Tanner Gray sat in father Shane’s Pro Stock Camaro, his gaze at the dashboard as intense as if he were laboring to solve a calculus equation or land an airplane in distress.

He was warming up the car in his Texas Motorplex pit at the AAA Texas FallNationals near Dallas, becoming more and more familiar with the race car he plans to be driving fulltime next season.

“My dad doesn’t have any interest in driving next year, so it’ll just be me in his car,” the 17-year-old said. “I’d love him to race with me. He just doesn’t have a desire to do it anymore. I think it’d be cool. He and his dad raced together for a couple of years. It’d be a lot of fun to have him out here with me.”

“I’d rather watch him,” the Countdown contender said of his son. He smiled a genuinely contented smile, proudly watching his son inside the car.

Shane Gray, who gained ground in the Pro Stock standings at Dallas and still has an outside chance to challenge the KB/Summit dominators for the championship at the year’s final two events, has left the door open to return. He might race next March at the Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla., and later in the spring at Las Vegas in the K&N Horsepower Challenge bonus race, for which he is qualified.

“We’re trying at least to make the top 10. That’ll be our main goal,” Tanner Gray said.     

“We’ve got Valvoline, and we’re looking for someone [additional] to come onboard next year,” this third-generation racer said.

Tanner Gray is no newcomer to motorsports. The North Carolina resident started in circle-track racing, running dirt sprint cars in Pennsylvania and California, even driving with NHRA champion Gary Scelzi’s sons, Dominic and Gio, in their 600 micro-sprint car. Mentored by former NASCAR/USAC driver Brad Noffsinger at his racing academy at Concord, N.C., Gray said he also likes to hop into a midget ride “if somebody wants to put me in their car.” He said. “It’s just kind of going back to grass roots and having fun with what you love.” He still races go-karts every Wednesday night at his local karting track.

“My grandpa [Johnny Gray] raced every car you can think of. He ran some dirt sprint cars when he was younger. My dad got a sprint car, and he kind of ran around there for a little bit. It got so dangerous and people were getting hurt so much – it’s awesome to do, but when you have this,” he said with a nod to his family’s Pro Stock operation behind the oversized Goodyear tire he was sitting on, “it’s not worth getting hurt.”

Tanner Gray’s older brother Bryce, who dabbled in sprint cars and won his first start, lost a kidney following a Motocross accident a few years ago and is a personal trainer today. Younger brother Taylor, he said, “hangs out with Steve Torrence, so he’s going to be a Top Fuel racer.” So the love for racing definitely runs in the family. The three Gray children even went to school in the race shop, home-schooled with a California-based plan developed specifically for youngsters involved in motorsports. (Tanner Gray did attend Lake Norman High School briefly but returned to home-schooling.   

Besides, Tanner Gray said, he just “got burnt out” with circle-track racing after switching to asphalt sprinters and driving for a team that simply ran out of funding. “I’ve always wanted to drive [a Pro Stock car] since I was 11 or 12, but I’ve always been on the circle-track side of things,” Gray said. “My dad didn’t want me to get into it [drag racing]. He wanted me to stay on the circle-track side of things. That’s what I grew up doing and was getting good at. Pro Stock racing’s something I wanted to do for awhile, and I think I can be good at it. He said, ‘If you’re good at it, I have no problem putting you in the car.’ He said, ‘Whatever you want to do, I’ll support you.’ I’ve got cool parents [including mom Amber].”

Dave Connolly, the 26-time Pro Stock winner who serves as Shane Gray’s crew chief, let Tanner Gray take a few spins in his bracket car, the Camaro that Erica Enders drove for Victor Cagnazzi’s team when Connolly was her crew chief.

“I made a few pass in it, and it was pretty cool,” Gray said. “Then they put me in the Pro Stock car and got me doing burnouts. By the end of the day, they had me taking it to the eighth [-mile]. It was a lot of fun to do that. That’s when I knew I really wanted to do it.”

He since has tested to the eighth-mile at Rockingham Dragway. But Gray spends much of his time working on the car. He tended to the shocks and tires on the back-up car, and Gray Motorsports engineer Owen Wells has been teaching him about engine building and servicing. And he’s paying attention to what goes on at Gray Manufacturing, the machine shop that’s two doors down from the race shop at Denver, N.C., in the space former NASCAR/ARCA racer/team owner Eddie Sharp used to occupy. “That’s a business I wouldn’t mind getting into later on,” Gray said.

Admittedly, what he needs to work on right now is getting comfortable with the Pro Stock car – and more so, the notion that he isn’t going to win all the time.

“I’m a very competitive kid,” Gray said, fully aware that he needs to adapt to the realities of racing. “If I lose, I don’t take it very well. I’ve always been: ‘Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a bad one.’ I’m not really good about losing.”

Dad Shane Gray, unflappable and seldom agitated about any unpleasant situation for long, has helped his middle son put racing in perspective. Tanner Gray is learning.

“You come into this, you’re going to lose 50 percent of the time you go up there [to the starting line],” Tanner Gray said, still telegraphing his uneasiness with the idea. “It’s a 50-50 chance that you win or lose. I’ve kind of changed my mindset a little bit. Obviously, you want to go up there and you want to kill everybody you go against. But the odds of it are you’re not going to do that every time. I’ve tried to stay open-minded and realize, coming into a professional class, that it’s going to be harder than anything I’ve ever done.”

He said his task for the moment is “just to focus on what I need to do: starting the car and studying the routine of what the driver’s got to go through to be good – then to do that as much as I can and hopefully it works out.”

Judging by the look on his face as he warmed up his dad’s car at Dallas, Tanner Gray is earning an A so far.

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