Before he began racing full-time, Spencer Gallagher was working for a tech startup in San Francisco. The 24-year-old Las Vegas native is trying to make up for lost time, however, and has relocated to Charlotte and is splitting his time driving in the Truck and ARCA Series for GMS Racing.
What happens in Vegas …
“Vegas is a crossroads for so many of the racing scenes on the West Coast, and I think that’s why it breeds such good drivers. The drivers that come out of Vegas are going up against the best talent the entire West Coast has to offer. You might run this little track out here in California, or you might run this little track out here in Utah, but everybody comes to Vegas, so you’re always testing yourself against the best of the best.”
Get off my lawn
“I’m a bloody grandpa in this sport! I started running Legends when I was 12 and did some road racing stuff just to kill time with my buddies a couple of weekends a year. I turned my first lap on an oval when I was 19.”
Learning curve
“For the first few years I was absolutely terrible. The entire field would come by — buzz on by — and you wait one-one thousand, two-one thousand, and about five or nine seconds later there would be these two little dots off in the distance, and it was me and (my friend) Nicki just going at it, battling each other’s hearts out. Around 2009, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, with no real experience or training of any kind, I started winning.”
King of the road
“I like to do road cycling. I’ve been looking into mountain biking around here, but I remember a few experiences I had up in Lake Tahoe on a mountain bike with those nice big steep hills, and, yeah, there might have been a couple of stitches involved there. So maybe a little residual memory is keeping me from getting back on the mountain bike.”
Stay humble
“You’re not going to set the world on fire your first time on the track. You need to always have your head down and work. You can’t let yourself get cocky because you’re finding success at one level of racing because that next level is going to rock your world.”
