Scott Tidwell saw value in Collins long before NHRA Pro Mod became part of the conversation.
At first it was testing. Helping with cars. Making laps. Collins became the kind of driver experienced racers trust because he understood what a race car was trying to tell him even when the thing was doing something ugly.
Sometimes especially when it was doing something ugly.
“I started driving and testing some cars for Scott,” Collins said. “He actually bought one of my old Outlaw 10.5 cars from me, which was the red car that they ran in Pro 275 for a while. And I don’t know, I started just doing some driving for him, just testing really.”
That relationship eventually turned into Collins driving Tidwell’s blue Camaro during the radial racing boom, and the results came almost immediately.
“For whatever reason, it all worked,” Collins said. “The very first race, we didn’t even test before we got it going and run it up at the first race. And then went on to, I think we won every race but one that year in the Radial stuff.”
Even then, Collins still wasn’t sitting around believing NHRA Pro Mod was waiting on him.
He became the dependable racer around the shop. The guy teams trusted to shake down cars and make difficult runs. Collins laughed recalling one stretch where he drove four different cars in the same day.
“I think the most passes I made, I think I made 20 laps in one day,” Collins said. “I drove David Mallory’s car and I drove Jose’s car and I drove two of Scott’s cars all the same day.”
Then came the RJ Race Cars machine Collins jokingly called a “military car.”
“I told them it was a military car if it would go left, right, left,” Collins said. “And they ended up finding what was wrong with it. But for whatever reason, call it ignorance or stupidity or whatever, I could poke it down through there.”
That’s the kind of thing veteran racers notice.
Anybody can drive the clean ones.
The valuable drivers are usually the ones willing to wrestle the difficult cars without tearing equipment up in the process. Tidwell kept putting Collins in race cars because Collins kept proving he belonged there.
“Scott’s allowed me to do things that I thought I’d never do in drag racing,” Collins said. “I really got to give some props to him for that.”
That line carried weight coming from Collins because by his own admission, there was a point where he stopped believing any of this was realistically coming together.