Lifestyle - Lifestyle Feature

POSTED: Monday, Jul. 28, 2008

Grassroots racing a family affair

Jake Benson was too young to remember his first trip to Deming Speedway to watch his uncle, Kevin Benson, race sprint cars around the clay oval track.

He can remember, however, how old he was the first time he tried to purchase his uncle's car so he could do some racing of his own.

"I was 4 or 5," Jake Benson said. "And I put together a jar of pennies and nickels and a bunch of fake money to try and buy his car. He didn't sell it to me."

Five years later, at the age of 10, Jake Benson was behind the wheel of his first junior sprint car. Now 17, and running 250cc and 600cc minisprints, Benson's fervor for racing is still just as great as the day he fell in love with it as a child.

The cars are bigger and the horsepower is greater, but there's a moment every time he grips the wheel or catches the sweet smell of methanol in his nose that he feels like that wide-eyed 5-year-old again.

For Benson, like many of the racers who show up at one of the handful of clay or dirt tracks scattered around Whatcom and Skagit counties, racing is much more than a hobby. It's a lifelong passion, a family bond and an unpaid, fulltime job all rolled into the torqued whine of a four-stroke engine on a summer night.

"That's my church," Benson said. "Driving on Friday nights is what I live for."

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

When Derek Holmwood has a question about the 1,200cc minisprint car he races at Deming Speedway he goes to the person who built it - his father, Dave Holmwood.

Like many of the minisprint drivers in the 1,200 class at Deming Speedway, Derek drives a car that Dave Holmwood had a major hand in putting on the track.

"I've probably built 30 or 40 cars over the years and probably 18 of the 19 cars running in the 1,200 class on any given night," Dave Holmwood said. "Let's just say when there's an accident at the track I usually don't get a lot of sleep."

Dave Holmwood's passion for racing started more than 30 years ago when he was 16. It hasn't really diminished since. It began with go-karts, progressed to minisprints, and carried over to his son and his daughter, Jodi. That passion also became a business, DLH Racing Products. He even met his wife Lori at the track.

"It's definitely a family affair with us," Derek, 17, said. "We're always doing something with the cars and with racing. It's a total team effort to get the car ready to drive."

On Friday's during the summer the Holmwoods can usually be found at Deming Speedway. During the week at least one of them is in the garage working on a car. At the race track Dave is Derek's crew chief and Jodi helps keep the car clean of clay and mud. Lori works in the director's tower at the speedway.

"If I ever have any ideas or questions about the setup of the car I defer to my dad," Derek said. "He has the experience, he knows the equipment. And my sister, she's right in there as part of the crew making sure everything stays clean. My mom's roll is that she let's us go racing."

AN EXPENSIVE HOBBY

While many of the skills needed to be a successful race car driver haven't changed much since Deming Speedway opened in the early 1970s, the equipment certainly has. Even at the grassroots level, as much of the racing that takes place in and around Whatcom County is considered, it can be costly to be competitive.

"You have to keep up with the new parts and technology to compete," Jake Benson said. "If you're not keeping up with what's coming out, you're not going to do very well. That's just how it is."

It's a far cry from the days when Kevin Benson and his brother started building cars. Back then if a vehicle had four tires and enough horsepower to tear around the track it was considered raceable.

"When we started building cars we were building them out of bedrails," Kevin Benson said. "Really we would use whatever we could get to make it go around."

These days, depending on the class and size of the car, a racer can expect to spend at least $8,000 for a quality used minisprint car and upwards of $20,000 for a new one. During the course of season the cost to race the car and buy replacement parts is typically between $5,000 and $10,000, Dave Holmwood said.

Of course, that doesn't include the cost of labor. That work usually comes at the expense of the owner and driver's free time. The cost of proper safety equipment also has to be factored in.

"You really have to love doing this," Jake Benson said. "I'm working on the car just about every night during the season. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

The cost of fuel is another aspect to consider when it comes to racing. A driver of a 1,200cc minisprint might go through five or six gallons of methanol on a given race night and between 125 and 180 gallons in a season. And while the cost of a gallon of methanol is slightly less then a gallon of gasoline these days, the money spent traveling to and from and the track can add up quickly for any racer making a commute.

"Methanol is a little cheaper than diesel or fuel now, which is pretty ironic because it used to be a lot higher," Deming Speedway owner Paul Lemley said. "The cost of fuel has hurt things quite a bit as far as the traveling shows go, but I think we still put on a good show."

Offsetting out-of-pocket expenses with sponsorship moneys is also part of the race game. That might mean cold-calling businesses, hitting up family friends, or just making the right impression on the track while the right people are watching.

"There's a lot more that goes into racing than what people see on the track on a Friday night," Derek Holmwood said. "You have to work at getting sponsors, and after that you have to work hard to represent those sponsors."

Holmwood, who won the 1,200cc class at the Nooksack River Casino Clay Cup Nationals at Deming Speedway on Saturday, July 19, was also able to parlay his skills behind the wheel into a seat in a 410 Sprint Class car at this year's Jim Raper Memorial Dirt Cup at Skagit Speedway. The move to the bigger car probably wouldn't have possible without the right sponsors.

"It's definitely a wild ride getting into one of these things," Derek Holmwood said before the final day of Dirt Cup. "There was a lot of anticipation trying to get here and doing it was a ride I will never forget. I've always dreamed of racing a big car, but actually being here at Dirt Cup, is so surreal it's almost like a dream."

THE NEXT KASEY KAHNE

While most of the older drivers at the tracks around the area consider racing a hobby, many of those in the younger set are hoping it blossoms into a lucrative career.

Children as young as 10 are running in junior sprint races on any given night across the nation, and kids even younger are sliding behind go-kart wheels to learn which line to take coming out of a corner and how to handle three-wide racing.

Many of the young racers from Whatcom County are hoping to become the next Kasey Kahne, the Enumclaw-raised NASCAR driver who learned his trade at Deming and Skagit speedways before moving on to race stock cars in NASCAR's premier Sprint Cup circuit. Kahne has done as much to raise the profile of racing in the area as Blaine's Luke Ridenour did for basketball or Ferndale's Jake Locker has done for football.

"Everybody is getting better and better and starting younger and younger," Derek Holmwood said. "One day I hope I'm one of these guys who is a big name, and I know I'm going to get my butt kicked by some 17-year-old some time."

Of course the odds of racing in a NASCAR series are slim, but for everyone who thinks it's an impossible dream there comes a story like that of NASCAR's Kyle Busch who raced in NASCAR's Craftsman Truck Series when he was 16 and broke into the Sprint Cup Circuit when he was 19.

The dream is enough to make local drivers like Jake Benson get behind the wheel time and time again despite broken bones and long nights tinkering on his car.

"Racing can be detrimental to your health," Benson said. "Physically it can be tough. I've slammed into that concrete wall hard and had to be taken to the hospital. I've broken both arms two times each, but I've never thought about not racing."

Racing is also clearly a major time commitment to all of those involved. Family vacations usually mean traveling to a different race track and weekday nights are spent in the garage.

"Racing takes just about all of your time," said Lemley, whose son Brock is a driver. "You have to sacrifice just about everything. You're working on a car all week, or at least three or four days a week, just to make sure it's done and ready for the weekend."

BLOOD AS THICK AS OIL

Whether it's nature, nurture or a combination of the two that makes a race car driver fall in love with zooming around the track is hard to say. In the case of Jake Benson, who seems to have gotten the speed gene from his uncle and his father, racing around a dirt circle just came naturally.

"My uncle used to race in a circle, but my dad has always said he prefers to go fast in a straight line," Jake Benson said. "Racing on a circle track is just something I can do. It's one of my talents."

As the longtime owner of Deming Speedway, Lemley has seen the way racing can bond a family. He's watched many children of drivers grow up to become racers themselves and witnessed the positive impact it's had on their lives.

"The neatest part about family racing is that you can take your son or your daughter out racing and then work with them and teach them in the garage during the week," Lemley said. "It really doesn't give them a chance to go out and get into the wrong stuff. It gives them common sense, confidence, and helps them understand the way things work."

For Derek Holmwood, who started racing when he was 12, there was never any doubt that he would someday be roaring around an oval track. He was out at Deming Speedway before he could walk and thinks of the place almost as a second home. Since his parents finally let him get behind the wheel it's been nearly impossible to get out of the cockpit.

"Deming is the best place I could have ever started," Holmwood said. "We know everybody down there. It's just a bunch of family and friends getting together to race. What more could you want."