After exploits on land Speer gains growing reputation for work with water racing

WOODSTOCK — Tyler Speer has always had a need for speed.

At 5 years old, he started racing motorcycles. After that, it was on to go-carts, stock cars and boats.

While Speer no longer races motorcycles or go-carts, three top-15 finishes in stock car racing’s ARCA Series and a seventh-place finish in the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Series have kept him entrenched in the world of motorsports.

Now, Speer wants more than that. He wants to change it.

“You want to be one of the pioneers for the sport,” said Speer, a 2009 graduate of Etowah High School. “I want to help the sport grow and not just benefit myself from it.”

The son former boat racer Tim Speer, Tyler got an early start on the mechanical side of racing thanks to a boat repair shop his father once operated out of the family’s backyard.

“The fact that my dad got me into motorsports, in general, really helped,” Tyler Speer said. “Whether it was motorcycles, cars or boats, it didn’t matter because of where I came from. I grew up working on everything. I got a lot of his skills passed down to me.”

Those skills showed last year as Speer became licensed to drive in the Pro Modified division of the Drag Boat Series in his first attempt. This season was Speer’s first in the series, and he finished seventh of 20 drivers.

“The transition for (Tyler) was easy,” Tim Speer said. “He can drive anything, and his background helped tremendously. If you can build it and drive it, it’s night and day. You understand it. You know what’s behind you and you know what’s going on. That’s a big plus. During a race, if he made a change that isn’t working, he knows how to adjust his driving to fix it. You don’t see that much anymore.”

Tyler Speer’s mechanical knowledge also helps him on land, where he is a piece of the first drag boat team to completely build and race a boat in-house.

As much as Speer’s skills have helped him as a racer, a different set of skills could help him realize his dream of changing the landscape of the sport.

After graduating high school, Speer enrolled at Kennesaw State, where he majored in sales, with a minor in finance. Now, he is taking his economic-based background and using it to advance his team and sport.

“There are no big names in the sport that really have a foothold,” he said. “If you were to walk up to someone and ask who Dale Earnhardt is, they would know whether they like racing or not. No one in the boat scene has that yet.”

In the short time he has been racing, Speer has seen his notoriety grow. He said one of the “coolest” parts of racing is when fans recognize his boat from television and want to talk to him. He spent last weekend representing Hedman Hussler Hedders, a racing parts manufacturer, at the Performance Racing Industry Trade Show in Indianapolis.

That popularity, coupled with Speer’s success, has also been good for the family business, which moved out of the backyard in 1997.

“I think it has helped us,” said Tim, who described himself as the owner and crew chief of the family’s Amphibious Motorsports. “I have a lot guys coming back to the sport. We have nine teams under our umbrella, so that’s good. I try to bring in a team that isn’t doing well, try to bring them together and put them back out there as a team who can be competitive again.”

As Amphibious Motorsports continues to grow, Tyler has his eyes on the future, with hopes of owning his own team. He compares his aspirations to Hendrick Motorsports — NASCAR’s most prominent team, with the likes of drivers Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the recently retired Jeff Gordon — but that does not mean Speer wants to stop racing anytime soon.

“I want the sport to grow, first of all,” he said. “I would like to have a few boats and a team with it, so I could run it almost like you would see from an NHRA team. I want to have the team and, of course, I’ll still be racing on it. It’s one of the things you can’t really get out of.”

Reaching the level of success of a team like Hendrick may still be a while away for Speer, so he will look to continue his stock car racing career, build off his rookie season in boat racing and attempt to qualify to race in the Top Fuel Hydro division next year.

“We’re definitely going to keep racing in the ARCA Series, but I’ll be focusing more on boats,” Speer said. “This year was a lot of fun, but it was also a learning experience for us. Next year, we’ll be better prepared and, hopefully, have an even better finish.”

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