Blount Motorsports owner Larry Garner
On Monday, Maryville, Tenn. based Blount Motorsports will embark on the two-week adventure that is the Schaeffer’s Oil Southern Nationals. Ten races are scheduled to be contested over the course of a thirteen day period with the BMS team placing their hopes for mini-series glory squarely on the shoulders of young Donald McIntosh.
And looking at the record compiled by that driver and organization over recent months, it would seem as if those hopes are indeed well placed. After winning the season finale last year at Boyd’s Speedway, McIntosh and BMS have scored a total of five victories in various series races during the first half of 2015.
BMS owner Larry Garner believes there will be more success in the future for his team and his driver. The founder and guiding force behind Blount Excavating along with BMS crew chief David Bryant sought McIntosh as their wheel man last September after a parting of ways with former pilot Billy Ogle, Jr.
“I think he has a lot of upside, and he still has some downside because he’s just 22,” Garner said of McIntosh in an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “I think this is only his third year in supers. We saw the talent last year when he was driving and crewing his own car. We’d watch him get out, he’d park beside us, and when he got out he had to work on the car- and that’s tough.
McIntosh talking with BMS crew chief David Bryant.
“We knew the talent was there,” Garner continued. “But if you noticed last fall, we had a lot of crashes and a lot of people gave David grief over it. They wanted to know what we were doing and wondering if we had lost our minds. But we got it together right at the end of last year and now people have decided we weren’t as crazy as they thought we were.”
Garner sees McIntosh’s knowledge of the inner workings of a race car as his greatest asset.
“Donald can come in and tell you if it needs more wedge, more weight, a stiffer spring or a softer spring, what it’s doing, and he could get out and fix it if he had to,” Garner noted. “Donald gives David great feedback. He may get out and say we need one thing and David may agree or he may think we need something else then they work it out. They get along real well. It’s been a big help to have a driver who can tell us what’s wrong and give us an idea of what it needs to get it right.”
BMS typically runs a regional schedule entering races within a few hours of their shop, regardless of series affiliation. However, Garner, Bryant and crew member B.J. Hillman are so high on McIntosh’s abilities that they considered entering their car in a full series during the 2015 season. But that idea was ultimately shelved… for the time being.
“We talked this year about possibly running the Ultimate(Super Late Model) Series, but with Donald being new and us all having to gel, and we’re still gelling, we weren’t ready,” Garner said. “We have no intentions right now of ever running a national series. We do this for fun and not for a living. I just want us to be a team that will be respected enough that when we do enter a national event, people at least know who we are.”
Donald McIntosh in the BMS #7
And Garner believes people will not only know his team, but also his driver, in the near future.
“In another year or two, he’s really going to turn some heads. There are going to be some people watching.”
