High Performance & Racing alumni Steve Mcbride, Jr. graduated in December 2015 and was featured on our Road Trip themed yearbook. In keeping up with many of our alumni, we reached out to all of our students on that cover to see what they were up to.
After graduation, McBride was immediately in the thick of professional racing with Kalitta Motorsports. He spent three years with that organization spending 280 days on the road from track to track learning the ins and outs of professional drag racing. His desire to settle down brought him home to NE, Ohio. McBride is now working for Stainless Works in Streetsboro, OH.
He’s a welder fabricator and builds headers and cat-back performance exhaust systems. McBride credits much of the rigid training he experienced in OTC’s High Performance program to an easier than expected transition from student to professional. “The rules of OTC mimic the same ones you have to follow as an employee. If you don’t like wearing a uniform, calling in sick, explaining your work or accounting for your time – well, your transition into the professional workplace might be a little more difficult.” His High Performance technical training prepared him for the demands of maintaining top-fuel and funny car drag racers, along with the welding skills he learned are now being put to use at Stainless Works.