SRI Performance and Stock Car Steel And Aluminum are looking to expand beyond current markets into new race segments and locales.

The pandemic remains a global challenge to businesses of every stripe, but the emergence of a virus didn’t bring innovation to a jerking halt, either in the realm of motorsports or anywhere else. In the ever-briefer offseason, teams are scrambling to get new cars built, and in NASCAR that means creating an entirely new generation of race car. It takes parts, raw materials, ingenuity, and determination. Many of the most basic supplies, particularly in NASCAR country, emerge from the Mooresville, North Carolina, home base of SRI Performance and Stock Car Steel And Aluminum (SCSA).

Founded 25 years ago, SRI Performance and SCSA exist across multiple marketing categories. SCSA’s original core business was providing raw and processed metals to fabricators across a broad variety of racing disciplines. Today, it serves its market from locations in both North Carolina and Indiana. Getting the raw material is one element of readying a racing operation for the coming season. Another is outfitting the race car, which this firm can also help accomplish.

Those remaining components are what SRI Performance, as it now exists, is all about. In 2015, SRI Performance purchased TJ’s Performance Warehouse of Denver, North Carolina, providing it entrée to supply hard parts to the dirt car and drag racing markets. That part of the business operates as SRI Dirt & Drag.

Next, SCSA acquired the chassis, suspension, and trackside-support operations formerly managed by CV Products. And to close out 2015, SCSA bought the component-retailing business of Roush Yates Performance Products, creating a one-stop source for literally anything a race team, in any discipline, can use, from tubing and sheetmetal to engine parts, rollcage padding, and driver gear.

“I founded the company after identifying a niche with the NASCAR teams in terms of supplying steel and aluminum,” SCSA and SRI Performance founder and president Greg Fornelli explained. “Tubing, sheetmetal, bar stock, anything that’s used to build a race car. Our roots are in NASCAR, but we’ve since really diversified into every form of motorsports, and even into industrial accounts. But our bread and butter is motorsports. Dirt racing is probably the single biggest market we touch now, but we also have drag racing, off-road, and marine.”

If the firm has a founding, core product, it would have to be the mild steel tubing that SCSA has furnished to NASCAR and elsewhere for decades. The 1.75-inch, .095 thickness tube for rollcages is ground and polished before shipment. SRI Performance is the lead metal supplier to Technique Chassis of Concord, North Carolina, an approved NASCAR contractor, which is supplying center sections, front and rear clips, plus other assemblies for Next Gen applications.

“We’ve been doing this for 25 years, but before Technique came about 15 years ago, we were selling to individual race teams,” Fornelli said.

Adapting to NASCAR’s parceling of Next Gen technology has been a priority of late. Beyond that, the CV and Roush Yates acquisitions have given SRI a retail footprint that covers racing components from more than 400 manufacturers. A few of those, Fornelli pointed out, account for about half the parts that go into constructing a Next Gen car, including all tubing. His fundamental business strategy is expanding across all of the motorsports genres now being served.

“We’re very strong locally, but we’re looking to expand on a national and even, really, an international level,” he said. “We’ll be doing that through marketing and e-commerce. We’re also working to stay ahead of the Next Gen car on the NASCAR side, and all the changes that’s bringing. It’s important to us—a monumental task—to keep track of what’s happening with those parts, while we continue to nurture the dirt racing community, which will represent a huge opportunity to us in the future. From chassis manufacturers in the Midwest to the dirt modifieds in the Northeast, we’re going after them. The bigger multi-car teams, like the World of Outlaws guys, buy quite a bit from us currently. We’ve got a branch in Brownsburg, Indiana, to handle those areas. We’re looking for a bigger presence on the West Coast in the next few years.”

In terms of business discipline and obstacles, Fornelli said manganese supply interruptions from China have made stocking raw aluminum a challenge at times, especially when dirt teams are clamoring to replace body components with painted sheet. “Aluminum’s going to continue to rise, and tubing will come down a little. A lot of manufacturers, steel mills, shut down during the pandemic. Then the world’s governments flooded so much money into people’s hands that there really wasn’t a demand stoppage.

“In Q1, Q2, we’re going to see the mild steel easing up for sure, a catch-up on the performance parts, but aluminum will be a problem until later in 2022,” Fornelli continued. “And I bet that as the next election comes closer, we’ll see inflation ease up, too. If you’ve got material in stock right now, you’re sitting good. But not too much inventory, because the prices are at historic highs. It’s a very interesting time to be in business. NASCAR was the first major sport to get back in business, and the smaller dirt tracks are exploding now, so I’m very bullish on this industry.”