Seventeen-time national Midget championship-winning team Keith Kunz/Curb-Agajanian Motorsports (KKM) has been fueled by the experience of co-founders Keith Kunz and Pete Willoughby since its inception in the late 1990s. But there’s one other man they’ve consistently relied on — Beau Binder.
Fabricator. Shop foreman. Crew chief. Driver coach. The El Paso, TX, native has worked in several roles with KKM since his first season with the team in 2004. This year, he celebrates 20 years with the team as the dependable, dedicated veteran and role model for KKM’s small army of mechanics.
“He’s like Keith and I were back when we first started,” Willoughby said. “It didn’t matter what the clock said, you didn’t leave until you were done. And Beau was always right there by our side.”
As KKM’s longest-tenured crew member, Binder has spent the past four seasons back on the road with the team as a crew chief and driver mentor, chasing points championships with the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series presented by Toyota, USAC National Midget Series and POWRi National Midget League after several years primarily in the team shop in Columbus, IN.
In that time, he’s been able to learn from the best, which he said has helped transform him into the racing brain he is today.
“Being able to work with Keith who is just a master at reading the tracks and knowing what changes to make,” Binder said. “Being able to work with him and his resources has just taught me so much. Where we run so many different drivers, and you learn so quick that you have to watch the car, not the driver to be able to tell what changes to make. That’s such an important telltale sign there of what direction to go.”
Before his first introduction to Midgets, Binder grew up a Sprint Car fan in Texas, attending races with his family locally and wherever their travels took them. At 13, his father gave him his first opportunity as a driver when a new dirt go-kart track opened in nearby Las Cruces, NM. As a neighbor to local Sprint Car racers Joe Yearwood and Dennis Pellicotte, he also took on crew member duties for them, giving him his first lessons in full-size open-wheel race car anatomy.
In 1998, Pellicotte was getting out of Sprint Car racing. Binder’s father bought the equipment and stuck his son in the seat on the condition he got a job to help pay for the expenses and worked on the car himself. As he established himself as a regular competitor around the local 360 Sprint Car scene, Binder doubled his knowledge as both a driver and a mechanic of his own operation.
At the turn of the millennium, Binder was hired as a welder and fabricator at renown drag racing shop Don Davis Race Cars — one of his biggest lessons in motorsports education.
“He taught me all my basic fabricating,” Binder said. “He taught me how to weld, how to build frames and how to repair frames. I knew at that point I probably didn’t have enough money to always go and buy replacement parts. So, it was kinda nice to know how to fix the stuff myself.”
A similar role at Avenger Chassis in 2002 allowed him to focus more on the inner workings of the Sprint Car frames the company produced. This opened the door for his own fledgling 360 Non-Wing Sprint Car career in 2004, when he won the USAC Southwest Sprint Car championship.
During that season, Binder towed to Indiana to compete in USAC’s Indiana Sprint Week. It was there he met Kunz and Willoughby when he visited the KKM shop while searching for a new job. Willoughby soon called and hired him as a crew member on the road for the rest of 2004 before moving him into the shop full-time for the 2005 season to assist with their own increasing production of Sprint Car frames.
“When I first started, we were way more focused on Sprint Cars than Midgets,” Binder said. “At the time, we didn’t follow the entire USAC series with Midgets, we would hit the banner events. We would do Sun Prairie, Chili Bowl, Belleville, but weren’t chasing all that. We were more oft to go run a local Sprint Car race than we were some of the Midget stuff.”
When KKM was approached by Chip Ganassi Racing — and later Toyota Racing — to start a driver development program in the late 2000s, the team began to dedicate more time to Midget racing, later producing champions like Cole Whitt, Bryan Clauson and Christopher Bell.
As the team’s priorities began to change, Binder adapted his skills and began to earn his standout status.
“As he saw that was kinda what takes to survive, the way we do it, he just jumped on board,” Willoughby said. “Honestly, I don’t think we could do it without him.”
Throughout the 2010s, Binder served in various capacities in the KKM shop, including a break from his full-time role in 2011 before rejoining the team in 2014. During that period, he worked only nights at the KKM shop, spent more time with his family and even got back in the seat, winning the 2012 and 2013 Midwest Mini Sprint Association championships.
Binder returned to a crew chief role in 2021 with driver Daison Pursley, rejoining the road crew full-time for the first time in many years. By then, the KKM Midget program had expanded to upwards of four cars at any given event, and more staff, more time, and more effort became necessary to stay competitive.
“It has helped us learn to keep the setup evolving because essentially, we are running four-to-eight races in one night,” Binder said. “Granted, we’re not trying to take big swings, but there’s still a factor of trying to make the car comfortable for each driver, and sometimes you see that watching the car and not the driver. You see where you gain some speed by trying to help one of them somewhere and now you go and apply it to everybody.
“We’re able to learn faster because we’re running more races every night. That has really kept our cars, even with more rookie drivers, up front and in contention for the lead every night.”
To keep up with the extensive maintenance schedule on the team’s expanding fleet, Binder helped to organize the team’s pre-race and post-race habits, still in use today.
“One of their biggest things they tell us is to treat this place like it’s our own,” Binder said. “A lot of the processes and stuff, I’ve been able to take and mold myself. A lot of the way we do stuff, granted it’s all still based on Keith’s original processes, there’s always a little bit here and there where you can figure out how to save some time or save some money or save some work and make the process, while still productive, you make it a little more efficient.”
Reflecting on 20 years working for one of Midget racing’s most successful organizations, Binder has learned several things from Kunz but mentioned one that stands out as the difference maker over their competition.
“It’s that attention to detail,” he said. “It’s not always about having the prettiest car out there, it’s about having the most functional car out there. It’s about making sure the details that do matter are correct every time it goes on the track.”
Binder and the KKM team now prepare to wrap-up the 2024 Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series season and earn their 18th national championship in the final two races — Friday–Saturday, Oct. 4–5 at Jacksonville Speedway in Jacksonville, IL.
Advance sale tickets are available for purchase now at the link below. If you can’t be there to watch in person, stream every lap live on DIRTVision.
