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“When are you going to put the kid in the car?” people in the pit area of race tracks around suburban Chicago would ask his father, Ed, when Eddie would be elbow-deep in grease, wrench in hand. “My dad wouldn’t let me drive. He needed me to work on his car, to be his crew chief.”
Eddie wasn’t a young, wet-behind-the-ears kid, either. By today’s standards, at 26 years old, he would be considered at, or maybe a little past, his prime as a driver. You have to remember this was 1986, and putting kids behind the wheel of a race car before they had a driver’s license wasn’t the rage like it is now.
Eddie had to wait, and wait, and wait some more. Years he waited.
Finally, Eddie took things into his own hands — and feet. He took an old car to a local race track, knocked the windows out of it, and went enduro racing. His father didn’t know what he was up to, and didn’t approve. It didn’t matter; Eddie was hooked.
Turning wrenches became secondary to turning a steering wheel.
Some 19 years later, Eddie Hoffman, the pride of Wheaton, Ill., is one of the better-known drivers around the Midwest, and for good reason. He’s won 13 NASCAR touring series races in his career, and turned in another solid effort Saturday night in the NASCAR AutoZone Elite Division, Midwest Series Oktoberfest 200, which highlighted Saturday’s third day of the 36th annual Oktoberfest Race Weekend.
Hoffman is well beyond the, “See dad, I can drive, too,” stage. In fact, the toughest part of his racing career has been balancing business and pleasure, I mean racing. Part of Hoffman’s incentive to do well in the business world was that he needed to in order to fund his racing career. His excavating and trucking business, with 12 full-time employees, has done well.
“That’s been a problem since Day 1. I had to build my business and do well there in order to take care of my family. When you’re doing that 60 to 80 hours a week, you don’t have a lot of time to go racing,” Hoffman said. “You’ve got one foot in one and one foot in the other. You always wonder if you would have been able to do just one, what might have happened. You wonder what it would be like to do what a Steve Carlson has been able to do.”
Carlson, a nine-time NASCAR touring series champion who has raced full-time for years, entered Saturday night’s race with 67 career touring series victories, one less than the legendary Dick Trickle. Would “Fast Eddie,” as he’s called, be at that same level if he would have concentrated solely on racing?
Who knows, but it’s a thought worth pondering. Remember, this guy did win a series championship in 1997 while racing part-time.
Hoffman isn’t alone in that “If I could have just raced” thought. In today’s racing world, it’s all about finding sponsors, finding money, and keeping enough of both. Hoffman said he is fortunate to have Lisa Thomas Salon as a main sponsor. Tom and Lisa Kmak own Lisa Thomas Salon, and also own Hoffman’s AutoZone and Wisconsin Late Model cars.
“I wouldn’t be racing without them. At least not at this level or this often,” Hoffman said.
Those drivers without a good, deep-pocketed sponsor struggle to get the latest equipment, or the best equipment. And as any knowledgeable race fan will tell you, without good equipment, speed is hard to come by. And without speed, a great driver can look pretty average.
“The smaller the track, the more it comes down to the driver,” Hoffman said. “I would say its 30 to 40 percent driver here. It’s a good track. We had a rough year last year, but overall we’ve done well here. This weekend, this is what racing is all about, the longer races. I still get that enjoyment.”
Now 46 years-old, Hoffman hasn’t thought about how long he plans to continue racing. There is no doubt the passion still burns within him, but he admits it’s tough to make enough money or attract big-time sponsors in a series that had just eight races this year. The future of the NASCAR AutoZone Elite Division, Midwest Series, Hoffman said, is up to NASCAR, not drivers like himself.
This time, there is no busting out the windows and going racing. NASCAR, he said, has the wherewithal to make this series something special if it wants to. It’s up to the suits in Daytona Beach — NASCAR’s headquarters — to make that happen. There is no doubt there are plenty of talented racers like Hoffman around who would make this series something worth following.
The question is this: Is anyone within the mega-sized racing governing body watching? Or are the other, highly popular series, simply more important to them?
“The future is what NASCAR wants it to be,” Hoffman said. “They are going to make of it (the series) what they want to. They need to look at it as a feeder system. They need to keep getting rookies from some place.”
Guys from the grassroots of racing, like Hoffman.
Jeff Brown can be reached at (608) 791-8403, or e-mail at jbrown@lacrossetribune.com
