Rick Schwallie was just launching his career with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series when he had an interaction with Forrest Lucas that made him immediately understand the essence of the business entrepreneur.

That moment came in early 2005 when Schwallie sat down in Lucas’s office in Corydon, Ind., soon after Lucas Oil Products had purchased Spencer Wilson’s NARA DirtCar Series. Lucas was overseeing the circuit’s expansion to a national tour with a skeleton crew of Wilson as director, Schwallie as event coordinator and James Essex as announcer.

“The first thing he asked me is, ‘What do you guys need?’ ” Schwallie said. “I told him we needed a trailer, and then he showed me a trailer, a T&E trailer that was (Forrest’s wife) Charlotte Lucas’s drag (race car) trailer and we used up until we bought this Featherlite, and he said, ‘I got this trailer for you. What do you need from here?’

“And I said, ‘Well, we need a set of scales, we need a golf cart probably to get some people moving around, and then we probably need a four-wheeler to be able to push cars.’ He said, ‘OK, well, give me give me a week to work on that.’ And then I come back the next week and he had it all. He says, ‘I got everything ready. Is this what you're looking for?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’

Then he says, ‘Anything else?’ And I said, ‘Well, we could build a backdrop frame.’ And he says, ‘OK, I got some guys in a fab shop.’ We went right over and he told them what we were looking for with a 10-foot by 20-foot frame with Velcro on it, and his guys welded this all up for us while we were there — and it’s still the frame that we use in victory lane today.

“He immediately did what he could to provide for us, almost like a parent would provide for their kid,” he continued. “And I was a kid at the time. You know, I'm 46 now, so when I started I was 25, 26, and he just provided anything we ever asked for.”

Lucas’s true caring for his employees, as well as the Dirt Late Model series bearing his company’s name, was front and center on Schwallie’s mind last Saturday during the tour’s Rumble by the River finale at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway. Now the Lucas Oil Series director some two decades after his initial meeting with Lucas, Schwallie spent the race day reeling from the news that Lucas had died that morning at the age of 83.

“Today was tough,” Schwallie said while sitting in a sideway doorway of the Lucas Oil Series operations trailer as his officials packed following Port Royal’s $50,000-to-win feature captured by Ricky Thornton Jr. “I mean, even though we knew it was coming for probably a while, it don’t make it any easier when it actually came.”

Schwallie learned of Lucas’s passing early Saturday afternoon. The information was not announced at the track or on the FloRacing stream until after the heat races were completed; the FloRacing production crew had a photo montage of Lucas ready to run once Schwallie gave the go-ahead to acknowledge his death after seeing a Lucas Oil Products statement on social media during the evening’s first heat. 

“I feel like out of respect to the family, it was their news to say when they wanted to say it and how they said it,” Schwallie said. “I started to see a few things said on social media, but we weren’t going to say nothing in the broadcast. We weren’t going to do nothing until Lucas Oil Products made a statement. I feel like that’s the only respectful thing.”

Schwallie found it difficult to negotiate his way through the racing program with Lucas’s passing hanging over the action.

“I didn’t think I’d be emotional about it today, but I certainly have been,” Schwallie said. “I’ve talked to (former Lucas Oil Series regular) Earl Pearson (Jr.), I know he has been. He answered the phone, but yeah, he said, ‘I’m going to have to let you go. I can’t do it yet.’

“Earl had a longer relationship with him (including Lucas Oil Products sponsorship for 20 years). Earl seen him in May — when we went to Circle City (Speedway in Indianapolis), Earl went and visited him. He had a friendship with Forrest that I would admire. I never had that close of a friendship with him, but just yet, as much as I didn’t have the friendship Earl had, at the same time, I did have interactions, I did talk to him, and I did think the man provided for us like no other person has done in the sport.”

The personal touch Lucas had always impressed Schwallie. He was a fabulously wealthy man from his business success but maintained his down-home personality, one that came from his blue-collar upbringing as a trucker.

“I just remember times, like when we were in meetings, we would be in Corona, Calif., at the other (Lucas Oil) plant and we’d have an annual meeting with everybody there,” Schwallie said. “He would go on about … he had a couple sticklers. He didn’t like FedEx shipping — he felt like if you over-nighted something, you messed up along the way. But his main thing that he always said was, ‘It don’t cost us nothing to be nice.’ And we still live that in our veins every day — it don’t cost nothing to be nice. Kill people with kindness. And that was him, man. That was him, every time.

“I can remember when our daughter (Addison) was born (February 2011), and mom and dad, Ashley and I, are on the road (working with the series), and how are we going to figure this out? You know, this is our job, but yeah, we’re in the life on the road. And Forrest’s like, ‘Whatever it takes. You take your kid on the road with you, that’s fine, you know? And whatever you got to do to take care of the kid is fine, too.’ Like, he was very, very accommodating.

“And Lucas Oil, from top to bottom, has always been great — the benefits package is out of sight, it’s one of the best companies you could ever work for,” he added. “Really, in 21 years of time, I could have moved on and done something else. There was times in my life that I thought I was ready to move on to do something else, but I remained loyal to these people because they have been nothing but amazing to me and my wife this whole time. And that all starts at the top with Forrest.”

Schwallie emphasized the impact Lucas and his company, a modest start-up effort that became a global brand, had on racing.

“I mean, beyond us personally, they have provided and nurtured grassroots racing for many years,” Schwallie said. “It’s no secret they shut down an off-road series and a drag boat series, and they got out of the tractor-pulling league, but the tractor pulling league lived on. Those things happened, yes, but yet, where would any of those entities have been had it not been for the years Forrest stepped in? He kept them going.

“And just, man, our series alone, the amount of investment Lucas Oil has made in 21 years is unbelievable. It’s never been a real profitable thing for them. It’s always been about marketing, and it’s always been about letting the sport live on.

“There was philosophies that were implemented very early that Forrest was a big believer in. One of them was the souvenir program. We’ve printed a souvenir program every year. They cost us $20,000 to print them and we don’t charge anything for ‘em, we hand ‘em out. That was always his thing — hand them out. Let’s knock them dead with volume. Let’s do good for our advertisers, and let’s hand them out. 

“And that was Forrest to the core,” he continued. “Just things like that … and our sanction fee, it has always been lower than any of our competitors, and it still is, and it’s always because we needed our racetracks to remain healthy. In a lot of ways with our racetracks, our race was a bailout program for their year, but we needed that so that we could routinely, year after year, have somewhere to race. We needed them to be healthy, you know? And Forrest understood that.”

Lucas set the standard for how his company is run.

“Even today, even though Forrest hasn’t been at the at the head realm of things in the last four or five years, and Morgan (Lucas’s son) and the family have now taken over it all, they’re the same way, though,” Schwallie said. “They’ve provided for us. They’ve allowed us to raise the points funds and do things along the way that just continue his legacy, really, that we’re still right here, right now, living the legacy of Forrest Lucas and the way he would have done it.”

While Schwallie noted that, in “the early days” of the Lucas Oil Series, Lucas was often seen at races and “won and lost with us,” his appearances lessened in recent years. He still attended the annual awards banquet and would typically show up at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo., the track Lucas purchased and turned into a dirt-track showplace, but his age and health largely kept him away. The last time he attended a series event was last year’s Show-Me 100 at Wheatland where he watched the afternoon pit-crew competition in the infield and participated in pre-race ceremonies.

According to Schwallie, Lucas relished every minute of his racetrack visits.

“There’s some of those photos where he’s got a microphone up to his mouth and he’s got that smile on his face, and it’s like I can hear it right now what he would say,” Schwallie said. “You know, he loved to egg on a crowd when the microphone was in front of him. He was great for that.”

Lucas knew how important motorsports was to his company as well.

“The whole starting point of Lucas Oil Products was because he was a very blue-collar man that was a trucker and ended up developing products for his trucking fleet to make them last longer, because all of his trucks had a million-plus miles on them,” Schwallie said. “And he started selling oil products and having countertop displays, like you’d be at the AutoZone or somewhere like that, and they had the little gear-oil demonstrator there and you could see the competitor and you see the Lucas Oil product added to it. 

“His idea was people love racing. He said, ‘I got to put a race car on that.’ And (his advertising and products) had race cars on it, and that’s where, yeah, the whole marketing technique of Lucas Oil was grassroots racing. He was a big, big supporter of that. He was a big supporter of NHRA, big supporter of, obviously Morgan’s drag racing career.

“He was just a pioneer for the sport of auto racing, especially at a grassroots level,” he added. “I don’t know how anybody could do any more than what Forrest Lucas has done for motorsports. It’s amazing, really.”

Schwallie made sure all the racers in Saturday’s feature field at Port Royal realized Lucas’s imprint on their careers.

“Today was just a struggle, really, to have all my thoughts in it,” Schwallie said. “But I jotted a few cliff notes down on the back of a lineup sheet for the feature, just so when we got ready to go four-wide, I came on the (one-way) radio and told (the drivers) what was going on and what had happened today, and that ultimately we’re here racing today because of Forrest … we’re all gathered here today because of him. And because of everything he did over the years, it’s still set up and left in place for us to go out and do what we have to do.”