Driver: Richard Medlin
Hometown: Aberdeen, NC
DOB: Aug-05-1982
Height: 6’-2”

 Driver Profile:

Richard named after the King Richard Petty, grew up in the small town of Southern Pines, NC. Richard’s passion for racing developed well before even being born through his father Terry. Terry raced for many years at local dirt and asphalt tracks in North Carolina with the dream of someday making it to the big leagues. This lead Richard in the direction of racing even before day one when Richard’s mother Diane would go to the local track to watch her husband race even though pregnant with Richard. According to Diane, Richard would get excited while at the track. The sounds of the racecars would make him kick and move around all night while they were at the track. So from then on the family knew racing would be in his blood. And boy were they right, Richard grew up playing with racecars and watching races up until the age of 9 when the want to race became more than the 1/64th scale racing champions cars and racing video games could handle. His mother Diane would not let Richard strap inside anything to race for fear of him being hurt so Richard picked up the next best thing, a remote control. No not you Television remote control. The remote control to a hobby grade radio controlled race car.

From this point on it was as they say “ON“ as far as his racing career goes. Richard made his way racing r/c cars all the way up to the international level by competing in the Snowbird Nationals in Orlando Florida. While racing r/c cars Richard was able to win well over 100 races in many different classes, hold track records, gain 4 or more regular season track points championships,  and even win a national title in 2005 after coming close so many times before. During this time he was able to make a name for himself in the industry and meet and become friends with quite a few in the racing industry. Richard had become friends with such people as James Bowser, Roman Pemberton, Adam Brown, and even Tony Stewart just to name a few. Tony Stewart is owner of Custom Works R/C one of the biggest and best known r/c companies and also a rival company to one of Richard’s former Chassis Sponsors, Hyperdrive R/C. One of Richard’s best friends to this day James Bowser is currently employed at JR Motorsports as a shock specialist on both the #88 Navy and the #5 National Guard Nationwide series cars. Roman Pemberton was the Spotter of Dale Jarrett and brother to Ryan crew chief at Michael Waltrip Racing and Robin Pemberton Vice President of Competition at Nascar. Another of Richard’s good friends Adam Brown is employed at Richard Childress Racing and works on  Richard Childress’s Grandson, Austin Dillon’s Latemodel and ARCA team.

 Even though Richard had much success racing r/c cars he still wasn’t able to completely fulfill his dreams of racing. That is until the age of 24 when he sat down with his dad and talked seriously about getting a racecar. The two have had this conversation many times before but financially the opportunity to purchase a racecar was not there. But with Richard recently graduating from college with a degree in Civil Engineering and having landed a great job at HobbsUpchurch& Associates a local engineering firm the two finally had the resources to go racing for the first time for Richard and again for Terry. After purchasing a Limited Latemodel chassis and engine combo Richard finally could see his dream of driving a racecar coming true.

The first night of racing didn’t quite go as planned for Richard as it was his first time in the car and on the track. The plan was just to ride around a get seat time. Well his first time on track was his qualifying run where he put up a time of 26.78 seconds to turn a lap around the half mile track. This would not have been that bad of a lap time, for the U-Car class but with most everyone else qualifying in the 19 second bracket he was a bit slow to say the least. Still Richard’s priority was to ride around on the bottom and stay out of the way of the other drivers while getting the much needed seat time. This worked for the first 8 laps until the leaders came up to put Richard a lap down for the first time. Richard was running in the racing groove as they approached and started moving down to give the leaders the racing line when the leader got a head of steam coming off of turn 2 and got under Richard on the backstretch. Richard never saw him coming and kept coming down to the bottom lane. This ended up with the leader running over his left rear tire and climbing  up onto the left side door of his car ripping all the sheet metal off of the left side. Not exactly the start to a racing career that he was looking for. Everyone was ok thankfully but after the incident all Richard could think about was seeing another cars right front tire in his window net. This did not stop him but it did however end the first night of racing early for him. From there Richard has come along and gained more confidence with the seat time that he has gotten and is now able to run up front with those same guys who were almost 8 seconds faster than he was in the beginning.

Richard and team continue to compete now as an under funded team compared to most of his competitors but with the heart and drive to compete and be good at it that Richard has, success is coming. With the help of his father Terry and younger brothers Jonathan and Adam along with the support of his mother Diane and girlfriend Tanya, Richard was able to finish in the top 5 in seasons points this year out of the 27 teams to run this season in the division. The team hopes to build on there success from 2008 and better it in 2009 by winning a few races and being in the hunt for the overall points championship.     

Richard and the Medlin Racing team continue pushing forward to make it in the racing world. Many victories will come and Medlin Racing will in the end, come out in the lead with the checkered flag waving. Feel free to keep up with Richard and the Medlin Racing team by reading our stories in the race results section of our soon to be revamped website www.MedlinRacing.com.