One of the most familiar faces in motorsports is Wayne Jesel, whose roots reach back to the 1960s era Stock Eliminator battles of the Northeast in the YooHoo sedan delivery. With the recent announcement that older brother Danny had recently retired from active involvement to become Executive Chairman, Wayne was open to discussing changes in the well-known brand.
“For the last ten years, Danny’s been working on that Equal 8 engine. So while he is also was on hand to do whatever he needed to, he was already handing the baton off.” The Jesel Equal 8 engine is all-new, fully machined of billet, and was Danny’s imaginative effort to take the optimal features of many 90-degree V-8 engines and meld them into a single platform using an innovative equal-column valvetrain across all cylinders. Jason Line has been involved, and Wayne hopes to have a chance to run one of two finished prototypes in his Bonneville vehicle next year. He expects the engine to possibly end up in Comp Eliminator, too.
“Danny’s been at the valve train business for 42 years now, and he really wanted to get that done while he was still active in the company and doing everything. Now that the engine is done, he’s 81 years old, and he’s just going to kind of take it easy for a while. He’ll still remain available for whatever we need guidance-wise, but he really wanted to take it easy.”
The firm, located in the New Jersey city of Lakewood, continues to be a trendsetter in development, and Wayne himself noted that there is already a process in place when he himself decides to retire, with longtime management employee Rich Runne now taking both a controlling interest in the firm and the CEO position. Meanwhile, when asked about the state of the industry, Wayne noted that while business is strong, the firm is confronted by the same issues that many companies, automotive and otherwise, are dealing with in 2022.
“Everybody right now is maxed out. Everybody’s back-ordered, and where we lack is human capital. We need people to run the CNC machines and that type of thing. Our business has never been in better shape, but we are back-ordered just because of the amount of orders that we’re getting right now. I mean, we have machines, we have time, we have material. We just need more operators.
“We haven’t lost any of them,” he continued. “It’s just that the business has grown so rapidly in the last year and a half or so. Right now, we could do two shifts very easily if we had the manpower, but we’re challenged to have just one shift. Everybody needs people.”
