on back here.’
“First of all, if you’re allowed to go behind that counter that’s pretty good. That’s how quickly we got to be friends. And, well, I go back there, and I’m staring at this thing … you know, I’d mucked and gobbed my own cars together. I put Camaro clips on ’57 Chevy frames and Chevelle frames. I mean, I built all my own crap ever since I started racing. So I’m looking at it and I go, ‘You even got a clue how you’re gonna put this (front end) on?’ He said, ‘Well hell no.’ I go, ‘Well, you gotta have a wheel base and know where the motor’s gonna be and all that.’ So he goes, ‘Well what’s the wheel base on these things?’ Back then they were like 105, 104 (inches) -ish, and he said, ‘OK.’
“I left, and that’s kind of where he ran off with it. That’s the one he built for Don Hobbs to race. This thing was like 1,000 pounds lighter than anybody else’s car, and then they started traveling with it, went through Iowa and won every race, and come back through here, and as the story goes, the rest is history.”
Pierce got his first Rayburn car in late 1982 and became a regular visitor to the chassis builder’s shop. He met a long line of drivers — Hobbs, Purvis, Jim Curry — and got the whole C.J. Rayburn experience while there, including many long lunch breaks. Rayburn, of course, was known for taking his guests out to eat at local establishments.
“I would go over there in the middle of the week and pick up my parts — he’s like an hour and 10 minutes from me here,” Pierce said. “But if it meant staying over and building a race car, you knew you were gonna be there for a couple days because you were gonna have to go out to eat and hit every bar in town with him. And not an hour lunch. We’re talking a three-hour lunch, because not only did he have to sit in the restaurant and tell stories and talk for hours, if you rode with him you better plan on riding around town, too. He’s gonna point out this house and tell you, ‘I dated that girl who lived there,’ all kinds of stuff like that.”
Pierce’s countless hours spent at Rayburn’s place put him behind the scenes of some historic moments in the C.J. Rayburn Race Cars time line. He recalls, for instance, the birth of the four-bar suspension that became the sport’s hot ticket item during the ‘80s.
“When the leaf spring cars were slowly dying, I was driving for Bill Sloan out of Chicago a little bit because I was still working (full-time),” Pierce said. “Rayburn and Bill Sloan decided they were gonna build a four-bar car, and Rayburn hated the four-bar cars. He hates them … still does to this day. But he said to me, ‘Well, come on over here and we’re gonna build one,’ not knowing that he’s called Purvis and wants Purvis to be involved in it.
“So it’s me and Purvis, Bill Sloan, one of the guys who helped us on the car and Rayburn, and we got on the floor, bars laid out with heim ends, and (Rayburn’s) TAC welding some birdcages together and we’re mocking this thing up. Well, remember Jeff Purvis won the World 100 (at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio) in ’83 in the (Rayburn) wedge car and then he came back and won the World 100 in ’84 with a small-bodied car. That small-bodied car was a four-bar car. That was the first four-bar car that Rayburn built. Then (the late Jack) Boggs got one and won all those races with it and it just took off.”
Rayburn’s favorite style car was the swingarm suspension that became his calling card through the ‘90s and much of the 2000s. Pierce said he will “swear on his kids’ lives” that he was around Rayburn for the birth of the swingarm idea back in the late ‘80s.
While at Rayburn’s shop one week, Pierce said he “drew these bars out on a piece of paper where the rear shock and spring was mounted on the bottom arm of one of these bars. Now I drew it in a four-bar fashion naturally because we’re talking like ’87 now. Rayburn goes, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘Well, I had a ’61 Chevy when I was 17, and I had a ’63 Chevy with I was 18, and, you know, the springs on those old Chevys are sitting on that bottom control arm and they’re in front of the rear end by like 5 inches.’ And I go, ‘Look at how much more tail is behind the springs and shocks for leverage to let that car roll back and get traction, kind of like a drag car.’ Well, he related to that real quick, and he goes, ‘Oh, OK. Well here … we need to flip that bar back,’ and that’s how it became a Z-link — he took the back top bar and flipped it backwards.
“I said, ‘Nah, it’s gotta be four-bar.’ Now remember, this was after Purvis and all those guys were winning races on the four-bar stuff but he hated (the style), so he said, ‘Nah, nah, nah, you gotta put it backwards.’ I said, ‘Well, however, but don’t you think that would be better because, say, we got 58 percent tail weight and the springs or shocks are almost right against the axle tube, how much more tail weight will we have if they’re 5 inches farther forward of the axle tube in front?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s leverage.’
“So anyhow, he starts laying all this tubing out, he throws his heim ends on the table, and he says, ‘Here, take this home with you and build something. Let me see what it looks like.’ I said, ‘No, no, no Rayburn. I’m winning races with what I got right now. I ain’t screwing my deal up.’ He said, ‘Well, s---!’”
Rayburn went to work on the swingarm concept, though.
“He never had a car at Dave Dayton’s auction (that was held) in Indianapolis over Thanksgiving weekend before the PRI show came,” Pierce said. “Well, I walk into the Dayton show going into the winter of ’88 and there sits a bare red frame with front and rear suspension on it, and there were them swingarms on this thing just like I drew it out, but he had the bars flipped backwards. That was his first swingarm car. And guess who the first guy to drive one was? Billy Moyer. Billy Moyer was his guinea pig. Billy Moyer could drive anything.
“When that (Rayburn swingarm car) first started, I used to tell Billy, ‘Sorry about that man. I should’ve never brought that up to Rayburn,’ because he was struggling, he was having a hard time getting that thing going. And he finally did naturally, and the rest is history with him and O’Neal and Babb and Terry English (among those who excelled in Rayburn swingarm cars). All them guys who could drive swingarm cars were (fast). I couldn’t. I was the one who thought about it and I couldn’t drive the thing to save my ass. The rougher, the muddier, the tracks were, the better those cars were, but as good as I could be in the mud back in my day, I needed something a little more stable. Those things flopped up and down and they fell over a whole lot more than I liked to drive a race car.
“As smooth as Moyer was, he didn’t make that car look like a swingarm car,” he added. “(Rayburn) had a lot of tweaking to do to make him comfortable, but O’Neal and Babb, them giddy-up, get-on-the-cushion-and-let-‘er-eat kind of guys, it fit them guys real good.”
Pierce left the Rayburn fold after the 1990 season to campaign MasterSbilt cars, but Rayburn welcomed him back with open arms during the 1999 campaign. The conversation he had with Rayburn about returning is another Pierce will never forget.
“The day that I called him to leave MasterSbilt and come back to him, I remember this like it was yesterday,” Pierce said. “I was pulling out of Knoxville — that’s when Knoxville, Iowa, had their first Summer Nationals Late Model race in (July) ’99 — and I was either gonna turn right and come home or turn left and go to (the next race at Owatonna, Minn.) and finish Summer Nationals out. So I called Rayburn when I got to that T in the road and I said, ‘Rayburn, I need a car.’ He goes, ‘What’s the matter with your MasterSbilt?’ I said, ‘Ah, I just ran my course I guess. When I first got with them they weren’t as big as they got and I’m just that other guy now.’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, it happens. What do you need?’ He always knew I was broke, and he said, ‘You ain’t got any money, do you?’ ”
Rayburn invited Pierce to his shop and got him set up with a new car. He even demonstrated his special affinity for Pierce by letting him make changes to his machine right there in the garage.
“How you know Rayburn really liked you is from the people who work there,” Pierce said. “Like, if you got a frame sitting there of Rayburn’s, and you get the saws all out and start cutting bars out or you start adding bars, those guys that work there know that Rayburn don’t let that happen. So if you get by doing that, he likes you. And they knew that me and Billy (Moyer) could do that.
“Like, the year I went back with Rayburn in ’99, I got that car out for two races and I was terrible. I mean, I could not line up, and I called Rayburn and said, ‘I can’t drive this car. I can’t do it.’ He said, ‘What do you wanna do? What’ll make you happy?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He says, ‘Well, you want to bring it back. Will that make you happy?’ I mean, it was his, he owned it, and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well, you wanna cut it up? Would that make you happy?’ I went, ‘You know what Rayburn? I think cutting it up would make me happy.’ So he goes, ‘Cut that son of a bitch up.’
“So that’s how the four-bar Z-link stuff come about. You remember hearing about that when I won the (1999) North-South (100 at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky.)? He was all swingarmed up, and the Z-link is when one bar goes forward and one bar goes back, and a swingarm car was Z-link on both sides. But where the shocks are positioned is a different story. I kept the right side alone a little; I changed where the shock was mounted, but I four-barred the left side, and that’s what got that whole thing kicked off.
“I won the North-South, I run second in the Jackson 100, I won the Prairie Dirt Classic again and I won the $10,000 at Joliet and led the World 100 until my door fell off … that’s what sparked that car. But to do that at Rayburn’s, you better be somebody he likes. And those guys over there knew I could get away with that. They said, ‘We thought Moyer was God, but you’re God, too.’ ”
Not that Rayburn disliked anyone, though. He was the most generous of people, and Pierce witnessed his benevolence over and over through the years — acts of kindness that sometimes were to Rayburn’s financial detriment.
“The problem with Rayburn, if he had any kind of problems, was he had too big a heart,” Pierce said. “He would help anybody no matter how bad they screwed him. And he would help them again after they did.
“I was over there a lot, and I seen guys come in and just do stuff, take advantage of him, and I was like, ‘God, Rayburn, why do you let that guy do that?’ He’d go, ‘Ah, it don’t matter. He’ll sell me a couple cars down the road.’ I mean, he’d loan ‘em motors and they’d never show back up … he’d say, ‘Ah, that’s all right, he’ll sell me a couple cars.’ It’s just the way he always thought.”
Rayburn was a recipient of Rayburn’s largesse as well.
“I know in ’88 I wrecked pretty bad,” Pierce recalled. “The car was old anyway, but I went over there to fix it. He said, ‘What are you doing bringing this junk over here?’ I said, ‘I need to fix it.’ He goes, ‘Well golly, how old is that thing anyway?’ I said, ‘It’s an ’83 or something,’ and he’s like, ‘That’s too old. Throw it in the pile back there. Go out there and pick yourself a better looking one.’
“So I go out there and there’s like six new cars sitting there, and there’s this one that looks kind of new but the front clip was bent on it. I went and got him and said, ‘How about this one right here?’ He goes, ‘God damn, kid, are you blind? We just walked by two or three brand new race cars.’ I told him, ‘Nah, Rayburn, I don’t need a brand new one. That one there looks good enough. Hell, the paint’s not chipped.’ He said, ‘Well, all right. What are you gonna do with it?’ I said, ‘I’ve gotta put a front clip on it.’ He said, ‘You know how to weld, don’t ‘ya?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah,’ and he said, ‘Well get it in there.’ He never charged me a dime.”
Pierce specifically recalls how Rayburn extended him a long-term line of credit — and Rayburn’s reaction when he finally took care of his bill.
“I owed that man $10,000 for three years, and the night I went over there to pay him, he was laying on his couch sleeping and I said, ‘Rayburn, I got your money,’” Pierce said. “He said, ‘What money?’ I said, ‘That 10-grand I’ve been owing you.’ He’s shocked somebody is paying him! He’s used to getting ripped off … he had so money cars that he’d give away and then they’d sell ‘em and keep the money.
“So finally, he just lays his hand out as he’s half asleep and I lay $10,000 in cash in his hand. He starts to just crumple it up and he goes, ‘Yeah, it’s all there,’ and he pretty much fell right back to sleep. He didn’t even want to count it.
“But doing that stuff to him, when so many people screwed him over, that’s golden,” he continued. “So I was that guy who … he would do anything for me. I mean, when I asked him for a car, he said, ‘Well, get your ass over here and get it.’”
Pierce still relishes the memories of how Rayburn would go out of his way to help his racing career.
“I drove a beer truck (as a full-time job) for 10 years, 1980 to 1990,” Pierce said. “Remember, ’82 was when I got my first Rayburn car, and he knew I drove a beer truck. Well, if he thought I needed to drive someone else’s car besides my own, because my stuff wasn’t that good, he would call the beer place I worked for and say, ‘Where’s Pierce at? Can you get ahold of him? I gotta talk to him.’ They’d call taverns where I was stopping at and tell them, ‘Have him call Rayburn right now.’ So I call Rayburn when I get the message and I say, ‘What’s up Rayburn?’ He says, “I got you a ride for the North-South,’ or, ‘I got you a ride at Pennsboro,’ or, ‘I got you a ride at Brownstown.’ ”
Naturally, Pierce is upset that he won’t be able to attend Rayburn’s funeral services later this week because he will be in Vado, N.M., serving as crew chief for his son Bobby’s participation in the Wild West Shootout presented by O’Reilly Auto Parts.
“It hurts me. It’s not nice,” said Pierce, who entered the chassis-building business himself when he began constructing modifieds late in his driving career and then Late Models following his retirement from competition. “But he’ll know I miss him.”
Indeed, Rayburn had to realize how much Pierce appreciated him. Pierce made that clear ever time they crossed paths.
“When I got a chance to, I always gave him a hug and he’d go, ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ like he don’t expect to get a hug,” said Pierce, who last saw Rayburn during last July’s Summer Nationals event at Circle City Raceway in Indianapolis, Ind. “But I’d tell him, ‘We’re just that way buddy.’ I don’t know. It’s just different with him. You know, I wouldn’t walk up and hug (former Late Model chassis builder) Larry Shaw, although I drove for him and I respect him. I shake his hand. But Rayburn, I just hug him. It’s just that way. It just felt right.”
