When it comes to the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, there are few faces more synonymous than Mike Skinner‘s. That remains the case today.
Through his 231 starts in the Truck Series, Skinner amassed 28 wins, including one in the series’ inaugural race, which was hosted at Phoenix Raceway on Feb. 5, 1995. The Gunslinger went on to win seven more races that year en route to earning the first championship in the now-30-year-old division.
However, after a long 26-year NASCAR career with 569 combined starts across all three national series, Skinner hung up his helmet for good in 2012 at 55.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t still at the racetrack. That’s because Skinner has become a coach for many of the youngsters in the Truck Series and even ARCA Menards Series garages.
And you bet he’s doing it with an old-school approach.
“I don’t teach people how to drive a racecar,” Skinner told Frontstretch at Daytona International Speedway in February. “I teach them how to race craft and how to find that fire in there. A lot of kids today, they didn’t have to come up through the ranks like we did. They didn’t have to write hot checks for your tires and know that you have to win to cover the checks.
“It’s like today’s generation don’t really understand that because most of them that’s in racing now never had to struggle. They’ve either had successful parents, successful grandparents, something has triggered a situation for them to be in the sport and wasn’t raised in a single-wide trailer house and mop the floors at their mother’s cantina to help her get by.”
Skinner still primarily focuses on the Truck Series, a division where many of today’s NASCAR Cup Series stars got their starts while in their late teenage years.
But a series comprised of mostly young, hungry kids who haven’t felt the same struggles Skinner and early Truck champions felt has resulted in the constant sight of burnt sheet metal, verbal confrontations and destroyed trucks. Skinner knows this too well, and he wants to change it.
“We see this in the Truck Series a lot,” Skinner said. “Which hurts my heart just a little bit. [Ron] Hornaday [Jr.], and [Jack] Sprague, myself and [Todd] Bodine and Teddy Musgrave and all those guys were aggressive, but we didn’t just run through somebody to pass them. It seems like today these kids can’t pass. They run through people.
“That’s one of the things that we’re trying to work with.”
His most recent protege is TRICON Garage part-time driver and 25-year-old Lawless Alan, also a full-timer for Venturini Motorsports in ARCA, whose father approached Skinner for help after watching an old interview from a Cup race Skinner nearly won at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2000. In it, the then-Richard Childress Racing driver claimed he’d wreck his own mom to win a Cup race.
“They heard that,” Skinner remembered. “And he goes, ‘That’s who I want coaching my son.'”
Despite being approached for his fire and will to win, Skinner still hasn’t lost sight of the fact that racing demands a balance between being patient and being aggressive. It’s a virtue he is striving to instill in young Alan.
“We’re trying to work with guys like Lawless,” Skinner said. “He’s very patient. He doesn’t run through people. He doesn’t go up and wreck somebody to pass them. Finding that balance of when do you go ahead and be a little more aggressive. I would never ask him to wreck somebody … but when it’s down inside the last five laps, if you can win a race, I’m disappointed if you don’t move them.
“I’m not saying just blast them and wreck them. I want you to move them up the track, but understand when you move them up the racetrack, it better be the last lap, the last corner where he doesn’t have time to catch him because he’s going to pay him back. Make sure you get paid back next week, not that day, or else you’re in trouble.”
However, Skinner also understands that even the modern-day Truck racers face certain challenges he and the racers yesterday didn’t: a lack of practice, and perhaps that is what needs to be changed the most.
“If I could take Lawless to Phoenix [Raceway] or Daytona or anywhere and test for three days like we used to do, we could focus on one thing at a time,” Skinner said. “But now these young kids, they don’t get any practice time, 20 to 30 minutes of practice. They’re shoved right into battle and really don’t really have any footing under them.
“I’ve been saying this for a couple of years now. … I think those guys need more practice time. I’ve seen a lot of kids wreck this last year in the first five minutes of practice because they only get 20 minutes of practice. They got to go out there and be just balls to the wall wide open and getting everything they can out of that thing right off the trailer.”
Of course, it doesn’t stop with Alan. Skinner sees plenty of drivers in the sport who could use some coaching, but he also knows there is still a good presence of talent within the Truck ranks.
“There’s some young drivers I feel like I could help a lot,” Skinner said. “Ty Gibbs being one of them. He needs a guy that’s been there and done that. He needs a guy that’s went and blatantly wrecked somebody and then had to deal with the consequences.
“Other than the quality of the drivers, there’s some guys in the top five in the trucks that are as good as myself or Dale [Earnhardt] or Jeff Gordon or you name it. … This Corey Heim kid is amazing. He’s got a really good future in the sport.”
Since 2012, Skinner has wandered through the Truck and ARCA garages for most of the events every year. This year, he intends to join Alan during most of the ARCA schedule.
But his time hasn’t only been spent in the garage, he’s built his personality on radio and even television, too.
This season, Skinner still hosts his radio show on the SiriusXM NASCAR channel Skinner Roundup with his wife Angie Skinner on the Sundays after Saturday night Cup events.
“It’s a little bit different than most of the shows,” Skinner described. “We don’t have as many call-ins as a lot [of the NASCAR shows], but we have celebrity guests. We have personality stuff. I do a tech talk on it. It’s a great show.”
However, most notably in 2016, Skinner’s media career began when he took on a surprising role in Amazon Prime’s series The Grand Tour, which featured British personalities Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
His role? He was the show’s test driver of its many exotic sports cars. All the while, he acted the personality of being the grumpy American that hated all things European. It was a role he didn’t particularly enjoy.
“I was approached,” Skinner recalled. “A couple of people had thrown my name in a hat. … So we went to Virginia International Raceway and did a test or film thing, and they decided they really wanted me to do it.
“But they presented it to me, ‘This is what you’re going to be. You’re going to be this cranky fricking American that hates everything that we do. You only have love for American muscle cars. This is all stupid, basically.'”
His time on the show ended after only one season, but Skinner was meant to have more time as his character developed.
“‘But then we’re going to develop your character,'” Skinner recalled. “‘You’re going to spend more time with the guys.’ I literally would sit down … around a campfire and play guitar while having a dang bourbon or a bottle of wine or whatever. … They wanted to develop that character.
“And then as we got going, they had me look like Evel Knievel, and they had my cheeks puffed out and all. That’s all good. It was fine. But when it just stayed like that, for me, for the amount of travel I was having to do, it wasn’t worth it to me.”
Since then, on top of coaching young drivers, Skinner has still stayed close to the racing craft by entering a few races himself.
“I get in a late model every once in a while,” Skinner said. “Believe it or not, I’m probably a better driver today than I ever was. At 67 years old, my reaction is not as good to be in the Cup Series, but I think I could still be very competitive in a Truck race or [NASCAR Xfinity Series] race. I probably won’t do that, but there’s a good chance I’ll get back in a late model car once in a while.”
Sometimes, he’ll join his son Jamie Skinner, who owns his own late model team.
And you better believe there’s some fatherly coaching there, too.
“I have [raced with Jamie] many times,” Skinner said. “It’s fun. He’s a really smart racecar driver. The problem with Jamie is when he became the driver of that little late model team, he drove the cars like he owned them. I’m like, no. That don’t work, bud. You need to put hired drivers in there … if you’re not going to drive it like you stole it.”
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT