Tim and Krista Wilkerson’s oldest son, part-time racer Dan Wilkerson, recently was married. Their son Kevin, 23, is serving as a medic in training with the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio, Texas. Daughter Rachel is about to celebrate her 22nd birthday in October.
 
One might think the Wilkersons are experiencing that “empty-nest syndrome.”
 
But how could they be? They have plenty of “kids” to look after these days, with his Levi, Ray & Shoup Ford Mustang Funny Car as they look ahead to the National Hot Rod Association’s Countdown to the Championship.
 
That’s what Wilkerson calls his crew, four of whom either are new to the sport or had only one year’s experience at the start of this season. Among the team members are two sets of brothers –Nick and Dave Shaff, from Marion, N.Y., and Ryan and Travis Wirth, of Cordova, Ill. With him for a number of years have been the husband-wife team in Rich and Annette Schendel, of Janesville, Minn. And he has the north-south East Coasters Nick Casertano, of Old Bridge, N.J., and Brandon Burgess, of Mill Spring, N.C.
 
“I call them my kids, just because they’re half my age,” Wilkerson says. “I started in business when I was 21, and most everybody was older than me that I employed. Then it turned when I got to be about 30. Then everybody was younger than me. When I owned gas stations, I had 60-some people who worked for me at one time, and 85 or 90 percent of them were under the age of 20. We had full-serve gas stations — some of them were self-serve stations — but the mechanics were really the only people that were old. The rest of them were kids. That’s who you hired.”

Image courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

So Wilkerson, who’s just 52 himself, spends as much time teaching his young crew members life’s lessons as much as he does how to adjust valves or the clutch pack, set a magneto, mount a supercharger, or mix nitromethane.
 
“I try to preach to the kids, ‘Make me the bad guy. Make me the guy who makes this mistake.’ The guy dumping oil in the car is just as important as the guy putting air in the tires and the guy building the cylinder heads and the guy building motors. We try to make sure they all understand how important everybody’s job is, because it is,” he says.

Part of that mutual respect is the pact he makes with each of them.
 
“The deal I make with all of them is ‘I won’t fire you if you don’t quit.’ We live and die by that. ‘Don’t you quit on me. Don’t you give up.’ When I put it to them that way,” he says, “I think it gives them, first, a little security, and second, then it means we’re both serious.
 
“That’s the road I try to walk down with them, to try to make sure they all feel important — and to me they are. I couldn’t do this without ’em,” Wilkerson says. “We have that talk the first day: The No. 1 priority is to keep the driver and the crew alive. If everybody does his job correctly, when we turn that key on that thing, it won’t blow up in our faces.

 
“That’s our No. 1 priority, because this thing is one dangerous piece of junk. It really is. It’s a rolling bomb,” he says.
 
He tells them, “You’re going to do the job of keeping me alive. And I’m going to make sure that you learn your job properly to keep you alive. That’s kind of what we go through.”

 And despite the teaching process and the patience it requires while the crew collectively gets up to speed, Wilkerson says he enjoys the process.
 
“Would I like to have six or eight of the lifers who are out here to run my car? Maybe some days. But maybe some days not,” he says with a satisfied smile. “We do all right with it. My stuff ain’t up there, leaking all over the ground, and the blower ain’t falling off, and we run OK.”
 
Wilkerson is nothing if not modest, comfortable with himself, and armed with a sense of humor.
 
And he’s right. He’s running OK. He’s in eighth place in the Funny Car standings, 277 points off leader Matt Hagan’s pace as the Mello Yello Drag Racing Series heads to Brainerd, Minn. That event, the Aug. 15-18 Lucas Oil Nationals, and the Labor Day weekend classic U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis are all that remain on the so-called “regular-season” schedule before the six-race Countdown begins at Charlotte.
 
He has a chance to win outright the last event-winner berth in the $100,000-to-win Traxxas Nitro Shootout at Indianapolis. If he doesn’t record his first Brainerd International Raceway victory, he still could take the final spot by fan vote and lottery drawing.
 
So by all accounts, his “newborns” and “toddlers” have taken big steps toward bringing Wilkerson back to the level where he was in 2008, when he won a career-best six times and finished second to Cruz Pedregon for the series championship.
 
He said he doesn’t consider himself a father figure, really, but he definitely relishes the role of teacher, or mentor.

 
“I just try my best to try to make them understand the importance of the job, more than anything. You can’t really teach somebody to care. That’s what I try to get through to them. I’ve known that over the years, that you could pay somebody a lot of money to act like they care, but you can figure out pretty quick who really does and who doesn’t. And that’s kind of the way I look at it,” Wilkerson says. “I enjoy all the crew members out here.”
 
He has a policy that might make him a hero to some of his competitors. He won’t pirate crew members from other teams.

 
“I don’t like to hire them off of other teams, because I think they got bad habits and I don’t have the initiative or the time to correct them, because my team is so small and I wear too many hats. Financially, I can’t usually coax them away, anyway,” he says.

“My guys are not underpaid, by any means,” he quickly says. “I try to stick with what people get paid out here so they’re happy. But I tell every single one of them before we do this, ‘You’re never going to get paid enough so you can say, Boy, that’s the best living, by golly. For how hard you’re going to work, you’re going to be underpaid.’
 
“We have a running gag around here: People walk up and say, ‘Boy, I’d like to work here.’ We say, ‘We only work half days — 8 to 8.’ At the shop it’s only half-days, 8 to 8 . . . which is not true, but I don’t want any false pretenses,” Wilkerson says. “I don’t want them to come up to me and say, ‘That’s all I do is work!’ Unfortunately, this is a grueling job, and you have to have some passion for the job and the people you’re with. When you spend this much time together, it’s really hard.”
 
With siblings on the team, he says, “there’s some brotherly problems you run into. I tell them, ‘I bet your mother’s home, laughing, right now: I couldn’t believe you took one. I really can’t believe you took both of ’em!’ We have a good time with that. There’s both sides of it. I really never dreamed that I would do that, have brothers on the team, but it just kind of worked out that way.”
 
Some of what he teaches them has nothing to do with the Levi, Ray & Shoup Mustang.
 
Wilkerson says he tries to instill in them the notion that “the other crew members work just as hard as you do. That’s what I try to beat into their heads. Be happy for the other team when they win. You can be pissed off that we got beat, like I am — that’s fine. But if we run a fair-and-square race and they win, those guys worked just as hard as you did. I believe that’s 100-percent true. I’m not trying to be nice or mean.
 
“If I had won the championship that year, that was going to be part of my speech — that everybody out here deserves this spot . . . because they do,” he says. “Every crew member out here puts their heart and soul into these cars. When I see ’em jump on the starting line, even if it’s not my kids, I’m just as happy for ’em, because it’s really a lot of work.”

 
Naturally, though, he’d like to be the one celebrating and seeing his “kids” jumping up and down for joy late on a race-day afternoon. So his advice to the crew is this: “Make it your point to do your part of the car. Nothing else matters. Fix that part of the car, and when it all comes together, then the only guy that screws up is Tim. When Tim screws up, you’re never going to get your a– chewed out. And Tim’s pretty hard on himself. I still put it in perspective at the end of the day.”
 
And “the kids” have put everything into practice so far.