Q & A: The Bailey Brothers with Leroy Van Conett and Jimmy Sills

Leroy Van Conett, Jimmy Sills, Sam Bailey, and Fred Bailey at the shop.

Sam and Fred Bailey sit down with retired sprint car drivers Van Conett and Sills as they reminisce about tearing up dirt tracks together in the 1970s and ’80s.

Interview + Photos: Saroyan Humphrey

Feature | It’s been 50 years since Sam and Fred Bailey, both in their 70s, opened the doors at Bailey Brothers Speed Shop in American Canyon, California. A lot has changed in the world of speed in the last half century, but the Baileys are still building racing engines, and racers still expect the same high quality when they contract with Sam and Fred.

In the 1970s and ’80s, during their 11-year run as sprint car team owners, the Baileys fielded their iconic black and gold number 01 machine on the West Coast, winning prestigious dirt races from Arizona to California to Washington. They hired some of the best open-wheel, short-track dirt racers of the time, including Leroy Van Conett, Jimmy Sills and Lealand McSpadden, as they carved a niche in sprint car racing legend.

• Related: Jimmy Sills | Leroy Van Conett

Before sprint car racing, the Baileys got their start building engines for their drag race cars, competing at Bay Area strips in the early ’60s. They eventually changed their focus to oval track racing and soon built a customer base that appreciated the brothers’ proven ability to build powerful, reliable, nearly bullet-proof power plants for the regional hardtop racing scene in the mid to late ‘60s.

(Left) A framed photo of the Bailey Brothers sprint car, circa 1981. (Right) A blown racing boat engine sets, ready for delivery.

That same winning reputation followed them as they moved into super-modified and sprint car racing and for the ’76 racing season, they built their first sprint car and partnered with champion Northern Auto Racing Club (NARC) wheelman Van Conett. The formidable team chased points on the regional NARC circuit, winning the championship twice in ‘77 and ’78.

“Then, I’d had enough of points,” remembers Sam. “It’s really kinda boring. I liked going to different race tracks with different drivers.”

The Bailey Brothers sprint car was a force to be reckoned with no matter where it rolled into the pits. It was a potent machine, and with some of the best drivers in the cockpit, they were always a threat to win. “I never took the time to count ‘em,” says Sam, when asked how many feature events the team won.

The racing brothers were inducted into the Calistoga Speedway Hall of Fame in 2017, etching their place in California sprint car lore. With at least 24 main event wins, from ’81 to ‘88, the Baileys have the most car owner wins at Baylands Raceway in Fremont, the momentary open-wheel hotspot that lives only in memory; 10 main event wins at the historic Calistoga Speedway, fifth on the all-time list; and a Gold Cup victory at Sacramento’s West Capital Raceway in 1976.

While taking a break from the workday at their Northern California speed shop, the Baileys sat down with two of their most successful drivers—Van Conett and Sills—on a late February afternoon to reminisce and retell a few stories.

***

You’ve been working from this same building for 50 years?
Fred: Yep, we were building engines and running a sprint car team, all from here. There was nothing around when we opened the shop. We were the only building, it was all open space.

The good part is, people came here on purpose, not by accident, so, we don’t get all the tire kickers. People come out here for a reason, and that has worked to our benefit. With speed shops in town, every body that had a dream the night before, they’re in there with a bunch of blah, blah, blah.

When you opened in ’69, how many other speed shops were in the area?
Fred: They were all over the place. Now, they are few and far between.
It’s all mail order now. It’s nothing like it used to be. Years ago, there would be two, or three counter guys out there all the time and people standing around waiting to get waited on.

What kind of machine work are you doing these days?
Fred: Anything you can do to a motor, we can do. We have a working crank shop. There’s only three active crank-grinding shops left in Northern California, that I know of. One’s in Sacramento, another in Hayward, and us.

How’d you guys get interested in cars and engines?
Sam: It was something to do; I just taught myself. The first motor I did was my ’57 Chevy; I rebuilt it in ’59 or ’60. I raced it for several years, just on the street and then went to the drags: Vaca Valley, and I think I ran it at Half Moon Bay, which was just an airport. We’d go out and race down the street, mostly. There was no traffic then. It had traction bars. It was a stocker, a driver; I drove it everywhere.

I never took auto shop, or nothing. I worked with my dad in construction during the summer and I worked on engines at night and every weekend, at home, in our garage.

Fred: The auto shop teacher in high school—his name was Bailey—everybody thought we were related, but we weren’t. I didn’t even know the guy. But, I wanted to take auto shop, and I didn’t want to do the first-year thing. We were already building cars. I knew what a starter was and this, that, and parts of a car.

So, [the shop teacher] said, “explain to me how a brake system works on a car and I’ll let you go to the second-year class.” Well, that was pretty easy, I said, “you got a brake pedal with a leverage advantage, a master cylinder that pushes a piston, hydraulic fluid goes through the tube to the wheel cylinders and spreads the wheel cylinders and the brake shoes go out against the drum, creates friction and it stops.”

“Nope,” he said. I had to know the three key words from the beginner’s book: pressure, friction, and heat.

Fred: So, all I’d heard [about auto shop class] was cars would go in to be fixed, but they went out on the hook and as I’m talking to the teacher, I’m thinking: “loser!” The shop was a shit hole. All the hoodlums were lined up against the wall with their desks, smoking away.

I took machine shop instead. They had a vocational course; it was three hours a day and that’s where it started. The instructor got me on at Kaiser Steel [in Napa] as a machinist and then I was working at Mare Island, in the shipyard.

A framed snapshot of one of the Bailey Brothers’ first drag cars hangs in the shop.

Were you two close when you were growing up as teenagers?
Fred: We weren’t close back then. I was the little brother and he didn’t want nothing to do with me. But then we started racing, and we started working together.

Were you known around town for having a hot car?
Sam: Yeah.

Fred: Oh, yeah. You’d mention his name, and that was it. He was [three years] older than me, so, he was driving before I was.

Sam: We went street racing, and then I just started putting motors together for other guys with cars. It was mostly small-block Chevy stuff.

Fred: We had equipment at home—valve machine, boring equipment, balance machine—to do the job. We had a two-and-a-half car garage and we were doing motors out there. We had as much machinery that you would find behind an auto parts store. Then we opened this place, and we moved everything down here and kept adding to it.

Sam Bailey looks over a pair of racing heads, ready for assembly.

After we got the business going, we got interested in circle [track] cars. We started doing some motors for those guys.

Sam: We’d go to Vallejo Speedway and that kinda started it.

So, we built a few and after a year or two, we had 14 engines running [at Vallejo] for different people in the hardtop division. We built engines for John Viel’s modified. He raced at San Jose.

Fred: People used to blow up so many motors back then, and then when we started doing ‘em, they were reliable. And then everybody wanted to come here.

Sam: We were also building motors for West Capital guys. We built Wayne Sue’s motor when he was running pretty good and he won the [track] championship. There was Joe Hill and there were a few others, but I don’t remember their names.

How did you start working on sprint cars?
Sam: Well, one of the hard top guys was getting a ride in a sprint. Phil Pedlar, he was kinda popular. He wanted us to work on his motor, because they were having trouble. So, we built him a new one. Then I got involved with Dick Bauers and Billy Anderson and he won the [1971] NARC championship in that first year. It was all non-wing.

Fred Bailey holds a 1975 photo of their first sprint car, with Leroy Van Conett, sitting in the parking lot.

How did you hook up with Leroy?
Sam: [In 1975,] I built a motor for him and Ted Hunting; they had a car together. Then we heard Ted was going to quit. We were building a car, so, I asked Leroy if he wanted to drive for us the next year. He said, “ok.” So, he drove and the first race we ran was in Santa Clara, an open [competition] deal and we finished second. Rick Ferkel passed us on the last lap. I remember that.

I was doing a few other sprint car motors, too. I built Kenny Woodruff’s motor that Jimmy Boyd won the first Outlaw race with at Devils Bowl [Speedway in Mesquite, Texas, ‘78]. I also built motors for [Gary] Ponzini, out of Morgan Hill.

[To Leroy and Jimmy] What was the best thing about driving for the Bailey Brothers?
Leroy: I was telling him [pointing to Jimmy] on the way over, we never really had any breakdowns, or anything. When that thing come to the track, it was ready to go. These guys were always great to work with.

Jimmy: You just knew when the thing rolled off the trailer, everybody else knew they were running for second. And, it was going to run all night, as long as you didn’t do anything stupid to it, it would be there at the end.

(Left) Another shot of a Bailey Brothers sprint car hangs on the wall near the engine balancer. (Right) Crankshafts, fresh from the grinder, ready for shipping.

As drivers, would you say these two guys were easy, or hard on your race cars?
Sam: Oh, they were easy on ‘em.

Fred: They were terrible on ‘em.

[laughs, all around]

Leroy: Once in a while …

Jimmy: Here’s how I finished up on one of ‘em. [points to a photo of a destroyed 01 sprint car].

[laughs, all around]

Sam [to Jimmy]: You had help on that one, though.

Jimmy: Yeah …

So, who was your favorite driver, of all your drivers.
Sam: I didn’t have a favorite.

That’s a good answer.

[laughs, all around]

Sam: Well, I had three favorites. That’s it and I had just about five drivers. [Gary] Patterson drove it twice. We went to Ascot and Calistoga and ended up second up there. He came in after [the main event] and he said, ‘you know, the way you said you set your car up, I didn’t think I’d like it, but you know, it sure worked good. If I’d have got on the gas a little harder at the end, we would’ve won. [laughs]

He was actually a pretty nice guy.

Jimmy: Yeah, I always liked Gary.

Fred: A lot of people were scared of him, but it was just his image.

How important is the driver on dirt, say, compared to asphalt?
Sam: I think the driver on dirt is real important. You gotta have a motor that runs; it don’t have to have the most horsepower, but it has to handle and the driver’s got to be good. You either got a good driver, or you don’t. [laughs]

Snapshots of Leland McSpadden and crew (and family) on an office desk.

Jimmy: Oh yeah, on dirt it’s 70% driver and on asphalt, it’s 30% driver and 70% car. On asphalt, if the car’s not right, there’s only so much [the driver] can do, but on dirt, you can move around and get the car to feel right.

Sam: You want somebody aggressive and if you watch ‘em, you know. I knew Leroy was good in those days. I didn’t know anything about setting up a car, but, I figured he could drive it. Without a wing, he was about the best one going, at the time. We ran the first three years and then I got tired of NARC.

I wanted to run Phoenix—Manzanita [Speedway]. You have to run there all the time to be good. So, I’d done a motor for [Gary] Stanton and McSpadden in those years, so I knew both of ‘em and I’d run a Stanton [chassis] with Leroy. I figured I’d see if McSpadden would drive it. He said, “sure,” and we went down there and we won it. That was ’78.

He ran it for quite a few races [for us]. We ran Ascot [Park]. Then he wanted to go help a guy on an Indy car in May and Leroy was back in the car for points at Calistoga and he went out and won that race.

Leroy won one of the most memorable Gold Cups in 1976 at West Capital in your car.
Sam: That was a long time ago. [laughs]

Leroy: I remember it was about the last lap, I hooked a big hole and everybody that had gone into it, had flipped. I hit that son of a bitch and went up against the wall and I said, “shit, I can’t let this throttle go now!” It hit the ground and shot off and I was going by Sammy [Swindell] and [Bob] Marshall. I got by ‘em both as we were coming off the corner. We won the race.

We’d had engine trouble before the race and you [to Sam] went home to work on it. And I didn’t know if you were going to make it back [in time] or not.

Sam: That was just an old 350.

Fred: But it ran.

In those days you could run a small block and be competitive with just about anything, right?
Sam: Pretty much. We had iron heads on it, still. We’d run a 400 at Baylands, but mostly we ran a 350.

You guys are known as perfectionists with building engines.
Fred: We put a lot of hours into it. Back then, a lot of guys would say, “well, if you’d quit working on your car, you’d get my motor done.” [I’d say] “No, we open the door in the morning, we work on customers’ stuff, we lock the door at 5:30 and we work on our stuff.” Unless there was a Friday race, 99% of the time we worked on our stuff only after hours.

Nitro was big in those days.
Sam: Yeah, we ran it when it was semi legal with the [World of] Outlaws. They didn’t want you to run it, but it wasn’t illegal. But they were all running it, a little bit.

We had it in when we won the Gold Cup at West Capital, just for the heat [race].

Fred: We knew what nitro was from drag racing. A lot of those guys had no clue what they were doing [when they used it]. They’d pour a five gallon can into their tank and blow their motor up.

Sam: You run such a small amount. I didn’t use a hydrometer, I mixed it by volume, just so much in five gallons, and it changes with the weather. When it gets cold, it’s a higher percentage, when it gets hot, it’s lower. You just gotta run your motor a little richer. We didn’t run so much that we had to run really rich, or change nozzles, because then you gotta start changing the whole fuel system. We used just enough, and by the nighttime, we didn’t have nothing in it.

“We won the championship at Baylands and we didn’t even know it.”

— Sam Bailey

Fred: It was always good for psyching everybody out, because they could smell it and see the flame coming out. It would just give it a little more snap. You could tell it made a difference.

Leroy: Oh, yeah!

Sam: If you saw a blue flame, kinda lazy looking, that was the nitro.

Fred: Then they came out with a chemical test, and you could check for it. so, then everybody had to kinda straighten out and quit running it. That was the ‘80s.

Sam: We never did run it in NARC. The only time we ran it was in open shows.

What made you so successful at Baylands?
Sam: We pretty much ran the same combination every time we went there. The track really wasn’t different—and he [Jimmy] would run the top.

Jimmy: Sam had a different approach of reading the race track. I’d go out and look at the race track and feel the moisture in it. Sam, he would stand in the pit grandstands. I’d ask him, “Sam, do you think it’s time to snug it up a little bit? The track’s kinda going away.” He’d take his finger wipe his ear and if there was dust in there, it was time to go to work.

[laughs, all around]

Sam: It was a poor surface, but it had enough bank in it that it stayed together.

Jimmy: It was race-y because there was always a bottom groove and the top might be way up there by the wall, but there was enough bank that you could use it. But where the grandstands were was where everybody was turning, going into one, and it would kinda blow the dust up, if there was any dust.

Sam: Baylands with Sills was fun, because he could run where you had to run. Some guys can’t get off the bottom, and they would just stay there. Jimmy could run the top.

Leroy won the inaugural race at Baylands.
Sam: Yeah, that was another time that I didn’t have a driver and I got ahold of him. So, we went down there and won it.

Fred: We won the championship at Baylands [in ’82, with Sills] and we didn’t even know it. [laughs] Nobody told us about the banquet. So, we didn’t show up. They were kinda pissed about it.

You guys are in the top five for all-time race wins at Calistoga. What do you remember about racing there?
Leroy: Some nights there would be no rocks at all. But, the next time around, shit, they’d be bigger than golf balls. I could hear ‘em come through the hood. One time it knocked the mag off.

Jimmy: I remember the first time we went to Calistoga, somebody said, “man, that place is full of rocks, you gotta put some cardboard on your arms [for protection].” I said, “hell, I don’t need any of that!”

Leroy: They just shot off that front wheel.

Jimmy: Yeah, I came in from hot laps, I could barely hold my arm up. There were big ol’ knots down my forearm. Then I went and got some cardboard. [laughs]

Leroy: When I first went there, the steering wheel was up above the cowl and there was nothing in front of your hands. I never wore no gloves. I figured, shit, I wanted a good grip with my own hands. Stupid. I come back in there, man, my knuckles were all bleeding.

Jimmy: When you’re racing, you can hear it, chinging off the roll cage.

Leroy: Sometimes it would sound like you got shot with a bullet.

You had a bad crash on the backstretch at Calistoga in 1977, driving the Bailey car.
Leroy: I’ll tell you one thing, when I went through those trees, I can still hear them [tree] limbs breaking and all the wood busting up. Holy shit. I was passing for the lead when that happened. I got on the outside, and the guy pulls over a little bit and I got in that bit of mud out there and the back end hit the wall and swung the frontend into the wall. I went end for end down there, I felt like I was riding around in the back of a cement truck, tumbling all day.

Jimmy: I’ll bet that seemed like it was never going to stop.

Fred: Oh yeah, every which way you could think of. You were up in those trees breaking branches off—shit flying—it just kept going, and going.

“I can still remember the sound of those branches: crack! crack! crack! crack!”

— Leroy Van Conett

Leroy: The boards from that fence were like rough 2x12s. It knocked my face mask off and got me in the eye. [After the crash,] the car was upside down and somebody came over and was going to pull the seat belt and I said, “hold on, let me get an idea of what’s going on here.” Shit, I couldn’t see out of that eye. I thought I’d lost it. I asked the guy, “am I missing an eye?” He said, “hell no, just closed up.”

[laughs, all around]

But, I can still remember the sound of those branches: “crack! crack! crack! crack!” [It was] faster than I can say it. Them boards will beat the shit out of you.

Sam: There was no race the following week, but we had another frame, and we were back.

Leroy: We went back and won it.

Jimmy won your last race, and it was at Baylands, right?
Sam: Yeah. He ran just that one race [on April 4, 1987].

Jimmy: I’d come home for a weekend [from racing the USAC Silver Crown series]. I called Sam and asked if he had anything going. So, we put a deal together and went down there [to Baylands]. I remember, I loved the car. It felt good all night long. It was adjustable to the track. It was good.

What made you decide to stop racing?
Sam: After Baylands closed, I didn’t want to go back to NARC. It was all club racing and that was all that was left at the time. I just figured, well, we got enough sponsors on the car and I think I had $10,000 in the car and Ted Finkenbinder wanted to buy it, and I sold it for 10.

I ran it for seven races and I got the same thing out of it. Finkenbinder won quite a few races with it.

The Bailey brothers flank Van Conett and Sills in the engine shop.

Did you guys ever think about racing in the Silver Crown series?
Sam: No. I did a motor for Gary Howard from Santa Rosa, and Lealand drove his [Silver Crown] car at the Little 500 [at Anderson, Indiana] and he won that.

Fred: It’s a lot of traveling and all that. We had a business to run. You can’t just lock it up and leave. After a while, you just get wore out.

After you stopped racing, did the engine-building business pick up?
Fred: It’s funny, it didn’t work to our benefit to have a race car with our motor out there, racing. But after we quit racing, it picked up. Everybody thought we were going to detune their motor. It would be suicide for an engine builder to ever detune somebody’s motor. That would be stupid.

We do the best job for every customer within their budget. But, I’ve fired a lot of customers. [These days] we’ll build about 10 engines a year, but we don’t have a whole lot of people who come up with a wheelbarrow full of money to start from scratch. Every so often you get one, but we work on a bunch of engines to keep them going, refresh, and all that.

Do you still go to the races?
Sam: I didn’t go last year, but I go once in a while.

Fred: We watch ‘em run on the dyno.

Jimmy: It’s always great to see you guys.

Fred: Yeah, when we were racing, people always said we hired the nicest drivers.

[laughs, all around]