Inside B and R Performance: The Shop Story That Built Ryan Martin Before TV Fame

Long before the cameras made his name a headline, Ryan Martin built his reputation the slow way, the way that never goes viral.

It was built in a place where mistakes have receipts, where the customer still calls back if the car is not right, where deadlines do not care how talented you are, and where a reputation is either welded into the work or shattered by the first weak link.

That place was B and R Performance, a performance shop anchored in the Oklahoma City area and widely associated with Ryan Martin as co-owner, a role that predates the image most fans carry of him as simply the man in the red car.

The official Street Outlaws driver bio frames him as co-owner of B and R Performance and credits him with helping other drivers climb the OKC scene before he ever decided it was time to put himself directly in the lane.

In other words, he was building other people’s speed before he fully turned his own speed into a national story.

That detail matters because it explains why his public persona has always felt less like a character and more like a system.

A shop owner cannot afford to be all adrenaline.

A shop owner learns to be calm even while everything is urgent.

B and R Performance gets described in racing media as more than a local wrenching spot.

Dragzine’s feature on the Fireball Camaro calls it one of the most reputable performance shops in the Midwest, known for building some of the quickest street-legal race cars in the country, and it names Billy Hayes as Ryan Martin’s partner at the shop.

A dealer listing for the shop through Hellion Turbo also places B and R Performance Auto in Norman, Oklahoma, with a phone line and the claim that the company’s core business has been building record-setting turbo systems and turbocharger work, tying the shop identity to forced induction culture and repeatable performance results.

Norman, Oklahoma is not Hollywood.

It is not the kind of place people expect to produce a modern motorsports star with a global fanbase.

And that is why it is the perfect forge.

Because a shop like that teaches a particular kind of discipline.

Not the kind that sounds inspirational, but the kind that keeps you employed.

It teaches you to respect process.

It teaches you to listen to engines like they are speaking in code.

It teaches you to treat every small inconsistency as a warning sign, not a coincidence.

It teaches you that speed is only impressive if it is repeatable and survivable.

And most of all, it teaches you that every win has a cost, even if the cost is only paid in hours no one will ever applaud.

The early racing arc around Ryan Martin reads like the origin story of someone who never expected anything to be handed to him.

Dragzine reports that he made a name racing a Fox body Mustang in X275, a Mustang coupe that was originally his high school car, gradually transformed from a basic street car into a front-runner in one of radial racing’s most competitive classes.

Racedom’s profile reinforces the same foundation, describing how he bought an 89 Mustang GT as a teenager, got hooked quickly, and moved from street racing to regular drag strip life, later prepping that Mustang for X275 and eventually transitioning to a Camaro.

That is the kind of trajectory that turns a person into a technician even if they never meant to become one.

You learn what breaks, what survives, what makes power in theory versus what makes power when the air is heavy and the surface is unpredictable.

You learn how to make a car look right and go fast, because in that culture, credibility is not only about performance, it is about the whole presentation.

This is where the shop becomes the real classroom.

The Street Outlaws bio is blunt about it: before he became the intimidating driver on the list, he helped other drivers rise through the ranks.

 That is what a shop does to a racer.

It forces you to understand different builds, different drivers, different problems.

You get exposed to failure patterns across many cars, not just your own.

You learn to predict disaster before it happens.

You learn to treat each pass, each pull, each adjustment as part of a long conversation with physics.

And then came the car that would become the most visible symbol of all that invisible learning.

Dragzine describes how Ryan Martin acquired a twin-turbo 2010 Camaro originally built for Outlaw 10.

5 and Radial vs the World, and how the team at B and R Performance went to work updating the car, changing the combination, updating the chassis, and painting it the signature bright red that would become inseparable from his brand.

This is the part fans often romanticize, as if a car arrives fully formed like a movie prop and all you have to do is drive it.

But the reporting makes it clear: the Fireball identity was built, not purchased.

That build culture is why B and R Performance is more than a backdrop in his story.

It is a reason.

In the Dragzine feature, the Fireball Camaro is presented as not only a brutally fast radial car but also a tool that helped put the shop’s best foot forward in the radial world, a deliberate move that connects racing success to business reputation.

Racedom’s piece also emphasizes that Ryan Martin was juggling a packed schedule while running obligations as a co-owner of B and R Performance in Oklahoma City, a reminder that this was never one job.

That dual identity changes how a driver thinks.

A driver who only drives can chase glory even when it is irrational.

A driver who owns a shop learns that every choice echoes.

The way you lose matters.

The way you behave matters.

The way you solve problems matters.

Because the shop is always there the next morning, and the same people who admire your wins will remember your failures.

It also changes how you treat reliability.

Dragzine’s story gets into the gritty reality of competing at high levels, where parts availability and serviceability can become the difference between advancing and loading up early, and it frames the team’s choices as partly driven by the need to keep the car maintainable between rounds.

That is a shop owner mindset showing through.

It is not only about peak power.

It is about staying alive in the schedule.

The shop culture also built something else that fans mistake for personality: composure.

Racedom’s interview notes his pre-race ritual and how he tends to get calm and focused when it is time to get in the car, and it credits the team around him as part of what makes that calm possible, naming Billy and Javier as core crew members who make the program happen.

This is one of the most important clues to the real story.

The calm is not magic.

It is a habit created by repetition and reinforced by trust.

A shop builds trust because trust is how you survive constant problem-solving without turning every problem into a personal insult.

And then TV arrived and tried to turn everything into a storyline.

The official Street Outlaws bio compresses years into a quick arc: co-owner of B and R Performance, helper of other drivers climbing the list, then the moment he decided he was ready to take to the streets himself and quickly proved he belonged.

That is how television likes its narratives, clean and fast.

But the shop reality is never clean.

It is slow, repetitive, and full of small decisions that accumulate into skill.

That is why the B and R Performance story matters.

It explains what audiences often misunderstand about Ryan Martin.

They see the results and assume the results are the point.

The results are the surface.

The point is the mindset built underneath.

A shop forces a racer to develop a relationship with pressure that is different from a purely competitive environment.

Pressure in a shop is continuous.

It is not one big moment where adrenaline saves you.

It is ten small moments where discipline saves you.

If you cut corners, you pay later.

If you fail to document, you pay later.

If you misread a symptom, you pay later.

A shop turns the chaos of racing into something you can manage through systems, and that is why a driver forged in a shop can look almost unfair when the lights get brighter.

The Fireball Camaro itself became a moving billboard for that philosophy, and racing media captured the way the car’s evolution and competitiveness tied back to the shop’s identity.

 The point was never just to be fast once.

The point was to be the kind of fast that convinces other people to trust you with their money, their builds, their reputations, their own dreams of becoming someone.

That is the quiet secret behind the B and R Performance era.

Before TV fame, the shop was already a form of fame inside the culture that mattered most: the culture of people who know what it costs.

The kind of people who can hear a car and tell whether it is brave or reckless.

The kind of people who can look at a build and see the hours hidden in the seams.

So when the cameras finally arrived, Ryan Martin didn’t transform into someone new.

He simply became visible.

The discipline was already there, trained by customer deadlines, by midnight fixes, by learning forced induction and traction strategy the hard way, and by helping other drivers climb before he made his own climb the main event.

The most cinematic part of this story is also the most realistic: the shop never stops being the shop.

Even now, the public can debate which era of his program was the most dominant, which combination was the most feared, which season felt the most inevitable.

But the foundation does not change.

It is still the same idea forged in a place like B and R Performance: make the work speak, make the fixes clean, make the process repeatable, and let the results look inevitable even when nothing about the environment is fair.

That is how a shop builds a driver before TV ever touches him.

It teaches him to live inside pressure without advertising it.

It teaches him to treat chaos like a routine problem, not a personal crisis.

It teaches him that the loud part of racing is only the final output.

And if you listen closely to the Fireball story, you can still hear the shop underneath it, steady and mechanical, like a warning that never needs to raise its voice