Road racer has the drive, the ride to go for the green

Skeen vies for new contract, next level

Mike Skeen had his first encounter of a famous kind this spring. He was knocking around in a Cingular store when a clerk asked him if he was "Mike." Skeen pleaded guilty. "Aren't you the guy from the race show?" asked the clerk.

Skeen admitted he had been in eight episodes of "Set Up," a reality television series that aired early this year on cable's Speed TV (www.speedtv.com). The series followed several drivers on and off the track for 13 races in 2007.

The clerk popped the question. Could he take Skeen's photo with a camera phone? Skeen ruefully complied and several months later was shaking his head. "It was the first time away from the track I've been recognized," he recalls.

Fans aren't the only ones who have noticed the 22-year-old redhead on television or his 11 wins this season on the National Auto Sport Association's road course racing circuit.

The 2005 Orange High School graduate is getting feelers from sponsors and at least one agent. He hopes he's on the cusp of a breakout 2009 season that will financially stabilize his racing efforts and elevate him to the next level -- either the SPEED World Challenge series or the NASCAR Camping World Series.

"Hopefully, we'll get somewhere with it," he says of the recent buzz.

"Sponsors look for someone who can consistently put their logo at the front of the pack and represent their brand well. He has certainly shown that," says Scott Lear, who has followed road course racing for 15 years, the last five as an editor for Grassroot Motorsports magazine near Daytona, Fla.

Lear, who has raced against Skeen, says Skeen's talent lies in a competitive willingness to run comfortably on the ragged edge of danger and "use every inch of the track to maximum potential. He just does not make a mistake."

Last year, Skeen had nine firsts and an additional seven finishes in the top five. He won the Geno's Garage Cup for the Southeast, the equivalent of being the circuit's MVP.

Road course races are a shift up in variables from the banked ovals of the NASCAR circuit. Road course drivers line up two-by-two and roar off at 125 mph for 30 to 45 minutes of combat on a 40-foot wide strip that dips and curves over the land's contours for 2.5 to 3 miles. A right curve might be banked downward and to the left due to nature.

Factor nature's whimsy into an "S" curve with a competitor hanging on your right rear fender and it's a bit more complicated than Interstate 40 at 4:44 p.m. on Friday.

It's really a question of "weight management, applied physics," Skeen explains of slicing through the curves while downshifting twice in a second by pumping the gas and brake simultaneously and popping the clutch.

Skeen approaches a racing career with the dispassionate analysis of an engineer, which was what he studied to be for a year at Georgia Tech. But "I didn't see myself getting a desk job," he says. "This [racing] incorporates marketing, economics and engineering."

Skeen is doing all that and more: driver, mechanic, Web master (www.mikeskeen.com) and hustler for contacts and contracts as he works the phone and computer in the spacious house just over the Orange County line where he lives with his parents. The race car is in the basement.

Race weekends are usually a solitary affair. Sometimes a parent or friend accompanies him. Usually, it's just Skeen with his BMW on the back of a 14-year-old truck whose odometer reads 250,000 miles. If he's lucky, he rolls 45 minutes up the road to Danville's Virginia International Speedway. More frequently, he grinds out the miles to races in Atlanta, Savannah or Birmingham, where he won a race in early June.