ow there’s an understatement. Like most ultimate success stories, though, today’s overwhelming acceptance of Rinehart exhaust systems into the Harley-Davidson aftermarket, and their big-power performance, was a long time coming. A couple of decades, to be precise. Those winning pipes, the industry’s first true step-header performance exhausts, come from the hands of Gerald Rinehart. While Rinehart is a name new to the two-wheeled world that isn’t the case elsewhere. Gerald Rinehart was—and remains today—a behind-the-scenes fixture in the high-stakes world of NASCAR.
     At one point during the late-1990s Rinehart Racing supplied full exhaust systems to “probably 70 percent of the Cup teams,” Gerald Rinehart says. The client list included Roush Racing, Richard Childress Racing, Morgan-McClure, Rich Gilmore who is now V.P of Operations at Dale Earnhardt Inc., Robert Yates Racing, the Wood Brothers, and plenty more. And word of mouth alone didn’t sell those racing exhausts; every season for the past 15 years Gerald has had to prove himself like it was the first time.
      “I have to come in with more horsepower and more torque every time,” he explains. “I have to prove it, too.” Only after engine dyno tests, chassis dyno tests and a day at the track all prove conclusive will a team place an order. “That’s where my saying of ‘Put up or shut up’ comes from,” says Rinehart. He’s carried that motto into the Harley aftermarket. “I don’t just say I’ll deliver performance, I prove it.” Witness those four AHDRA Class Championships last year.
      All of this began simply enough. Twenty years ago Gerald Rinehart was an average guy with an above-average dream. In the 1980s, working as a construction welder, he was “a huge NASCAR fan.” Living in North Carolina he was right in the thick of things, too. He’d hang around the race shops whenever he could. In 1989 he joined in. “Dave Marcus and Ray Zaruba, Dave’s engine builder at that time, had borrowed some collectors and they worked really well, but no one knew who had built them or where they could get some more. They asked if I could duplicate them, or at least come up with something similar. So I did.
      “I literally started on a wooden worktable using a borrowed bench vice and a borrowed Mig welder,” Rinehart laughs. His collector performed to everyone’s expectations. Soon other teams were asking for similar Rinehart collectors and an after-hours business was born. One day Banjo Matthews, a legend in the world of NASCAR called, asking for not only a collector, but wondering why Rinehart had limited himself. “He asked why I wasn’t building the entire header system. He was the one who encouraged me to build full systems. All I had to learn was how to make power!” A year-and-a-half later, after carefully studying what everyone else was doing and putting his own twist to it, he did.
     Buoyed by that success Gerald Rinehart quit his day job and began building NASCAR headers full-time in his basement. He had a solid customer base, too. Not only Banjo Matthews and Dave Marcus had signed on, but so had Michael Waltrip, Leo Jackson with the Skoal Bandit car, and Richard Jackson with the No. 1 Copenhagen car. Once he’d designed and proven his exhausts, however, he had to manufacture them as fast as humanly possible. “The length of time before something new in NASCAR gets copied by the competition is between one week and one month,” Rinehart explains. “I’ve had parts copied inside of five days.” With six guys now helping Rinehart Racing would complete two full sets of racing exhausts a day, every piece hand-fabricated. The number of systems required by a NASCAR team is staggering. Different exhaust designs are needed for different car-setups, and there are plenty of setups. A Super Speedway restrictor-plate car, for example, a car that will race only at Daytona and Talladega, has one set of requirements. An open-motor short-track car has another, and there are road-race cars and mile-track cars, and that’s just one team. “An average year for Roush Racing,” Rinehart says, “would be 45 sets for four teams, each getting 10 to 12 full systems to work with.” You do the math.
      Gerald Rinehart says he’s never been afforded the luxury of sitting back and enjoying even a little bit of all this success. “I’ve always had to prove myself,” he says. “Over and over again.” He never stops thinking about how to do it, either. One of the best compliments he’s ever received, he feels, came from Keith Simmons, at the time engine builder for the No. 40, 41 and 42 NASCAR teams. “Gerald,” he said, “you have to be the most persevering person I’ve ever met. You never give up.”
      By the late ‘90s Gerald Rinehart saw the writing on the wall. Top NASCAR teams had started bringing the chassis-building in-house, doing more and more of the car and accessory manufacturing themselves. Those in-house fabricators could build exhaust systems, too. Pretty soon, Rinehart realized, independent contractors like himself would be no more. “So what I did,” he says, “is align myself with some of those bigger teams. I’d do the R&D and prototyping for them. I took on a role as the exhaust consultant to NASCAR itself, as well.”
      That switch from NASCAR manufacturer to NASCAR consultant came just about the time Harley-Davidson dealer and famed race-tuner Don Tilley called asking for that first set of pipes for a Harley. Shortly after followed a fateful meeting with the folks at Drag Specialties to distribute the motorcycle pipes and then joining forces with Denis Manning at BUB to build them.
     “I never in my wildest dreams thought it would get so big so fast,” Rinehart says. He also hints that what we’ve seen so far is just a beginning, kind of like that first collector built for Dave Marcus. “We’ve just started with motorcycles,” Rinehart says. “We’ve just scratched the surface. There’s lots more power available.” You can bet Gerald Rinehart will prove it, too. “Put up, or shut up,” remember?
 

Gerald Rinehart and a few of his creations. The number of full systems each NASCAR team requires is staggering, and each system is just a little different.

agging along with Gerald Rinehart as he makes the NASCAR rounds is mind-boggling. Seen from the inside, NASCAR is bigger and more serious than you’ve ever imagined. Gerald Rinehart is welcomed everywhere, too, as well he should be. It’s those Rinehart Racing exhaust designs, after all, that are a big part of any team’s success, and it’s been that way for years.

Charlotte, North Carolina is the center of the NASCAR world.

At press time Kurt Busch and the No. 97 Roush Racing team equipped with Rinehart’s exhaust system was leading the 2004 Nextel Chase To The Championship.

Roush Racing, a NASCAR giant, is just one of Rinehart Racing’s clients. The No. 17 and No. 97 teams are housed inside this building.

Rinehart is a valued NASCAR consultant, too, busy developing exhaust technology for “the race car of the future.” He is seen here at the NASCAR tech center in Charlotte with Gary Nelson, the Managing Director of Competition for NASCAR.