Randy Cabral is a graduate of the auto tech program and he spent a decade working in the garage of an area dealership.
The 29-year-old local resident won eight of last year’s 17 events, despite suffering the loss of close friend and fellow racer Shane Hammond in the opening race of the year.
Cabral dedicated his season to his friend and went on to win the championship by more than 100 points and earn honors as the year’s most improved driver.
It is almost hard to reconcile the aggressive racer with the patient instructor helping students in Jack Joyce’s auto classes rebuild car engines. Cabral lets his driving speak for itself.
Cabral has flipped four cars in his career. The worst occurred at Seekonk, when he flipped three times and went seven feet in the air at one point. “It’s like a rollercoaster ride as long as you’re not hitting any thing, Then you realize you’re wrecking a $60,000 race car and it really starts to bother you,” Cabral said.
At 29, NEMAs’ reigning champ says he fulfilled two dreams this year, and only one of them involved racing. “I’ve always had two goals in life. One was to be a good racecar driver and one was to become a teacher. I always wanted to be a racer as a hobbyist and a teacher as a career,” he said.
His career path was circuitous. He attended MassBay Community College in Wellesley after high school to fine-tune his automotive skills and then went to work at Millbrook Motors in Duxbury.
After 10 years with the dealership, he left last spring to take a job as janitor at Manomet Elementary School. Cabral was looking to get his foot in the door of the school department. And it paid off in December, when Joyce, his old teacher, tapped him for an opening on his teaching staff.
Cabral said the environment is more relaxed under Joyce’s leadership and allows students to pursue courses of study that genuinely interest them.
“Some of the kids find it very interesting. They’ll be able to go on the Internet and track how it does,” Cabral said.
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