Some years ago, Mike Salinas and his father, Mike Sr.,  rode in his Peterbilt truck to Famoso Raceway for a California Hot Rod Reunion event in Bakersfield, Ca. The conversation was fun and lively, and, at times, entertaining. They were still father and son, but this time as adults.
 
“It’s more of a love/hate relationship as you’re growing up,” Salinas admitted. “I started companies and I knew that they were because of him.”
 
Mike Sr. was tough on him and his siblings. The stern lessons far outweighed the conversations of praise. It didn’t mean he wasn’t proud. He didn’t share his feelings of praise much.  

“He never let me know that I was good at stuff and I never let him know that I was good at stuff,” Salinas said. “We were going to the hot rod reunion in my Peterbilt. It was all done up, nice car, nice trailers. We talked. We talked and went to the races. He loved the races, so he’d come with me. 
 
“We were talking on the way to the races and we were laughing about how hard he was and how tough he was. It was silly because he goes, ‘You were a hard head -- you bucked all the way. But that’s why you’re where you’re at. It’s funny that I look at your children, and you’re pretty hard on them.”
 
Salinas might have been tough, but nothing like his father was on him. 
 
“He was just old-fashioned,” Salinas explained. “He did the best he could. He was all business. It’s not that he was hard. We didn’t know. We didn’t know that that was wrong. We just knew that that’s just the way he wanted it. He wanted to bring you to a perfection that most people can’t comprehend. He was a military man.”
 
If you were a Salinas kid, you did a childhood in the military, even if you really weren’t in the military.
 
“We had a dirt driveway and we would use the giant push broom to sweep it,” Salinas explained. “If the lines were crooked, he would make you do it again. The driveway was long and he wanted those lines, the dirt lines, straight. All the little rocks because we couldn’t afford concrete at the time, all the little rocks on the side, you had to line them up. He wanted everything perfect all the time.”
 
The importance of perfection was instilled in Salinas early. It’s a trademark of his life today.
 
“It’s just part of who we became,” Salinas said. “A lot of people didn’t do business that way. We never even noticed; we just figured that they weren’t disciplined. He had a discipline in him that we didn’t do things like other kids our age.
 
 ” I had my first birthday party at 30 because we were all business,” Salinas admitted. “You didn’t have emotions, you didn’t have feelings, and you didn’t have all this stuff. You took care of business. You worked.”

 
Salinas developed an entrepreneurial spirit early in life as a means of survival. He was a young dealer of used Schwinn bicycle parts. When he was nine years old, there was a Schwinn bicycle shop that had what he estimated to be at least 3,000 used bicycles in their inventory they’d refurbish and sell.
 
 Salinas, who lived two miles from the shop, brokered a deal where he took delivery of the old parts and bicycles they didn’t want to invest time and resources into. He basically became an asset because, all of a sudden, they didn’t have to take off the old stuff.
 
“Before my dad came in with all the stuff to pick up all the scrap metal, I went and cherry-picked all the bicycles that I wanted, cleaned out our basement at our house, and I started a bicycle wrecking yard,” Salinas explained. “I started selling bicycle parts to all the kids in the neighborhood. I was hustling. I was very organized and this was at nine years old. 
 
 “I’m walking around with anywhere from $20 to a hundred bucks in my pocket at nine years old. In our household, you worked and if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t obey the rules and you broke the rules, you weren’t allowed in the house, so you followed the rules. If you weren’t home at dinner time when there was dinner, you didn’t eat.”
 
Growing up Salinas was a tough way of life. It was also the best way because it taught him how to be a survivor.
 
“There were little kids in the neighborhood that had new bicycles and nice clothes and stuff like that,” Salinas said. “We shopped at the Goodwills and the second-hand stores. There were kids that had nice stuff. He told me, ‘The kids you envy today will envy you forever.” 
 
 “I understand that now because the kids that I went to school with and the kids at high school, 99% of them aren’t in the position we are because of that old-fashioned method of doing business. He taught us a lot and it wasn’t work after a while. It was fun. It became a game.”
 
Money is the last thing that motivates Salinas. The only thing that motivates him about money is working hard enough to earn it. In the big picture, earning his first million dollars before he was old enough to consume alcohol legally was nothing magnificent to him. Besides, alcohol or drugs never had a place in his life anyway.
 
“Called my wife and she said, ‘Yeah, we made our first million,” Salinas recalled. “I asked her, ‘How do you feel?” 
 
 “Feel the same,” she said.” 

“Okay, let’s go for the next one, the next one, the next one. Doesn’t matter. It’s not something that we thought it would make a big difference. When you think of it like this, say you buy a new Ferrari. You buy it, you’re driving it around, and you’re all excited because you achieved a goal. As soon as the new car smell wears off, it could be a Toyota, or it could be a Volkswagen or a Chevy, or a Ford. It’s still a thing from point A to point B. It doesn’t matter.

 “It doesn’t matter what you drive, what you wear, who you are. It’s who you are as a person, everything. None of that stuff means anything. We live where all the wealthy people are. It ruins lives. We’ve stayed grounded, very much grounded. You can find me driving a Ford pickup truck with rubber floor mats, the same as my company people. I don’t have any things like that. That’s my day-to-day vehicle. I have old cars and hot rods and stuff, and that’s it. Just stay grounded, stay grounded.”
 
Salinas admits there was a time when he resented his father’s methods, but as he grew older and wiser, one-hundred percent bought into it all.

“He was the toughest, hardest guy I ever met,” Salinas said. “Then I started to watch how we were doing things different than other people. I just paid attention to him because he talked to me a lot about the future, the future, the future. He was a tough son of a gun. I think he could have achieved the same goal just explaining the whole thing to me. But, when you think about it, that year, those people in those times, they didn’t explain things very well. They just say, “This is why we’re doing it,” and there are no questions to be asked.”
 
Even when it came to the family needing to be successful at the local flea market just to eat, Salinas didn’t think he just did. It was a hard lesson in survival.
 
“We would do our regular job before school and after school,” Salinas said. “Then we would come in on Friday night, about 11:00 AM. We’d finish it at 9:00 PM. Then about 11:00, we’d be packing up the stuff for the weekend flea market. We would take our stuff, the old used car parts, and go sell them at the flea market. We would sleep overnight. We would sleep overnight in the parking lot to be the first ones to get the best three spots so that when people walked in, they could see our stuff.
 
“We were selling car parts, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. What my dad had, this discipline, whatever we sold that weekend, is how much food we had for the following week. In winter months, when we didn’t sell good over there, we didn’t have very much good food at all or no food. He taught you some really good lessons. That was his way of teaching you lessons that you work, do a good job, and you’ll do good. But I went to bed hungry a lot in life.”
 
Salinas’ dad was a war veteran, an experience he said changed his father for life.
 
“He was a different person,” Salinas said. “He was so focused on everything and there was no error for mistakes. You toed the line, or you got a whooping. You didn’t question. You followed the rules. He treated us like we were the Army. It was just all business. It took me a lot of years to learn how to be with people and just hang out and just be social because two years ago was the first time I was on a lake in a boat. Well, I was there to go look at buying a lake house. 

“I told my wife, ‘This is kind of cool. This is what people get to go do. Huh? Wow.” 

“But I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I don’t know sports, so what am I going to do on a boat? What am I going to do? Watching TV, it’s a waste of time. What am I going to do with all this stuff? My time, still to this day, when I don’t have nothing to do, I go to work. I don’t know anything else.”

 
It all came full circle for Salinas in 2019 when he won on Father’s Day at the NHRA Thunder Valley Nationals and honored his father.
 
In a tearful tribute to Mike Sr., the Top Fuel winner let his emotions spill out about his mentor in life and in racing, who was struggling with dementia at the time.

“My sister was telling me that he thinks he’s still racing, and he wants to know why the TV is mentioning his name because his name is exactly the same. My sister tells him, ‘That’s your son.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, so I still race.’ It’s really cool that he’s still happy, still doing good. And I’m happy to have him as a father.”

Mike Sr. passed away a year after his son’s milestone Father’s Day Top Fuel victory.

With every passing Father’s Day, Salinas admits he counts his blessings for those life’s lessons regardless of how tough they might have been at the time.

Salinas spent much of time in the days before Father’s Day weekend loading trucks along with his team, sometimes putting in 20-hour days. But for a brief moment, he took time for a phone call which sent him down memory lane.

“You look at all this stuff here, and it is just stuff,” Salinas said. “Money is money, and at the end of the day, it really doesn’t mean a thing. It’s the lessons you learned in life that last forever.”

And for Salinas, he’ll be the first to tell you he had the best teacher when it came to life lessons.