Unlike some of the louder, faster, or more vintage automobiles, the 2008 Nissan was not exactly turning heads last week at the speedway. Fuller wants to change that, in part by racing across the country next year. In the process, the fast-talking, fast-driving 29 yr old former Riverview High student is trying to position his growing Sarasota-based battery company, which he said supplies 20% of NASCAR's top teams, as a player in the exploding hybrid and electric vehicle market.
Hybrid vehicles rely on batteries to store energy and cut gasoline usage. Hybrids account for about 2.2% of the world automotive market right now, but that number is expected to reach 7% by 2015, according to consumer group J.D. Power and Associates. Breaking into a market dominated by big automotive companies is an ambitious goal for someone like Fuller, who has only been in the automotive business since 2002, but Fuller is nothing if not ambitious.
He left high school for college at age 15, majored in marketing at Manatee Community College, ran a bicycle assembly business and eventually decided to focus on cars. The Alabama-born race car driver has been putting the pedal to the floorboard since seeing the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb as a teenage car junkie.
"I decided right there that I was going to enter the race the next year," Fuller said. He has been racing on and off on various professional circuits ever since.
Using his contacts in the racing industry, Fuller started a company in 2002 that was dedicated to marketing and developing products that make race cars faster and more efficient. The company has achieved some modest success supplying products to the racing industry, growing to about $1 million in revenues and 10 employees thanks largely to one product: A lightweight, high-performance battery that Fuller worked with another company to develop and refine.
Fuller's new goal is to break into the non-racing automotive market, which is increasingly focused on battery technology as hybrid gas-electric vehicles gain popularity. Using his marketing savvy and the showmanship he learned in the racing world, Fuller hopes Nissan will respond to his efforts to make its hybrid go faster while maintaining superior fuel economy.
"If you look at the history of cars, one of the big ways to promote new technology is through racing," Fuller said. "Everyone wants to brag that their car is the fastest."
Convincing car buffs that a hybrid can burn rubber has not been easy, though. The speed freaks at the Desoto speedway respect loud engines that suck in gasoline and belch exhaust. Many are inherently skeptical of quiet, efficient hybrid-electric power.
"Everyone thinks these cars are slow and they won't get out of their own way, but that's just not true," said Fuller's friend, Bradenton resident Darren Wilson, who races a hybrid two-seat Honda Insight and claims to have pushed it up to 126 mph.
Fuller, Wilson and their hybrid-loving friends form their own group on the outskirts of the track, part nerds trying to break into the cool crowd, part rebels breaking from the pack. They swap theories about who killed the electric car, mostly blaming big car companies and the government. Pink Floyd's anti-authoritarian anthem "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" blares on the loudspeaker at the speedway, periodically drowned out by revving engines.
Fuller removes parts from the Altima to make it lighter and faster, as his friends serve as the pit crew. The back seats land in a pile on the grass with door panels and the spare tire. Lighter tires go on the car. The lighter the car, the faster the speed, climbing from 80 mph, to 85 and topping out at 93 mph under the spotlights on the track. Fuller collects baseline performance data to show Nissan, which gave him the car as a promotional effort. The transformation is a makeshift version of the modifications Fuller plans to make for the Altima's big test in April: Seven races in seven days, spread out by 6,000 miles, in the One Lap of America event, a successor of the famous coast-to-coast Cannonball Run race that was discontinued because of legal and safety concerns.
Fuller wants to win a few races in the hybrid and demonstrate that batteries can provide a lot of power, specifically his batteries. "If we're successful, who knows?" Fuller said. "This market feels like the turn of the century when the industry was first getting started and anything seemed possible."