VIC COFFEY - Sweeteners Plus, Inc.Vic Coffey and family. From L to R: Kyle, Vic, Kasey, Jill and...

12 | Dirt Late Model Magazine | August 2009

The yellow and red colors of the Sweeten-ers Plus Dirt Late Model have become instantly recognizable to full-fender fans

across the country thanks to Tim McCreadie, who in just five years on the division’s scene has won a World of Outlaws Late Model Se-ries Championship and an ever-growing list of big shows. But now there’s another Sweeteners Plus driver attempting to make a mark on the national Dirt Late Model scene, and for the uninitiated, this one is actually more closely connected to the upstate New York race team. Vic Coffey, the 2008 World of Outlaws Late Model Series Rookie of the Year, has been the constant in the history of Sweeten-ers Plus Racing. He’s spent virtually his entire racing career competing with the backing of the Lakeville, New York, based company that distributes and manufactures liquid and dry sweeteners. From his early days in Micro-Sprint racing to his emergence as a force in the DIRTcar Northeast Modified ranks, and now on to his current Dirt Late Model ex-ploits, Coffey and Sweeteners Plus have been joined at the hip. Of course, Coffey, 38, isn’t just a hired gun for the motorsports arm of the Sweeteners Plus organization. He also happens to be fam-ily. His step-father is Sweeteners Plus Presi-dent & CEO Carl Myers, who married Coffey’s mother, Ann, several years ago. “To have a sponsor this good, for this long, whether it’s family or not, is rare in this sport,” said Coffey, hailing the support he’s received for nearly two decades from Myers and his mother. “Most of the time, people will eventu-ally say, ‘Enough’s enough,’ and get out, so I feel very fortunate that they have the love of racing that they do and con-tinue to

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August 2009 | www.ThreeWideMedia.com | 13

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BY KEVIN KOVACAugust 2009 | www.ThreeWideMedia.com | 13


1� | Dirt Late Model Magazine | August 2009

Vic Coffey sits in his Sweetners Plus,

Rocket Chassis mount prior to

on-track action.

his Sweetners Plus,

want to do this.” “I would probably be just a weekend racer without them; some-how involved in the sport, but not racing fulltime like I am.” Coffey didn’t harbor any grand ambition of making a life in dirt-track racing while growing up. Actually, as a kid he frequented the asphalt ovals near his home in western New York, regularly attending events with his father Pete Sr., who had raced in the late ‘60s to early ‘70s, and older brother (by six years), Petey. But when Coffey was 14, a small local track, Limerock Speed-way in Caledonia, New York, cov-ered its paved surface with dirt, and Coffey’s father decided to resume his racing career there in the Micro-Sprint division. Coffey helped his dad for a couple years until entering the Micro-Sprint class himself as a 16-year-old, driving a hand-me-down car from his father. He ran a partial schedule during his rookie season in 1989, and then became a Limerock regular in 1990. It was in 1990 that the Sweet-eners Plus logo debuted on Coffey’s Micro. Myers, who at the time was racing off-shore power boats, and Coffey’s mother, took advantage of an open weekend on Myers’s sched-ule to attend the second night of Limerock’s season. Coffey promptly went out and won the evening’s first feature and came from deep in the field to finish second in the nightcap, impressing them enough to earn a sponsorship deal. “They started out buying me tires and wheels,” said Coffey. “Then, about midway through the year, this one guy, Jeff Bennett, was pretty much kicking everybody’s

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tail, and Carl was like, ‘What kind of engine does that guy have?’ I told him he was running a Suzuki, which was the hot ticket at the time, and Carl said, ‘What do you have to do to get one of them?’ I said, ‘I guess you need a couple thousand dollars.’ “At the time, I was using one of my father’s spare Yamaha engines. I was kinda paying him off for the new car we bought from the money I was making working part-time at Sweeteners Plus, so I didn’t have enough money for an engine. (Myers and Coffey’s mother) de-

cided to buy me a (Suzuki) engine, and then the next year Carl decided he wanted to do a whole deal and own the car, too.” And with that, the Sweeten-ers Plus dirt-racing juggernaut was born. Within two years, Myers was funding a four-car Micro-Sprint team, and then in 1994, one year after Coffey won his first Limerock points championship, Myers moved Coffey to the DIRTcar Sportsman division in a new Troyer-built car. Coffey won 11 DIRTcar-sanctioned features over the next two years be-

fore advancing to the headline Big-Block Modified class, and winning the 1996 DIRTcar Modified Rookie of the Year award. When Myers slowed his power-boat racing in 1998, he expanded the Sweeteners Plus Big-Block Modified effort to a serious two-driver operation. Coffey was entrenched in one of the seats and spent the ensuing seasons learning the ropes as a teammate of several established big-block Modified stars, including Pennsylvania’s Doug Hoff-man and New Yorkers Danny John-son, Steve Paine and, beginning in 2003, McCreadie. DIRTcar Big-Block Modifieds were the bread-and-butter of Sweet-eners Plus Racing, but Dirt Late Models began appearing among the open-wheel cars in the team’s sprawling shop in Avon, New York, for the first time in 2001. Danny Johnson, a superstar in the Big-Block Modified ranks, enticed a skeptical Myers to purchase Rocket Dirt Late Models for both him and Coffey. “Back then, our only real expo-sure to Late Model racing was during Speed Weeks in Florida when we ran the Modified at Volusia (Speed-way Park) and the Late Models were there too,” says Coffey. “Carl didn’t really care for the Late Models, but the surface at Volusia used to be different than it is now. It got to be rubbered-up and one-lane a lot, and when Carl would come over and watch he’d say, ‘These are the most boring things I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s no passing, just follow-the-leader (racing).’” “But Carl had never seen (Late Models) anywhere else where there was better racing. Danny said, ‘Well, maybe we should try it,’ and Carl decided to do it.” The Sweeteners Plus Dirt Late Models debuted with Coffey and Johnson aboard in a UDTRA event on February 3, 2001, at Golden Isles Speedway in Brunswick, Geor-gia. Coffey was surprisingly fast right out of the box, finishing fourth in a talent-filled A-Main. “It was a fast, oil-slick sur-face, kind of like racing at Syracuse (the one-mile fairground oval in New York that hosts DIRTcar Modified



(Continued on pg. 88)

Vic Coffey and family. From L to R: Kyle, Vic, Kasey, Jill and Shelby Coffey

racing’s biggest annual event) or an asphalt deal,” Coffey says of Golden Isles. “I went out there and ran fourth, and I kind of got a false impression about Late Model racing. I was like, ‘Whoa, this ain’t too hard.’ Then we went to East Bay (Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Florida, the following week) and got a rude awakening. Just qualifying was tough, so it was a real eye-opener for us.” It was McCreadie who took Sweeteners Plus into the Dirt Late Model spotlight after becoming Cof-fey’s teammate in 2003. After run-ning a single Dirt Late Model event for Sweeteners at Hagerstown (Maryland) Speedway at the end of the 2002 season, and a handful of shows in 2003, McCreadie won an UMP DIRTcar-sanctioned A-Main at Volusia in February 2004 and then hit the road with the reincar-nated World of Outlaws Late Model Series, capturing the tour’s Rookie of the Year title. McCreadie went

on to lead the WoO LMS in victories in 2005 and captured the six-figure points crown in 2006. As McCreadie exploded on the full-fender scene, Coffey con-tinued to merely dabble in Dirt Late Model racing, entering the Georgia and Florida events at the beginning of each season, but only selected shows thereafter. “I was having fun doing what I was doing,” said Coffey, explain-ing why he didn’t immediately follow McCreadie into full-time Dirt Late Model action. “I was just start-ing to be successful in the Modified. I won Syracuse (the $50,000-to-win Eckerd 200) in 2002, won some races at Canandaigua (Speedway in New York), won some small-block (358-Modified) series races. I felt like I was just getting good at this – finally.” But after adding more Dirt Late Model events to his schedule in 2007, and finishing as high as fourth in a WoO LMS A-Main at

Cayuga County Fair Speedway in Weedsport, New York, Coffey got the itch to expand his horizons. He went WoO LMS racing in 2008, entering 37 of the season’s 43 events and scoring a pair of top-five finishes en route to winning the Rookie of the Year award. “Carl kinda pushed me toward it after seeing the success Timmy had,” Coffey says of his decision to curtail his DIRTcar Modified racing in favor of Dirt Late Model competi-tion. “I looked at it like, I’m gonna be 38. If I’m gonna do it, it was time to do it. My older two kids (Shelby, 13, and Kyle, 12; he also has a 16-month-old son Kasey) were at the point where they’re starting to do their own thing a little bit and Jill (Coffey’s wife and the sister of DIRTcar big-block Modified driver Justin Haers) supported it fully, so I felt like I should go for it. I didn’t want to keep going on wondering, ‘Should I? Should I? Should I?’” “I figured that Modified racing

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will always be there for me, and we already had the Late Model equip-ment for the most part. It boiled down to a situation where Carl and Ann have always said they’ll give us their full support while they’re involved, so I figured, ‘Well, if I’m gonna do this, I gotta do this while I have some good backing.’” A full-time racer since leav-ing his position in the maintenance department at Sweeteners Plus in 2001, Coffey’s Dirt Late Model ef-fort doesn’t operate with the virtual open-checkbook policy that pre-vailed in Sweeteners Plus Racing’s early days of Big-Block Modified racing. But he also makes it clear that Myers doesn’t allow him or Mc-Creadie, who returned to the seat of a Sweeteners Plus Dirt Late Model in mid-June after being sidelined for five months by a back injury suffered in a January wreck during the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to lack for any-thing. “Carl doesn’t do anything halfway, no matter what it is; whether it’s boat racing, car racing,

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hunting, fishing, he does it full-steam ahead,” said Coffey. “He’s a very competitive guy, and he wants results. He gives us whatever we need to get the job done, but he also expects some results out of it.” “It used to be a win-at-all-costs kind of a thing; there were no limitations,” he continued. “We had all kinds of race cars, all kinds of motors. There was a lot of over-spending on silly stuff that wasn’t really needed. But the last four or five years, they’ve said, ‘okay, here’s what we’re gonna do this year and you have to work within those parameters.” Coffey handles the budget he receives from Myers, basically man-aging Coffey-McCreadie Enterprises as a subsidiary of Sweeteners Plus Racing. “I think it’s made me more conscious or more careful with the equipment,” said Coffey. “I never saw what came in and out be-fore; they (Myers and his mother) handled all that. Now we have x amount of money to work with for the year, and I take care of the

business end as far as paying all the bills with what the cars bring in and the sponsorship we have.” “Before it was basically, send the invoices down the street and somebody else paid ‘em. Now I’m accountable for it all. I don’t have a lot of hands-on with the race cars because of it, but most of the time they (Sweeteners crewmen Johnny Coco, Al Stevens and Mike Amell) don’t want me working on it any-way.” Coffey’s job is to oversee the race team and, of course, figure out how to outrun the star-studded group of WoO LMS drivers. The lat-ter hasn’t been easy for the fun-lov-ing racer who’s come to be known as the ‘Captain’. “Just trying to keep up with these guys is tough,” Coffey said of his Outlaw rivals. “There’s so much talent in this pit area, if you’re off on any one thing, you don’t have a chance. “I’m still learning what to do (to the car). I’ll come in (to the pits) and I’ll say, ‘Man, am I loose or tight? Am I tight and throwing the

Vic Coffey inspects the worn-out right-rear tire that cost him a victoryin the WoO event on April 17 at Fayetteville, North Carolina.



car to make it loose, or am I driving it slow and making it feel tight?’ I have a hard time figuring it out sometimes.” “Timmy was able to pick through that stuff real quick and start making the right changes,” he contin-ued, praising his teammate. “I would dare say he’s got as much natural ability as anybody in any pit area. Me, I’m more of a guy who, if the car’s right, I think I can be as fast as anybody, but sometimes when the car isn’t right, I have a hard time figuring out what to do with it. Timmy can pick right through that.” “I wish I had that ability, that next-step talent. Some guys just got it, and Timmy definitely does. I guess I have to work at it more.” Coffey has shown flashes of his potential this season, but bad luck has too often prevented him from seeing a concrete result. His strong run in March’s Lone Star 100 at Battleground Speedway in Highlands, Texas, was short-circuited by a tangle as he ran in the top-five, and, more famously, he led April’s 50-lap WoO LMS A-Main at Fayetteville (North Carolina) Motor Speedway until a flat right-rear tire ended his bid as he approached the white flag. “Fayetteville and Texas showed me that we can run with them,” said Coffey, whose lone Dirt Late Model feature win came in an unsanctioned event on September 9, 2007, at Little Valley (New York) Speed-way. “On a good night we can run up front, like at Fayetteville. But when you get the opportunity in these Outlaw races like we got at Fayetteville, you gotta cash in. That’s what was so disappointing about that night.” “To be honest, I thought when I got in that situ-ation (leading a WoO LMS A-Main) for the first time; I

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thought maybe I’d get nervous. But I was so calm in the car that night. I thought, ‘We got this.’ The car was so good. It felt to me like a Saturday-night Modified race at Canandaigua.” “That’s why it was such a letdown when we got that flat. It’s hard to win a heat race with these guys, so to lose when you’re in that position is a heartbreaker.” Coffey hopes he’ll stick around the Dirt Late Model world long enough that everything becomes second nature to him. He pins that on the continued backing of Myers and his mother, who remain solidly behind the race team, despite rarely getting to see their cars in person. “They don’t even get to go to a lot of races anymore,” says Coffey. “They’re about half-and-half (living) between Florida (Daytona Beach) and (upstate) New York, and with us racing the Late Model now, it’s not like they can come to Canandaigua every Saturday to see us when they’re in New York. For them to be as involved as they are and spend the money they do on the sport when they don’t really don’t even get to go watch and see the results anymore, they can easily say, ‘Well, we don’t want to do it anymore.’” “Sooner or later that will probably happen, but there won’t be any complaints from me. They’ve done way more than I could have ever expected.” “But as long as we continue having some suc-cess; like the couple Syracuse wins I have (he also won the Eckerd 200 in 2007), the Outlaw champion-ship with Timmy, the other stuff we’ve been able to pick up along the way, it keeps them enthused and wanting to do it. Because the more you win, the more you want to win.”

Teammates Vic Coffey and Tim McCreadie inspect the track in Canandaigua, New York, prior to the WoO event on June 23rd.


VIC COFFEY - Sweeteners Plus, Inc.Vic Coffey and family. From L to R: Kyle, Vic, Kasey, Jill and...

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