Hord wasn’ t making the leap alone. His son, Ricky, and daughter-in-law, Chelsea, both engineers by training, quickly became part of the long-term vision for the company. While Rick focused on guiding the transition and setting the direction, Ricky and Chelsea would ultimately relocate to Missouri to help lead the day-to-day operation and carry that vision forward.
By education, Hord is an aerospace engineer. He walked away from that career a long time ago, but not the discipline that came with it.“ It gives me some technical prowess,” he says. For 44 years, he’ s been in manufacturing across a remarkable spread of industries – defense contracting, medical devices, consumer electronics, and today, a marine-products company with products distributed all over the world.“ What all of that experience really gives you is perspective. Whether it’ s a race car or something completely different, you’ re still looking for better ways to design it, build it, and make it perform.”
Hord’ s racing résumé runs just as deep. He started in 1980 at the local level in Orlando, began running NHRA Division 2 competition in 1983, and has been a card-carrying NHRA member for 43 years. Much of his early racing was spent in Competition Eliminator alongside his father, Dick – the self-described“ Rick and Dick Show” – running traditional Altereds and then the blown-gas AA / Altereds and BB / Altereds his dad loved. There was time away to raise kids and a return in the 2000s before
Hord pivoted to Pro Mod in 2014.
Hord’ s introduction to Bickel came the way it does for a lot of racers: he got tired of being close but never quite there. Hord was competing in PDRA Pro Boost and local eighth-mile Pro Mod events with lackluster results despite putting in the time and effort to be competitive.
“ Every time it took a little bit quicker to get in, we got a little bit quicker, but really were not, what I would call competitive, until I made the decision to go buy a Jerry Bickel race car in 2015,” says Hord, who vividly remembers that first trip to Moscow Mills.“ It was like,‘ Wow, this is a real race car shop.’ He had all these people; he had all these things. Every place I had been prior, they took forever and they re-
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