In 1986 Jon Nelson founded Nelson & Nelson Racing Products with his brother Eric, and his father Keith (Pops). With his family working by his side, Jon created some of the most iconic vehicles ever to race off-road.
One of Nelson’s trucks, the ‘Hay Hauler’, built in 1987 for Jim Venable, took the off-road world by storm, changing Class 8 and the sport’s perception of just what an off-road truck was capable of. With Robby Gordon behind the wheel, the Hay Hauler had great success in Class 8, winning the championship in 1988. Jon also built two new trucks for the 1988 season, one for Frank ‘Scoop’ Vessels and the other for Steve McEachern. McEachern would win the first time out for these trucks at the Parker 400. A Class 8 championship followed in 1989 for Vessels, along with the Heavy Metal Championship and a Toyota True Grit Award. Jon Nelson knew how to build championship winning trucks.
Chevrolet entrusted Nelson & Nelson to oversee their Class 8 and short course programs, which included stadium trucks raced in the Mickey Thompson series by drivers that included Jimmie Johnson, who transitioned from off-road to a highly successful NASCAR career.
Jimmie Johnson said, “Simply put, without Jon Nelson, I may not have become a 7-time NASCAR Cup Series Champion. Jon taught me valuable lessons about being cautious, patient, and how to better communicate with my fellow racers, which paid so many dividends at NASCAR’s highest level. His lessons helped me succeed. Jon’s leadership in the off-road community deserves to be recognized and I will forever treasure what Jon has meant to me, my family, and my career.”
High praise for Jon Nelson, who started his career in the late 1970s working for top off-road racer Walker Evans. In 1982, Larry Minor and Parnelli Jones hired Walker Evans Racing to build them a Class 8 truck. The truck was designed by Walker Evans, Larry Minor, and Randy Anderson, with Jon Nelson as one of the lead fabricators. After the truck was built, Jon stayed with the truck and moved from Walker Evans Racing into the role of team manager for the Miller American team. Steve Kelley joined the team as driver in late 1984 and won the first race he entered, the HDRA Frontier 250. He won the opening race of the 1985 season at Parker and went on to win the Class 8 Championship as well as the Heavy Metal Championship that year.
While with the Miller American Team, Jon accepted the challenge to build an off-road sedan to promote Larry Minor’s drag racing sponsor, Oldsmobile. Billed as “Not your grandfather’s Oldsmobile,” Jon and his team of fabricators built a Class 6 car based on an Oldsmobile Cutlass, using “somewhat” the same suspension as a Class 8 on a shorter wheelbase.
Hall of Famer Larry Ragland raced a Nelson truck named “Butch” and started his streak of five overall Baja 1000 wins in 1991, moving up to a Jon Nelson build considered to be one of the first Trophy Trucks: “Arnold” had a mid-engine connected to a “V” drive, and in the 1990s, with Larry Ragland behind the wheel, the Jon Nelson engineered truck won four SCORE Baja 1000s in five years, setting the fastest overall time ever recorded in an off-road race at the time.
In the early 2000s, the newly emerging sport of rock crawling caught Jon’s eye, and once again the sport of off-road would be forever changed by Jon Nelson, when he debuted his rock crawling rig, “Tiny”. Deemed radical at the time, the little VW powered rear engine car dubbed the “moon buggy” drew stares and jeers when it rolled off the trailer, but the doubters were quickly silenced when Tiny won a record setting 23 competitions, three series’ championships, and the Supercrawl World Championship.
“We knew about rock crawling,” said Jon’s rock crawling team member Larry McRae, “Jon Nelson taught us how to win. He told us he’d never built a car that didn’t win. Every event he expected to win. In his mind, second place was the first loser. He made us practice. No one else was doing that. He put us in team uniforms, no one else was doing that. And our team was the first to have headset communication between the driver and spotter. The car changed every time we got in it. Jon kept making it better and better. Jon was so far ahead of what we were used to in our sport.”
Jon retired from the racing world, but it wasn’t long before the sport called him back this time as crew chief for Greg Adler’s short course team in the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series in 2014.
