Page 151 - OVATION Magazine (Issue 1)

promotion departments at MCA (George Strait, Reba McEntire), DreamWorks (Toby Keith), and Universal (Vince Gill, George Strait), Borchetta followed his vision for a new kind of record label and started Big Machine.Taylor Swift, Florida Georgia Line, Midland,Tim McGraw, Sheryl Crow, Garth Brooks—they’ve
all had career breakthroughs with Big Machine.
Borchetta’s intensity and focus in business carry over to his collecting—
and racing—of automobiles.As he walks through the various cars, many of them street legal, he concedes that his passion can at times be polarizing.“Everything that I’ve done—and sometimes I think the reason we’re controversial in everything
I do—I’m always on the edge. . . .You’re trying to press limits.You’re controlling madness; that’s how the record business can be, as well. So when you know you’re on the edge and you’re competing and you win, you accomplish something for today. It’s completely liberating, and also you’re always aware when you’re going that fast, you can’t make a mistake.”
When most people talk like that,
it’s hyperbole. Not Borchetta, who got pulled back into racing in the early 2000s through country star Mark Collie’s Celeb- rity Race for Diabetes Cure and Brooks & Dunn’s Legends Shoot-Outs, as well as the Supertrucks for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. In theory, the races consisted of a bunch of country stars playing Mario Andretti. In reality, for Borchetta at least, they were a gateway drug to something he did very, very well.
In 2003, 2004, and 2005, Borchetta won the Supertruck championship at Nashville’s Fairgrounds Speedway. His 2004 time of 19.63 seconds still stands
as the track’s record.The truck, which still bears the sponsorship logos from the Stockyards—a now-defunct old-school Music City restaurant—as well as Ronnie
“Everything that I’ve done—and sometimes I think the reason we’re controversial in everything I do—I’m always on the edge.”
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Dunn’s embroidered seat and a cascade of win stickers, occupies a special place in Borchetta’s garage.
“Winning the first championship was cool because you’re racing with a bunch of guys here in Nashville who are real racers and who took years to accept me,” he says. “Some of them still don’t, but they had to accept what we did.We had to race for it, and we had to win for it—and for us to win, then win three times in a row, they hated us for it, but now I go back and we talk about it. It’s friendly.”
Borchetta’s final Supertruck race was on September 3, 2005, a time when he was also moving full speed ahead with Big Machine. “I won that race, won the championship,” he recalls.“That was two days after we opened the label. I didn’t
even tell Sandi, but I knew it was my last race. It was like,‘This is going to be it, win, lose, or crash’—because there was a guy I wanted to wreck if he got close to me. But we won the race, almost caused a riot. It was a really fun night, and then we went and built the Big Machine.”
Just because he wasn’t racing didn’t mean Borchetta stopped going fast. Many of the cars he’s amassed need to be driven, and one can often see a prized piece in his collection parked outside Big Machine’s Music Row complex.
“You have to observe the speed limit, though there are a couple places you can jump on it a bit,” he demurs. Over the years, he got his fix by driving on tracks and continuing to build his collection. “It’s like buried treasure.We’re like pirates,