Longhorn Chassis co-owner Steve Arpin revealed the future of the Longhorn Factory Team and Longhorn house car program after the split with Riggs Motorsports and Brandon Overton last month.
The split between Longhorn and Riggs Motorsports was originally reported by Justin Fiedler aka Dirtrackr at the end of November. He shared, “I’m told the split is amicable, but that both sides, Longhorn with Steve Arpin and Riggs with team owner Scott Riggs realized that a change was necessary.”
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Scott Riggs confirmed it in an interview with FloRacing’s Kevin Kovac, “Let me start up by saying (Longhorn’s) Steve (Arpin) and I are still good friends, so nothing happened there. It’s not a blow up. It’s simply that they want to go a different route on their (chassis) development program instead of using a team that goes on the road and tries to win races, which is probably the right way to do it and I totally get it.”
Now, in an interview with Kovac on DirtonDirt.com, Aprin revealed the future of the Longhorn Factory Team and its house car program. First, he explained the idea behind the house car program at Longhorn, “So where I’m at it with it, as a company, and I’ve always stated this, our sole purpose for housing a house car team and facilitating a house car team is just simply to develop and continue moving our products forward and providing service to our customers. Like, that is the purpose of a house car program and bearing that expense within our company, and we’re just looking at the best, most efficient ways to be able to provide that service and continue moving forward for our customers.”
“Obviously, one of the things that’s unique about our program is, what we’ve always done, our long-term development program is with the [K&L Rumley Enterprises] 6 car, and then we had our house car program to kind of take some of that stuff that was tested enough and go racing,” he shared. “But for those guys to be out trying to win a championship and race for a living and put food on all their own tables, it’s probably not the right approach to use that as a development program as you’re trying to move forward.”
As for what the future of the house car program is, he said, “We’re just kind of changing up how we’re going to go about trying to provide our customers service and keep on moving our products forward to do our best to stay on top and keep the advantage that we’ve had over the last few years.”
To that point, Arpin shared that he and his team have “some other stuff that we’ve got in the works that I’m really excited about, but it’s still just all coming together on how to move forward with it.”
“The reality is, bites of speed are harder and harder to come by these days,” he noted. “Everyone has done such a good job, and obviously we’re in a very fortunate spot on having a lot of success, but somebody is going to pass what’s currently winning races right now. Somebody is going to do that, and we’re just putting ourselves in position to be the one to pass ourselves rather than getting passed from someone else. So we don’t want to be complacent at all with the success we’ve had, and we’re going to make sure we do what we have to do to put our customers in a place where they’re always having the best competitive advantage they can using our products.”
One of the things that Aprin and his team are working on are a potential closer relationship with Ohlins Shocks. He told Kovac, “There is some stuff obviously happening and we’ll announce that here in the coming weeks.”
As for why he and Longhorn might have a closer relationship with Ohlins Shocks, he explained, “What we’ve done this year is really wanted to look at everything that’s out there within the marketplace from a technology standpoint and make sure that we have the newest, latest, greatest and up-to-date technology that’s available in the marketplace to build off for our customers. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we’re a chassis company, and all we care about is that Longhorns are winning races. So whether they’re winning races with Bilsteins, or Ohlins, or Penseks, or Foxes, whatever it might be, all we care about is that Longhorn customers are winning races. What we’re doing is making sure that whatever we feel is the most competitive technology in the marketplace is available directly to our customers.”
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