COMP Cams® Employees Get Competition Up To Speed

Ashley Newman and Joseph Leister devote their workweeks at COMP Cams® to making their customers faster and harder to beat on the weekends

While most racers spend their weekdays trying to figure out how to be faster and better than their competition, two top employees from COMP Cams®, Ashley Newman and Joseph Leister, spend over 40 hours each and every week striving to make their fellow racing competitors unbeatable.

Thirty-three year old, Ashley Newman, from Ripley, Tennessee, has been working at COMP Cams® since August of 2007. He works in the tech department and spends most of his time on the phone with customers. His time on the phone with customers ranges from assisting with installation issues to recommending which specific camshaft will work best for a particular driver’s situation.

Ashley Newman

While his career at COMP Cams® spans a little over two years, his racing career spans over fifteen years, and he has driven just about everything with wheels. He has many track championships to his credit and was most recently the 2008 USCS Open Wheel Modified National Champion. He has won at tracks across the Southeast, and he knows just how tough the competition can be, and that’s without his help. However, he also understands how important it is to keep customers of COMP Cams® on the cutting edge of technology and at the front of the pack. Because of this, he uses his own on-track experiences and lessons to help his customers get even faster.

Newman remembers a particular phone call one day, a cold call from a customer asking for assistance. “This guy calls me out of the blue one day on the COMP Cams® tech line asking which camshaft would best fit his needs. I spent the next thirty minutes or so giving him some input and ideas to increase his performance results. As we got ready to end the phone call, I asked his name, and he turned out to be one my toughest competitors, who I could never seem to beat. It was kind of ironic that I was helping one of my biggest foes to be even stronger on the track. However, that’s what we do here at COMP Cams®, and to be honest, I want my competitors to be at their best, so that when I beat them, I know that I’m at my best too.”

Across the COMP Cams® complex from the technical department, twenty-three year old, Joseph Leister, from Olive Branch, Mississippi, stays quite busy each day making CAD and schematic drawings of various camshaft designs. After graduating college with a drafting degree, Joseph worked for a competitor of COMP Cams® for a year, until late 2008. When he saw his dream job at COMP Cams® advertised, Leister applied and was hired immediately.

Joseph Leister

Much like Newman, Leister has been around racing almost his entire life and started racing go-karts at the age of eight. He competed in karts for the next nine years before moving up to Open Wheel Modified, shortly after his seventeenth birthday. Leister has enjoyed considerable success in Open Wheel Modified racing, including finishing second in the 2009 USCS Weekly Racing Series standings, as well as being named 2009 USCS Modified Driver of the Year.

Even though Joseph doesn’t usually deal directly with customers, he does occasionally take concepts provided by customers and turns them into actual schematics used for camshaft production. He likes the concept of working in a profession that increases the level of competition in racing.

Leister comments, “Even though I spend my days making everybody else faster, I enjoy getting to see new technology before anybody else.” He goes on to note, “It’s definitely a mixed bag of emotions when you are out on the race track, and a customer from COMP Cams® blows by me to take the lead. On one hand I’m frustrated that I just got passed, but on the other hand it’s a feeling of satisfaction to know that one reason my competitor is doing so well is because I’m doing my job.”

Joseph Leister On The Track

Both Ashley Newman and Joseph Leister attribute much of the recent success in their careers to working at COMP Cams® and the knowledge that they have acquired along the way via their endeavors. Each driver has a big 2010 season on tap that will see them piloting their respective Open Wheel Modifieds in various, high-profile events throughout the Southeast.

Looking down the road of his racing career, Newman hopes to travel more with his Open Wheel Modified and also dreams of a chance to pilot a Super Late Model someday. While the prospect of asphalt racing provides some interest for him, he quickly notes that dirt racing is where his heart lies.

Leister holds similar sentiments as Newman, in his hopes to be able to expand his racing program and travel more. He has aspirations to one day become part of a national racing team. And, while he does enjoy his dirt racing endeavors, he would ultimately like a shot competing in asphalt racing, whether it’s Open Wheel Modifieds or Stock Cars.

Ashley Newman On The Track

Joseph Leister and Ashley Newman represent just a small cross-section of the knowledge-base that COMP Cams® possesses not just as an organization, but also as an industry leader. In fact, COMP Cams® is filled with current and former racers, including everything from former NHRA World Champion Drag Racers to the current engine builder for one of the most dominant 360c.i. Sprint Car racers in history. COMP Cams® is truly a company that believes in the principle that racing on Saturday translates to better products for their customers. COMP Cams® has operated and thrived by this concept since the very first day the company opened for business in 1976, and it’s one of the core reasons that the company has continued to thrive, even in the most trying of economic times.

For more information about COMP Cams® valve train products or any other COMP Cams® product, call us at 1-800-999-0853, or visit us online at www.compcams.com.