Another go round

Once upon a time, Brandon Feagan was into team sports like little league baseball but that was before he got his first taste of racing.

“It’s a sport where it’s just you,” he said. “You control what happens.”

The 16-year-old Richardsville resident spends most of his free time perched on a dirt bike or four-wheeler flying around the motor-cross track near his home and for the last few years he has been traveling up and down the East coast competing in Soap Box Derby races.

“I used to like team sports,” Feagan said. “But in racing, if you screw up, it’s your fault and if you win, it’s your success.”

In the near future, he is even planning to take his 1993 Mustang GT to South Boston to compete in the Camaro-Mustang challenge, where the cars fly down straight-aways in excess of 140 mph.

“Everyone in the family has a Mustang and my cousins and dad have raced before,” Feagan said. “I haven’t gotten to do it yet but I hear it’s quite invigorating.”

Drag racing in a muscle car may be a bit of a different story, but Feagan hasn’t had much trouble finding success on the soap box circuit.

After competing in rally races in Washington, D.C., Maryland, West Virginia and North Carolina last year, he made the trek to Akron, Ohio, where he became the first driver from Culpeper to claim a world championship.

“That was wonderful,” he said. “Until last year, we (Culpeper) had never even had anyone place in Akron. It was amazing to be the first from Culpeper and the second from Virginia to win it.”

Feagan will make a couple trips down Blue Ridge Avenue in today’s derby, but he won’t really be competing because he has already run enough rally races this season to earn his third trip to Akron, where he’ll be competing in the Super Stock Division.

“I’m sticking with the rally system because it takes a lot of money to enter all those races,” Feagan said. “And once you win a local race and lose all those points, you can’t get them back.”

The rising junior at Eastern View will, however, climb back into the car that carried him to a world title and make a victory run down the hill. He’ll also make a couple of runs in a Super Stock car but they will just be for fun.

“It’s just a way to say thank you for an awesome year,” Race Director Frankie Gilmore said. “He (Feagan) will always be a world champion. That’s a title no one can take from him.”

Making it to Akron

After winning the masters division at Culpeper’s derby in 2007 to earn a trip to the world championships, he decided to join the masters rally circuit last year and just made the cut before going on to win the whole thing.

Rally drivers need 180 points to make the field in Akron. Drivers get points for each race they enter and more points for their top four finishes of the season. Feagan’s best finishes only earned him 155 points, but he entered enough races to end up with 185.

“Rallying gives you so much racing knowledge,” he said. “There are no slackers on the rally circuit. You have to work hard because most of the drivers have already been to Akron and anyone that makes it there practices a lot.”

Once in Akron, Feagan and the other qualifiers from Culpeper were treated to a week full of events, including a police escort and a parade through the city.

“There were at least 600 cars up there last year and there were drivers from Canada, Japan, Germany and all over the place,” Feagan said. “You do get kind of worried about how big it is, but they’re used to it up there and the races are still fun.”

Feagan said there were about 60 cars in the masters division in Akron last year for the world championship and his big win came down to a photo finish.

“It was so close they had to break out the high-speed cameras to figure out who won,” he said. “We didn’t really know what was going on. I thought I didn’t win at first and I actually congratulated the girl I thought had won before they announced my name.”

That wasn’t the last time he would hear his name. A few months later, Feagan was honored with a resolution from Sen. Edd Houck and even got to sit in on one of the Virginia Senate’s meetings.

“It was pretty nerve-wracking to stand there with Sen. Houck in front of the whole Senate,” he said. “But it was a really great experience. The Soap Box Derby has given me so much that I just want to give a little back.”

And so he has. For the last couple years, Feagan has been involved in just about every facet of Culpeper’s derby. He has been a member of the junior committee, helped out with driving clinics and been involved with this year’s impound and inspection process.

“He has been a mentor to the younger kids and a teacher to the drivers and pit crews,” Gilmore said of Feagan. “He has all kinds of racing knowledge and he has no problem passing some of that knowledge on.”

With so much success, Feagan has to be feeling pretty confident about his chances of repeating as world champion this year, but he knows it’s going to be anything but easy.

“It’s going to take a lot,” he said. “Only a handful of people have won more than once and there are a lot of good drivers up there who have been racing a lot longer than I have.”