“You can vary allot between stagger, wedge, and general set up at Berlin and still get a top five finish.” said Brian Tillema about the only track he races. He admitted trying it all the first couple of years owning and driving his present car. “Last year we won the championship but wore out the right rear often and learned that what feels good is more important in winning consistently, and will also save the tires.”
He certainly knows what he’s talking about having taken that same yellow and white No. 76 to the last two championships in the Kerkstra Services Pro Stock Division at the raceway. He’s presently leading the class, and second place Justin Regnerus, going into the last part of the season in a carbon copy of last year in his attempt to ‘three-peat’.
Almost all of fourteen years behind the wheel (with an occasional year off) has been spent at Berlin, with the exception of the first half of the season the first year he raced, which was at Galesburg. “My dad Don raced an enduro at Kalamazoo back in the early eighties when I was real young and again in the early nineties when I would bug him to let me drive, but he said, ‘I bought this, get your own’. So I did, and before long was beating him here in the Sportsman Class with my first car that I bought from Jud Project,” thirty-five year old Tillema remarked, “and it was that experience that gave me the seat time around other cars to race six years in Late Models. Three of those years were in his own car, three for the Gruppen team, and all with the likes of Randy Sweet, Bob Holly, John Grega and many other drivers still in the class.”
Brian -who is from Byron Center and works for the landscape company Katerberg-Ver Hage Inc.- can walk down pit lane where he knows everyone generating smiles and laughs, even with his biggest competition. Cutlerville Hometown Sunoco, Flannery Motorsports, Premier Graphics, Dale Roede Finishmaster and Bonefied Customs sponsor his efforts. Some were friends of his before helping fund the car, and the team of Chad Whittigan, Dave Mane and Barry Wildey.
Dirt bike races and building rides to take on the Silver Lake sand dunes are favorite pass-times, though not much in the last four years as his focus has been on the Pro Stock Class. He recently finished rebuilding a wrecked Shelby Cobra replica he bought for summer drives to relax.
With the future of the Pro Stock division uncertain for next year at Berlin, Tillema is waiting to decide on the team’s next racing move. If the class is removed from the list he expects to move to 4-Cylinders rather than back to Late Models saying, “We’re here for the fun of it and to spend Saturday nights with the friends we have in the pits, not chasing Nascar dreams. Racing and the cost of it, along with the number of fans in the stands have really changed allot with all the entertainment choices people have these days, making it harder and more stressful to compete.”
His good natured view made it hard to come up with a disappointment in the past, but when I interviewed him, the night the ARCA ReMax series was also in town, he was bummed about the feature a week before when Regnerus got around him after a slip between turns one and two. “Had I been up on the wheel more I could have caught him, gotten to his outside and pinned him behind lapped traffic enough to pass ... that’s the one that got away ... but I won’t be ‘giving’ Justin (Regnerus) the championship.”
Later on that night I got a photo of the two watching the ARCA feature on the back stretch as friends and fans, so look for their smiles on our web site: michigancircletrack.com. You’ll have to come to the Berlin Raceway to see the clean racing and thrills they provide with their ongoing race rivalry.
