Tod Hernandez
Tod Hernandez is coming off a season that many racers would consider to have been a success. However, the East Ridge, Tenn. resident believes that he can accomplish even more in the coming campaign, and he knows the secret to making good things happen when he hits the track in 2015.
“This past year, I didn’t get to spend as much time on the car as I wanted to and it showed,” the driver explained in a recent interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “You’ve got to put the time in on that thing and I just didn’t really have a lot of time to do it. My step-son, Justin Owens, was in his first year running the crates so I spent some time helping him and trying to get him dialed in, and he got better as the year went on. I probably should have spent some more time with my game, but I didn’t and it showed. I had a pretty good year in that we didn’t tear up a lot of stuff up and that’s a testament to the equipment we have and the people that help us.”
The 46-year-old Hernandez claimed the Limited Late Model track championship at Boyd’s Speedway and was able to snare a few wins along the way at other tracks. But he hopes to accomplish even more in the coming season, which kicks off on Saturday afternoon(January 31) at Boyd’s Speedway with that track’s annual Cabin Fever event.
“This year, it’s going to be a little different,” Hernandez declared. “We’re going to really pay attention to it and I’m going to spend more time in the garage working on it. We didn’t have a bad year, but I would have liked to have won more races. But you know how it goes, you can’t win them all.”
Tod Hernandez in his #T6 machine.
“Record wise and expectation wise, we didn’t do as good as we wanted to,” he said. “We won at Dixie and we won at Rome, but we didn’t win at Boyd’s or Cleveland or North Georgia. We did win the points at Boyd’s and every time we ran at North Georgia we were competitive. I think we ran down there five times and ran second three of those times. I didn’t have a bad race at Cleveland. We did alright with some top-5s. I just know I would have liked to have done better.”
Born in Los Angeles, Hernandez moved to Kansas with his mother after his parents divorced when he was 10 years old. He played a lot of sports as a kid, particularly baseball, which is where he learned about competition. But it was from a friend who competed in a drag racing boat where he was first exposed to the sport in which he now competes.
“That’s where I cut my teeth in racing, learning about engines and stuff from him,” Hernandez pointed out. “That’s where I got the bug to race.”
Hernandez moved to this area in 2001, where his met his wife Kim. It was here where his own racing career would begin to take shape.
“My wife’s dad had an old Hobby stock car that was probably 25 years old and it was just sitting in his yard,” the California native said. “His health was kind of bad and my wife and I would go out there bush hog his property. One day he asked us if we wanted that old Hobby stock car. We started racing around 2004 in Hobby and the rest is history. The first time I ever took a green flag, I smashed it into the fence. But I was hooked anyway.”
While he holds fond memories of his first checkered flag during a heat race at North Georgia in 2005, Hernandez counts his win in the Limited Late Model portion of ‘The Gobbler’ at Cleveland Speedway in 2012 as his most prized.
And his love for the sport has only grown since those wins.
“You have to love it,” the driver insisted. “You have to have a passion for it and you’ve got to have help. If your wife, or your girlfriend, or your mom and dad are not interested in it, it’s just not going to work. You have to have family behind you and you have to have help behind you. There’s nights when I get off work and I’m just tired and I don’t want to go in the garage but my wife will get on me and get me out there working on this thing to get it better.
“Whenever you go to the racetrack, you see us all there together as a family. We all have a good time, but we take it serious.”
