Concrete and asphalt are the building blocks of great cities and drag strips, two of the most important aspects of Vincent “Vinny” Budano’s life. The native New Yorker, a two-time Pro Street champion, is quick to say that he would “trade grass for concrete any day.”

Budano comes by his love of the fast-paced metropolitan lifestyle honestly. He was born in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem in 1962. His family later moved to Queens, where Budano, his brother Frank, and sister Fran, grew up amidst the city’s concrete canyons and asphalt-covered landscapes.

“I had a great childhood,” Budano, now 44, said. “When my parents, Anna and Frank, came to this country they had nothing, but they, along with my Aunt Gabriela and Uncle Phillip, raised my brother and sister and I in a close-knit and loving family atmosphere.”

 

 

Concrete and asphalt are the building blocks of great cities and drag strips, two of the most important aspects of Vincent “Vinny” Budano’s life. The native New Yorker, a two-time Pro Street champion, is quick to say that he would “trade grass for concrete any day.”

Budano comes by his love of the fast-paced metropolitan lifestyle honestly. He was born in the Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem in 1962. His family later moved to Queens, where Budano, his brother Frank, and sister Fran, grew up amidst the city’s concrete canyons and asphalt-covered landscapes.

“I had a great childhood,” Budano, now 44, said. “When my parents, Anna and Frank, came to this country they had nothing, but they, along with my Aunt Gabriela and Uncle Phillip, raised my brother and sister and I in a close-knit and loving family atmosphere.”

“They always supported and helped me, always had kind words no matter how crazy and wild I acted. I was never into bad things, but if something had a motor I would push it to the edge. A lot of racers have family backgrounds in the sport, but I don’t. I was just always a mechanically inclined kid. Some guys in my neighborhood had race cars, and as a kid I was naturally drawn to them. On Saturdays these guys would all be out working on their cars and tuning them so that they could go to National Speedway, which was on the east end of Long Island.  Every weekend I’d hang out and watch them work on their cars.”

Eventually, this “mechanically inclined kid” wanted a car of his own, one that he could drive to school and take to the racetrack on weekends. His first hot rod was a 1966 Chevelle, powered by a 327-cubic-inch small block and equipped with a four-speed transmission. In the beginning the car would run through the quarter-mile traps in 13-seconds, but that didn’t satisfy young Vinny for long.

“I kept tweaking on the car, and before long it was running in the eleven-second range,” Budano said. “The only problem was that it was my only means of transportation at the time and once I got it into the elevens it became almost impossible to drive on the street. It had a spool and a Liberty Super T-10 crash box transmission, and I kept breaking trannies.

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“It finally wore itself out, so I put another engine in the car – a real good small block that my friend James Antonette built for me – and backed it up with an automatic transmission,” Budano said. “After that we never looked back. My brother Frank and I went bracket racing every week at either Englishtown or Atco.  I was never really good at bracket racing though, because I just wanted to go faster instead of concentrating on being consistent. 

“Eventually James went into partnership with a gentleman by the name of Dominic Mastroaini, who now partners with John Nobile on an IHRA Pro Stock car. They had built a 500-inch Jerry Haas Trans Am. We were just bracket racers at the time, and James and I realized that we didn’t even know where to start.

We knew a lot of guys from the neighborhood who had tried Pro Stock and had a little success, though, so we figured if they could do it we could do it.” 

And they were right. At the time both 500-inch and 800-inch “mountain motor” cars were legal for IHRA competition, with the big-cube machines slowed down by the addition of weight. That year, 1990, the team qualified in the No. 12 position at the first Pro Stock race they attended, an IHRA event in Darlington, South Carolina. They went on to make the field at every subsequent IHRA race that season, and qualified for five of seven NHRA events.

“That kind of hooked me on going fast,” Budano said. “I knew I was in trouble then. That winter I cut up my Chevelle and put a 494-inch big block in it.  I’d had the engine for a while, and the way I got it is an interesting story. I got to the finals of a bracket race called the Super Stock Nationals at Englishtown and I had to run Sam Biondo in the final.  Tony Bartone owned the engine and he told me that if I beat Sam he would sell me the engine for whatever money I won. He was trying to get like eight or nine grand for it back then but he told me whatever I won he would take.  I think I won $4500.00 and he kept his word - he gave me the motor.”

Budano’s updated Chevelle was far from being a Pro Stock car, but it was capable of turning in low nine-second elapsed times. It also proved to be a real handful, wheelstanding past the 300-foot mark on every pass, much to the delight of fans. It was still a bracket car, however, and Vinny and Frank were ready to step up once again. “We were bored with bracket racing because ninety percent of the time I would put the car up on the back bumper and lose in the first round,” Budano said.

“I just wanted to go faster, so Frankie said we needed to do something or we had to stop.  He was getting married and he had some money stashed under his bed, so we took that and put it with all the money we could scrape together by selling the Chevelle, our spare motors, and anything else we could come up with. Our friends all helped us - they bought a lot of our parts.  We ended up with a Willy Rells-built ‘89 Trans Am, an old 500-inch motor, and a pieced-together Lenco. The first time out we took the car to the Northeast Pro Shootout.  That was a real neat deal - it was weight to cubic inch and you were only allowed a single stage of nitrous.  We got the car to go in the 6.90s at over 200 mph, and we were having a ball.”

 

 

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At that point engine builder and longtime friend Scott Shafiroff stepped into the picture. Having bought a new car, he offered Budano his record-setting Trans Am. “He told me that he would sell us the car for whatever we could get for our car,” Budano said. “His Trans Am was a very good car – it had bead-lock wheels on it and a big wing on the back. It was more of a Top Sportsmen car than my car was, and it had a lot of history. It was the fastest single four-barrel car in drag racing at one time, and was the car that Tim McAmis drove when he won the first-ever Pro Modified championship in 1990. I said ‘let's do it,’ and that was that. I sold my car and bought that one.  Scott said that he would supply our motors and we would go racing together and see what happened. 

“That first year we won a championship in the Northeast Pro Shootout.  We won it two years in a row and then the rules got stupid - they started allowing multiple nitrous systems and this car really couldn't handle it.  We tried to put a 700-inch motor in the car, but it became a guardrail hunter, so we sold it and bought a ‘63 Corvette from Wally Stroupe,” Budano said. “We ran that car with some success - we never finished worse than third in the Northeast Pro Shootout. We didn’t have it for long, though. During a match race at Englishtown it snapped the rear axle at the eighth-mile mark and I hit the guardrail at 170 miles an hour, bounced off and hit the other guardrail, which pretty much made a mess of the car. I wasn’t hurt, but at that point I was sure I was done racing. I couldn't afford to do it any more. 

“Scott wasn’t with me that weekend, so I called him and told him I had wrecked the car and that I had no idea what we were going to do next,” Budano said. “He was more worried about me than the car, and about 10 minutes later he called me back and told me that we were far from done. He told me to see if the car could be fixed. If not, he told me to order a new one. I told him that I couldn't afford it, but he said ‘I didn't ask you if you can afford it. I'm just telling you what we are going to do.’ 

“I took the car to Wally Stroupe the next day, and he said it wasn’t fixable, and if it was it would just be pieced together. Scott said he didn’t ever want to sell an unsafe car to somebody, so he told Wally to cut it up for scrap and build us a new one. At that point he started working on our Pontiac Grand Am, and we looked ahead to going Pro Street racing, beginning with the 2004 season.

“It took us a while to get a handle on the new car but once we did it turned out to be a good piece.  We ran that car for two years in both NSCA and NMCA competition, and took the NMCA Pro Street championship with it in 2005.”

There were more changes in the wind for the “Bad Apples” team, however. Late in 2005 they commissioned Tim McAmis to build them a new ’67 Camaro, and they had immediate success with it, winning five of six NMCA races and a second straight title. “The cool thing was that I finally got my hat trick, winning three consecutive races,” Budano said. “The car has just been phenomenal - it's just a good hot rod.  It has one of Shafiroff’s 738-inch engines equipped with CFB cylinder heads and a Speedtech nitrous system.  At 2,650-pounds we had a best pass of 6.31-seconds at 223 mph through the mufflers when we ran Pro Mod at the NHRA national event at Englishtown. At 2,800 pounds it's been 6.41 at 221.”

 

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Budano capped a successful 2006 campaign with a record-setting victory at the Streetcar Super Nationals at The Strip At Las Vegas Motor Speedway in late November. Budano’s top qualifying effort of 6.39, 220, which he backed up during eliminations, now stands as the event’s top elapsed time.

Behind the scenes of Budano’s racing effort stand a lot of family members and friends. “It's funny because one of the guys I used to watch work on his car when I was a kid became one of my best friends as we got older,” he said. “His name is Charlie Kominski, and today he races with me and takes care of my motors.  It's basically the same with my whole crew.  These are not guys I picked up along the way - they are a strictly volunteer crew who are all my childhood friends.  Of course Scott Shafiroff is among them, along with my brother Frank, my son Vincent, my cousin Anthony, who we call Bimbo, Anthony “Big Ant” Cassece, and Sammy Gathers. These guys make me look good and I couldn’t do it without them.

“I also owe a great deal of thanks to Shannon Jenkins.  More than just being fellow gearheads and competitors we have become good friends.  Shannon and I could have a conversation at one o'clock in the morning or 12 o'clock in the afternoon and every time I speak to that man I learned something.  More so than anything he can do for me in racing I feel that I've made a real friend.  He's just a special guy. I also want to thank “Eddie Eyes,” Tim McAmis and the folks at Comp Cams, MSD, Moroso, and Scott Shafiroff Race Engine.”

As for the future, Budano and Shafiroff are looking in the short term to defend their NMCA championship. In the long term, Budano has his sights set on something a little different, although it’s not high on his list of priorities. “Before my career is over I’d like to try my hand at IHRA Pro Stock. If we had a chance to try something different that would probably be it. If it never happens it wouldn’t bother me – I’m totally happy doing what I'm doing because it leaves lots of time for family and friends. I love going to New York and going to the theater and the restaurants, so Pro Street racing is a perfect fit for me. There’s time to live life and yet it fulfills my need for speed.”

Away from the track Budano is general manager of Scott Shafiroff Race Engines.  “I handle most of the daily ins and outs of the business, and I work with Scott closely,” he said. “I try to concentrate most of my efforts in the shop because we have a real good sales staff that handles that end of the business. I enjoy the mechanical end of the business, so I try to stay in the shop. I do get involved in every aspect of the business, though, from sales on down.  I've worked with Scott for four years, but we've raced together for the last 10 years.  I’ve known him my whole life it seems. When I was 17 he tried to get me to go to work for him and finally at 40 I went.” 

Prior to hooking up with Shafiroff, Vinny and his brother Frank owned and operated a gas station and repair shop for 18 years. “Racing was something I always wanted to do, and racing engines always intrigued me,” he said. “After all those years I just got tired of working on cars.  With the inception of leased cars and the fact that cars just kept getting better and better it became harder and harder to make a living repairing cars and selling gas.  I realized that we were doing a lot of things that we couldn't make any money at, and knew it was time to make a change.  Working for Scott has been real nice; we have a real good relationship.

 

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“Scott's shop is located in Bohemia on Long Island and I live in Hicksville, which is about 25 miles from the shop.  People think I'm kidding around when I say I live in Hicksville but I really do live there.  It's located between our shop and New York City.  I'm a city kid at heart.  I would trade grass for concrete any day.”

On the personal side, Budano spends much of his time away from the track, and the shop, with girlfriend Fran and daughter Catelin. When they first met, Fran, who is a psychologist, had a tough time making sense of drag racing. “When she looked at the amount of work and dedication it takes to do this, and at the amount of money it takes compared to the amount of money you can win - if you're lucky enough to win - the checks and balances just don't add up,” Budano said. “She had a hard time with that at first, though once she saw the passion and the love we have for the sport she grew to love it, too.”

As for his 15-year-old daughter, well, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. “Catelin is a lot like me.  I race today because I was a thrill seeker when I was a kid.  I liked anything that was fast - it didn't matter what it was.  A motorcycle, a boat, a car -as long as it was fast I was interested in it.  Catelin is just the same. She has shown some interest in wanting to drive a jet dragster, believe it or not.  She has said that she would love to get involved with the jets, so we'll see where that goes. 

“I’m pretty good friends with jet racer Al Hanna, and he told me that when she turned 16 we need to have a look at it and see if she has what it takes,” Budano said. “He claims he can tell in two seconds whether it's the fear of God or real excitement a person is experiencing when they’re in the car, because he’s brought some pretty good people along in the past.  If she still wants to try it we’ll put her in the car and see what happens. She'll either have tears in her eyes and say that she wants to get out, or she’ll say ‘let’s do it!’ I think it's cool, but being a dad I hope I see a ‘get me out of here’ look.”

But Budano isn’t likely to see any signs of apprehension in his young daughter’s eyes, and he likely doesn’t expect to. After all, he knows all too well the symptoms of the condition he himself has been suffering with since he was her age, and he knows there’s only one real cure - strap yourself into something fast and stand on the gas!

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