Fanfare: The Driscoll Family

Racing is an expensive sport. It takes a lot of money to get started in racing and even more to be fast. Kyler Driscoll of Calverton understands that so he has taken a unique approach to fund his racing dreams. Kyler, 12 and his younger brother, Caelyn, 9, build cardboard replicas of some of the cars you would see on the racetrack at Riverhead Raceway every week. They hope that some of the teams at the track will order a replica of their car and they can then put that money towards racing in the future.

“I’m trying to get a go-kart,” said Kyler. “I really want to be a racecar driver.”

Caelyn does too, but he said he has a different obstacle in his way besides just money.

“I wanted to get into go-karting too, but my mom said no,” said Caelyn. “But I’m gonna do it anyway.”

Caelyn said he was the one who first decided to build the cars.

“One morning I woke up and I was like ‘I’ve got to make this car,” said Caelyn. “We started out with the four car (Tom Pickerell’s Blunderbust).”

Their father, Dave, said he is thrilled that his sons have started building things because he is a shop teacher, but he was worried when he first came home to see them building the cardboard race cars as he feared it would just become another mess around the house.

“It’s great because both of them since they were little have watched me building stuff,” said Dave, ” but this is something that they’ve just taken on by themselves. I was at Brookhaven Lab for a conference and I come home and I see the two of them racing around inside with the sides of that number four Pickerell car. And I was like ‘What’s going on?’ And they were like ‘We’re building a car’ and I was like ‘oh great another mess around.’ Ever since they’ve been going crazy building the things. ”

Kyler and Caelyn have built cars for Tom Pickerell, Chad Churilla, Dave Roys, Ken Darch, Jeremy McDermott, Johnny Vullo, Dave Sapienza, and Kyle Ellwood just to name a few. Apparently Vullo has won all but two Figure 8 races since they built the car for him. He lost one of the races because he was disqualified for hitting too many cones, “So when you see that car it has cones taped to the sides where the wheels are supposed to be,” said Dave.

Kyler took to the social networking site Facebook in the hopes of getting some more customers and apparently the effort paid off.

“I posted a thing on Facebook letting people know that I wanted to get into go-karting and if anybody wants to buy one,” said Kyler. “And maybe ten minutes later I got a call from somebody wanting some cars.”

Kyler and Caelyn are charging $130-140 for a replica of a NASCAR Modified and $100 for any other car. The Modifieds cost more due to the nerf bars.

The cars are made out of recycled cardboard, chicken wire makes the windscreens, and coffee cans are used for wheels. In total the cars cost about $70 to make.

You can see Kyler and Caelyn running around Riverhead Raceway with their cardboard cars almost every single week, and maybe you’ll see Kyler running on the racetrack in a real go-kart in the near future.

Source: Rob Blount/LongIslandJam