THIRD-GENERATION RACECAR DRIVER
Nipper carries on family’s love of racing
“They can’t put it in you, and they can’t take it out.”
- J.K. Simmons, portraying Ralph Earnhardt in “3, The Dale Earnhardt Story” —— Over time, families pass down many things from one generation to the next.
It’s easy for Jones County’s Jordy Nipper, a third-generation racecar driver, to take stock of what he has inherited. That would be the love of racing, and all of the work during the week to come with getting a car ready to race at dirt tracks during the weekends at places like Cochran and Senioa as well as other bullrings a bit further away.
“Racing, that was all we did, we didn’t really go on family vacations,” Nipper said. “As a kid, I’d play in the dirt with racecars or watch racecars. From the time I was 5, I was asking my dad if I could race go karts.” In a way, Nipper is carrying on a family legacy. He’s the son of the late Scotty Nipper, whose father Pat was previously a driver. That DNA is pinned up all over an office at Scotty’s Muffler on Shurling Drive in Macon, filled with numerous racing photos of the younger Nipper’s father.
“That’s all he ever did. I tell everyone, all I knew how to do is put mufflers on and race. I like to tell everyone, my dad built my work ethic into me. He made me go to work when I was 14,” Nipper said. “I tell people that I’ve always had all that I ever wanted as far as racing, but I had to work for it. If you didn’t work for it, you didn’t race. He just built that work ethic into me.”
Early on in his racing career, the will to race has motivated Nipper by way of his dad.
“This got me through school. I was a B and C student. When I started racing, he told me, ‘you’ve got to have As and Bs. If you make a C, we wont go race,” Nipper said. “From that point on, I didn’t get a C until trigonometry when I was a senior in high school. He was like, ‘I’ll let you slide on that because I can’t do trig.’” That work ethic has helped Nipper to a pair of feature wins this year in the limited late model at Senioa Raceway, where in three other feature events in either limited or late models he has finished no worse than third. But there’s more to Nipper’s regimen than just one car. He also mixes in his race schedule with both late models and super late models, giving him three cars to race out of the garage at his family’s home.
Last weekend, for example, Nipper went out of state to race in super late model events in Gaffney and Lancaster, S.C. Within the Peach State, Nipper’s schedule has included jaunts to tracks like Waycross, Swainsboro, Screven Speedway in Sylvania and North Georgia Speedway in Chatsworth.
Where Nipper races each week is usually set within a matter of days.
“It’s kind of by the seat of our pants, I look and see what’s going on,” Nipper said. “It’s kind of what makes more sense as far as traveling, how confident I am on how much I want to travel.”
And with a work ethic that entails working full-time during the week, time has to be carved out outside the typical 9-to-5 day to work on racecars and get them ready to go. Nipper’s family is not far away when this goes on.
“Luckily, with the race shop at the house, my wife and kids are with me when I work on it, so it’s not as bad,” Nipper said. “But there’s lots of effort that goes into it. The biggest thing (people don’t realize) is all the work that goes into it. Some people think we just put tires on it, charge the batteries and that’s it. It’s like a full-time job, and to keep up, you have to put in a lot of work.”
