As he watched his brothers Geoff and Brett Bodine become more involved with the racing world, Todd Bodine didn’t get his chance behind the wheel till he was 19 years old.
“I got a late start,” Bodine commented. “I didn’t start racing anything until I was 19. From the time I was 19, I owned my racecar for two years – ran about 15 to 18 races, then went broke and had no money. From about ’85 to when I started running full time in Busch Grand National back then in ’91, I only raced a couple of races. So I didn’t have a lot of experience when I started racing Busch Grand National full-time.”
That opportunity to drive full-time in the Busch Grand National Series came after he made the decision to move to North Carolina. That decision came in 1985 after crashing his car at Stafford.
“I said, ‘The heck with this’,” he said. “Both my brothers had moved south already – Geoff was racing for Rick Hendrick, Brett was working for Rick Hendrick and actually started driving the Busch car at the time. So I packed everything in the little blue Chevette that I had and drove south and went to work for Rick Hendrick.”
During his time working at Hendrick Motorsports and other race teams, Bodine did everything – from building and working on the cars, to changing tires on pit road. He even crew chiefed for a bit. While working with Kyle Petty’s Busch car, an opportunity would fall into Bodine’s lap.
“Our sponsor at the time wanted to run more races. Kyle didn’t want to run more races so I said, ‘Send me in’ and they did,” Bodine said. “I did very well and that got me the opportunity to run full-time the next season.”
Bodine says while he hated working on the cars all those years, it was the best education that he could’ve gotten as it helped make him a better driver.
“Everything that I learned to that point, I was able to apply to driving,” he said. “By this time, I had been to all the race tracks and watched everybody race, I knew the bodies and how to set them up; I knew the springs and shocks that I needed. So when I got the opportunity to drive, I’m not going to say it was easy, but it made it easier because I already had good set-ups. I knew how to make them run – I just had to apply the knowledge in how to make them run and what I had seen on the race track to what my butt was driving me behind the wheel.”
Once he got behind the wheel, the success would come for the driver, that is now known to many in the garage area simply as “The Onion.” Per Bodine, the nickname was something that was just kept between him and Randy for a long time.
“Randy is very funny and in ’91 when I first driving full-time in the Busch Series, Randy was my spotter,” Bodine said. “Even back then, I didn’t have a lot of hair and he nicknamed me ‘The Onion’. He just started calling me it. Nobody else called me that – just Randy; it was our thing for a long time. We were friends, Randy is a jokester and nicknames everybody. Joey Logano’s Sliced Bread – that was Randy that gave him the nickname.”
The nickname didn’t come to light for the media and fans till 2001, when Bodine was looking for something to spice up his image.
“I’m getting up in age, kind of fallen into the crowd and not really getting noticed. You got to have a hook – something to get you noticed so they talk about you,” he commented. “I didn’t have a lot of hair so I shaved what I had off, grew a goatee, started wearing sunglasses and I became the onion. We branded it, made sure all the announcers called me. The kids loved it. That was the biggest reason I did it – the kids. They love it and we got a little onion man – go on the website and check out the little onion. That’s it. That’s the Onion.
“We branded me. At the time we did it, we had all these young guys coming around so us old guys were getting pushed back and forgotten about. We needed something to get back up and get noticed, and it worked.”
