My father, Stan Huntley, was into buying and selling European cars. He was also the premier Recaro seat dealer in Portland, Oregon. In the late 1960s he founded Faspec British Cars & Parts, concentrating on English automobiles. In the mid-1980s, he founded "Driving Ambition" as a division of Faspec. The name represented his love of cars and driving, a passion that I share since I was a boy.
In my teenage years I was racing Go Karts and my main sponsor was Driving Ambition. With their expertise and support of my karts we won four IKF Grand National Championships and many local and regional championships. I became an IKF registered Expert along with Scott Pruett, Mark Dismore, Greg Moore and Jamie McMurray.
After my years racing karts I realized I liked working on cars more than racing them and so I enrolled at Wyoming Technical Institution, now known as WyoTech, in Laramie, Wyoming. I graduated with Honors and went to work with my father at Driving Ambition, restoring classic cars. While still racing karts, on a trip to California we stopped by long-time friends and heroes Doug Peterson and Don Erb, the founders of Comptech. They offered me a job as the 3rd mechanic on the second IMSA Camel Lights car. So towards the end of 1991 I moved to northern California and just after Christmas headed to Daytona Beach to work my first over-the-wall race, the 24 Hours of Daytona where we won our class.
I moved up the chain at Comptech to become the youngest Chief Mechanic in the CART series. Our best results were a second place in the Long Beach Grand Prix and a pole position at the Michigan 500.
In 1997 Comptech was retained by Carl Hogan to run his new CART driver, Dario Franchitti. During the 1997 season we had two pole positions and led many races. I won the Chief Mechanic of the Year award by the Championship Association of Mechanics (CAM) -- the youngest winner in history and a title usually won by the champion's team leader (which that year was Chip Ganassi Racing with Alex Zanardi).
At the end of 1997 professional racing was getting very tiring. My long-time girlfriend (and soon to be wife) was still living in northern California and so when Comptech offered me a job in their fast-growing aftermarket parts division I quit the racing tour.
While at Comptech I was responsible for product development, customer installations and technical support for our customers and staff. During my tenure there we went from making a few parts for the Acura NSX during the racing off-season to a large assortment of performance parts for almost all Hondas and Acuras. We also designed and manufactured street-legal supercharger kits for almost a dozen different cars. -- Shad Huntley
