As the owner of an automotive repair shop, Alex Miller has spent a lot of time with cars.
He’s also spent a lot time at the race track, sponsoring drivers and watching family members compete.
About eight years ago, he said, “We finally figured: Why don’t we all just do this ourselves?’
“We had always kind of been hot rodders and stuff. So we went and bought a car and started turning the bolts on it.”
Having worked on cars as a career, Miller enjoyed the shop side of racing and learned about setup quick.
“I like the geometry of it, the mechanics of it,” he said. “I kind of picked up on that stuff really fast on how the geometry works. Why does putting a longer A-arm here work, and a shorter one here, why does that work? I really like that side of it.”
The driving side took a bit longer. Miller, now 41, said it took two or three years before he finally felt comfortable behind the wheel. The first year, he said, “I wrecked a lot.”
The second year he finished more races but still wasn’t running near the front.
The third year, Miller “stopped holding on for dear life” and got more relaxed in the car. From there, everything seemed to change.
“Once I started getting settled in the car, you really start looking ahead,” he said. “You don’t really pay attention to who’s in front of you. You’re looking at who’s in front of them and who’s in front of them. And then you can really start lining up passes, setting things up, positioning yourself on the race track where you’re supposed to be.
“Until you get calmed down, you can’t ever do that, or I couldn’t.”
Eight seasons in, after now thousands of laps at tracks throughout the southeast, Miller finally feels like he’s able to compete.
“Eventually you get tired of changing noses and you quit wrecking,” he said. “It’s not really like driving down the interstate, but you’re just more relaxed in the car…That’s when you really start learning how to race. There’s really a lot to it, a lot of finesse in racing. It took me, I’d say, a good three years to kind of start working on the finesse side of it. Instead of just manhandling a car and going sideways out of a corner and running around like Bo and Luke Duke.”
This season is one of the best of Miller’s career so far. Driving in the late model division at Kingsport Speedway, a NASCAR Regional track in Kingsport, Tennessee, he has one win and 14 top-five finishes in 17 races this summer. He’s third in the track’s points standings and 14th in the NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I national standings.
Miller said he hasn’t done much different this season. He’s in the same car he’s had for about four years. But he’s starting to stay more consistently up front week after week.
“Maybe we’re just getting the bugs worked out. I don’t know,” he said. “But it seems to be doing pretty good this year.”
One of Miller’s competitors at Kingsport is his dad Alan. The Millers have always worked on the cars together, and after seeing his son on the track, Alan got into racing himself a couple seasons ago.
“He’s a wild man,” Miller said of his dad. “He said, ‘Hey, I’m helping you work all night. Let’s go get me one.’ That’s how he got into it.”
Alan is currently 11th in the Kingsport late model points.
The Millers are extremely close. They help each other in the shop, but they’re also each other’s biggest competition on the track.
“We’re competitive people by nature,” Miller said. “We don’t like to lose.”
Even though they’re looking for wins, Miller said being with family is the best part of racing.
Miller has never really competed for points, but he’s been at every race at Kingsport this year, and he plans to complete the season. He’s also looking at traveling to Florence Motor Speedway in South Carolina later this summer, and potentially racing in the ValleyStar Credit Union 300 late model race at Martinsville Speedway in September.
He’ll return to Kingsport on Aug. 2 for race No. 12 of the season. The night will feature Mod 4s, Street Stocks, Super Street, Pure 4 and Late Models beginning at 7 p.m. ET.
“Racing at Kingsport, not tearing your car up is a huge win,” Miller said. “It’s a little tight track, not a lot of room. Really every race at Kingsport, if you come home and you don’t have to change a nose or a quarter panel, or change an A-arm or something, that’s a win in itself, and that helps me to keep my momentum up because now I’ve got something I can work on and make it faster.
“Wins help. You catch a win every now and again, that’s kind of a good pat on the back.”
