So what do you do when you’ve grown up at the racetrack, watching your dad put his all into a top-flight naturally-aspirated racing program like the NMRA‘s now-extinct Hot Street class? Well, if you’re Tim Eichhorn’s son Tyler, you make your case to have Dad turn into a crew chief and help you build a car for the NMRA’s newest naturally-aspirated class, Coyote Stock. We’ve been bringing you Coyote Stock news all winter long, and Tyler is the latest racer in a long string of competitors to pony up to play in the sealed crate-engine class. The difference between Tyler and the vast majority of other competitors in Coyote Stock? Tyler had never, ever been down the track before last September.

Shortly after the car purchase, he went to the Fun Ford Weekend event at Palm Beach International Raceway – and proceeded to take home the win in Street Ford. “It was my first time down the track and I qualified number one, and won the class. I had the quickest reaction time of anyone in the class – it was really exciting,” Tyler says. 

Tyler’s day job is right next to Dad as one of the engine builders at MPR Race Engines, and he’s been soaking up information on how to run a car for years. When we caught up with him, he was in the process of working on the rearend of the car, while the chassis was out having a roll-cage put in by Ryan Lowther at Demon Motorsports in Crystal River, Florida. 

“We bought the car just down the road from our shop – less than a mile away. One of my friends called us to tell me about it, we saw it, loved it, and picked it up. The car was all bone-stock when we bought it,” says Tyler.

Since the car was all stock, nearly every item had to be pulled out or modified in some way to get it ready for Coyote Stock competition, and if Tyler’s anything like his dad, the car will be a first-class ride when completed. Tim’s machine was always one of the nicest on the whole NMRA tour and we’d expect to see the same with this new racer.

And the proud dad? It’ll be a change to see him behind the car as the crew chief rather than in the driver’s seat, but it’s also a role he’s looking forward to playing. “I’ll tell you, this is something I’ve never felt before. Seeing him do things here at the shop, seeing him do well at the track, it’s just awesome,” Tim says. “Coyote Stock just made sense. With Tyler as a new driver, learning how to do the clutch and chassis and drive the car and not have to worry about pulling the engine out after every race trying to get faster, that’s what appeals to me.”

The team already has sponsorship from UPR Products and G-Force Transmissions among others – a nice accomplishment for a racer that’s never been down the track at an NMRA event. It’s clear that those companies are hoping the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and from the results of Tyler’s short racing career, it looks like that’s exactly the case so far.

The plan is to be out with the car at the NMRA/NMCA All Star Nationals at Atlanta Dragway in just a few weeks, but the team has a lot of work to do to be ready and Tim doesn’t want him to have to work out the new-car bugs in front of a large crowd – driving a new combination is challenging enough. If that turns out to not be feasible, they’ll be in Maryland in May for the third stop on the NMRA’s 2014 tour. Welcome to the jungle, kid!