White Dog Racing has its Roots at UNOH

Posted on Monday, November 26, 2018

“It wasn’t just, ‘Do this because I said so’, it was ‘Do this because this is why it works’, or ‘This is why it worked for me’”.  That is what High Performance and Business Administration Graduate Craig Fedak had to say when asked what he enjoyed about his experience at the University of Northwestern Ohio.

The founder of White Dog Racing, originally from Denver, Colorado, came to UNOH at the age of 24.  He was looking for a school that would satisfy his parents academically, but also satisfy him by learning more than just how to wrench on cars, he wanted more than a traditional tech school. “It was really appealing to be able to go to a school that had a drag team and had a dirt racing team and was so involved in the Over-the-Wall club and Autocross.  They do what I want to do, and I wanted to be there with them … And in addition, there’s like seven drag strips within two hours of Lima, so that was a very big bonus,” said Fedak.

White Dog Racing started just as a group of friends doing modifications on Fedak’s own car. “I had a lot of people in our friend circle that offered their time and their help. We built a lot of cool parts that were issues on my personal vehicle that we just were tired of fighting. We were like, ‘We have the abilities. The instructors give us access to anything we need in the shop’, so we knew we had the ability and we all said ‘Let's build some stuff. Let's fix some things’.”

One of those friends was Chris Salm from Poland, New York. “I got into White Dog Racing because one of my friends had an Audi, and I was driving and Audi too, and that was basically what we all worked on. And I just showed up to his garage one day, just started wrenching for him, helping him out, and it took off into what it is today, a fabrication zone,” said Salm, a High Performance Motorsports and Alternate Fuels graduate.

Things with White Dog Racing took off after Fedak posted some of their work on the internet. The company started to get requests from people asking White Dog to do the same modifications to their car.  Fedak says he didn’t come to UNOH with the anticipation of starting his own company, but after receiving technical training in the College of Applied Technologies, and company fundamentals during his Business Administration classes, everything just fell into place.

According to Fedak, “The skills I learned at UNOH, plain and simple, are the reason that White Dog Racing was able to start the way it did and grow to what it has become today.”

Both Fedak and Salm said they use what they learned at UNOH almost every day.  They even have all of their old text books and notes at the shop to refer back to. “We break out our notes and our textbooks and go back and look through everything. The information that the teachers gave us, from personal experiences, you know, they weren't afraid to give us their secrets, which is something that's pretty uncommon in the racing community,” Fedak said. “Even the general education professors, although they're teaching us paperwork and stuff that we might not associate with welding or whatever, the skills they taught me about running the front end of a businesses and making sure that customers are happy, the inventory's there, the paychecks are there, and how to do all that efficiently, was invaluable.”

One of the first fabrications they built, and what really took things with White Dog Racing to the next level, according to Fedak, was the development of a custom bi-pipe.0 “It deleted the need for the stubborn rubber boot that liked to blow off all the time. We've sold over 175 of those now. We've sold them to France, Mexico, Germany, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and I believe we have one in Austria. And that all came from social media. When we built those, people saw them.  We decided to get them third-party independently flow tested. Our product ended up flowing better than almost everything on the market. Then things really took off and our international sales increased.  That's really what did it, was the independent flow testing, for us.”

Salm said being able to work at White Dog Racing has already fulfilled one of his dreams, “My experience with the shop has been 100% awesome. We've built everything we've ever dreamed of. When I came to UNOH, I was just trying to make cars go fast; I wanted to put turbo kits on things that don't usually have turbos on them, and that was just a dream. I had no clue that any of this would happen. But it's been a wild roller coaster ride so far and I've enjoyed every single second of it.”

Fedak agrees, “White Dog Racing is definitely a product of UNOH. First the friends that helped me start building stuff, to the skills and abilities to do it, to the welders that we bought from UNOH when they were exchanging welders out. It’s just everything.  All the skills that we learned in the shop and a lot of the equipment that we were able to purchase from teachers, and have instructors come over to the shop and help us with projects that were a little bit out of our comfort zone. All of those different aspects contributed to White Dog Racing being here. If I had stayed in Colorado, I would still probably be working at a Corvette shop and kind of upset that I wasn't going anywhere and trying to figure something else to do.”

A dream became a reality for these recent UNOH grads and we couldn’t be more proud of them.

For more information about the College of Applied Technologies at UNOH, visit www.unoh.edu

Category: Campus & Community, Applied Technologies

Keywords: White Dog Racing