Photo courtesy of David Smith
To other top Frito-Lay executives, Mark Billington isn't one of the better Top Alcohol Funny Car racers of the last 20 years – he's the Senior Director of Growth and Commercialization. Balancing racing with everyday real-world responsibilities is hard on everybody, but for Billington, getting time off from work is really hard – just about impossible, actually.
It's a choice Billington made long ago and one he doesn't regret – except when everybody else is heading to Florida, where he used to live, for the Gatornationals and he's stuck in an executive meeting in Dallas. "If an executive meeting runs late, I can't just say, 'Sorry guys, I have to go work on my car now,' and walk out," Billington says. "If something gets rescheduled on top of a race I was already planning to run, it's not like everybody else can just change their schedule so I can go. I handle a billion dollars of this company's sales a year – I have to be there."
Race cars have run on money for as long as there have been race cars, but instead of paying for it the way most do – by owning a successful business – Billington has been entrenched in the corporate world since he was in his early 20s. He's not just an Ivy Leaguer or a top executive for a Fortune 500 company – he's both…not that he'd ever bring it up.
"I have a couple pictures in my office, but I really don't talk about racing much at work," Billington says. "People have Googled me and walked into my office and said, 'Is that really you?' A few of them even showed up at Dallas, and there I was, wearing shorts, clutch dust on the end of my nose. They'd only ever seen me in an office environment. They couldn't believe it."
Billington has been with Frito-Lay for 28 years now, ever since he graduated from Cornell University with business management and finance degrees and headed south with everything he owned in the back of a Chevy Monza. He's moved wherever he had to to further his career, from upstate New York, where he grew up, to Orlando, to Atlanta, and now to company headquarters in Dallas, working a lot and racing whenever he had the time.
The last few years, he hasn't had much time. Billington raced just four times this year. Last year, it was six. The year before that, five. Not unexpectedly, his success on the quarter-mile is inversely proportional to the trajectory of his career.
"Less and less of my time is my own," Billington says. "And when you're going to four or five races a year and racing against people who are going to 15 or 20, what chance do you really have? You start falling behind – the knowledge base just isn't there. I drive my truck to the races myself, and my wife and I do all the maintenance at home. The class has moved beyond that. Alcohol Funny Car has gotten away from the guy who does it for fun, as a hobby, and tunes his own car. When I was in my prime, from say 2005 to 2008, I could unload my car, run between 5.65 and 5.75, and start from there. Now people are running 5.50s at regional events. I'm struggling just to get down the track. Trying to run .50s at Noble, Oklahoma, using the same methods that worked for me five years ago ... it doesn't work."
Billington, who did a lot with a little for a long, long time, has destroyed more parts since 2012 than he had in his entire career before then. "These last three years have been probably the three toughest years I've ever been through," he says. "It's been three years of just kicking the rods out every weekend. No kidding, Dallas and Noble were the first two races in two years where I didn't."
And It's not just parts attrition and advancing technology that work against the little-guy racer. Moving from state to state to climb the corporate ladder creates its own complications. "You almost never have the same crew every time, and if you do, it's because you flew in the guys from where you used to live," Billington says. "I'll tell you one thing: Trying to race like this sure does teach you the real value of teamwork. I tried going to races with just one guy [Shawn Tuttle], and really I appreciated all his help, but it’s tough to be successful that way. It’s difficult do what I'm trying to do and have a job like my job. I'm in work mode at 7 in the morning and usually still there at 7 at night, and there's just no time during the week to look at the RacePak. All my racing is done from Friday afternoon to Sunday night."
With a job like Billington's, even when you do get away from it all to race, you still don't really get away – part of you is always still back at the office. "I try not to look at my phone too much at the track," he says. "That can really take the fun out of racing. You're sitting there, thinking, 'Hmmmm … .075 jet? .080? .090?' Then you look at your phone, and there are 100 or 125 e-mails to attend to.
"From 35 to 45, I didn't give a second thought to spending every extra dollar I had on racing," says Billington, who turned 50 this year. "Now I have a daughter in college, maybe another 10 years before I have to retire. Is another set of heads really what I should be spending my money on? Do I really want to blow 50 or 100 grand to go to a bunch more races next year? Could I if I even wanted to? I've always put my work and my family first. I could've taken a lower position and raced a lot more, but these are my priorities, and they've given me a great career and afforded me a nice lifestyle. Am I the baddest ass out there? Have I ever been the world champion? No. But I'm content with the decisions I've made. I've done all right."
Billington has been a Top 10 driver (2005), a national event finalist, and a division champ. He's won six divisional events, appeared in 19 finals, runner-upped at the Gatornationals, and won the last Division 2 Top Alcohol Funny Car title ever in 2011.
These last few years ... not so much. "There've been times when I've asked myself, 'Do I really want to do this?' " he says. "The whole class moved beyond my tuneup a few years ago – I just didn't know it. I bought a tune-up from Randy Anderson a while ago that really got me going in the right direction. I called him this year and told him how I was running the car, and he said, 'What? You can't do that anymore, Mark. You can't run that amount of fuel.' The year I won the division championship, I ended the year with the same shortblock I started the year with. I ran the same oil for half the season. The last couple years, I can't even get through a race with the same engine."
Billington's not complaining, though. Nobody ever said it would be easy, and you don't make it to where he's made it in the business world without working harder than the next guy. "Racing isn't just hard for an executive for one of the biggest companies in the world [parent company: PepsiCo]," he says. "It's not easy for anyone. I was at Maple Grove the year the race got rained out until Wednesday [2006], and on Monday I was still there, wondering when I was going to have to go home, and Frank Manzo walks over. 'So how long are you going to stay?' he said. I told him I didn't know, and he said, 'Me either. I have to get to the tower to fax all this stuff so I can be here for one more day, but I don't know how long I can hold out.' I think It's like that for all of us."
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