WEST SALEM — When most kids his age likely were riding a two-wheel, human-powered bike, or relentlessly encouraging their friends to ask out the cutest girl while hanging out downtown, Skylar Holzhausen was probably twisting and turning.

No, not his stomach. Wrenches.
When your dad is one of the top stock car drivers in Wisconsin, and certainly among the top 15 or so in the Midwest, you spend hours upon hours fetching wrenches, watching what he does with them, then asking if you can help. Getting grease on your hands, regardless of if you did anything, didn’t matter. You had greasy hands, just like dad.

Sure, it’s a lot of work — sometimes even boring work — but the payoff came when you got to tag along to race tracks all over Wisconsin.

Yes, Skylar Holzhausen’s playground wasn’t found near his parents’ rural Bangor home, nor in the small town of Bangor. It was the La Crosse Fairgrounds Speedway in West Salem, or tracks in Kaukauna, Wisconsin Dells, Jefferson, Slinger, Marshfield or Plover. Friday and Saturday nights were spent watching dad turn left, and left, and left.

So when Skylar showed a neverending interest in racing, his father, Steve, first put him in a go-kart. Success soon followed, and when Skylar turned 16, he was in a Late Model car racing every week at the Fairgrounds Speedway, something he did for two years.

Fast forward two years, and Skylar is back at the Fairgrounds Speedway. But this time he’s racing in the Big 8 Series, where he battled Ross Kenseth — yes, that Ross Kenseth, the son of Sprint Cup driver Matt Kenseth — for rookie of the year honors. Skylar didn’t win that award, but he did make his mark in the Big 8 series in his first attempt.

He entered Saturday night’s Big 8 Series finale — the 48-lap Big 8 Oktoberfest Feature — sixth in points — just 18 out of the top five — out of more than 100 drivers to earn points.

“It’s been fun, but it’s tough to make the shows. You feel you are doing really good when you make the show,” Skylar said. “It’s nice to be able to go out and race other tracks. I picked up a lot of different things, like how to handle traffic, how to pass, how to set up a car for different tracks.

“There are different styles of racing you come across. Most of the tracks are smaller than here (Fairgrounds Speedway), so you learn what a bull ring is.“

Skylar cut his racing teeth, so to speak, at the Fairgrounds Speedway, and even won a feature race during his two-year Late Model run. His dad, however, knew that if he was serious about racing for a career, he had to venture outside his comfort zone — even if that comfort zone was a 100-mph ride at the Fairgrounds Speedway.

“I graduated from (Bangor) high school early (in December 2007),” Skylar said. “I had enough credits, and I had to get out and make some money. I knew what I wanted to do.”

He’s known that for some time, but racing full-time while working full-time was an eye-opener. It’s what his dad has done for years, but this was far different than getting grease on his hands and pretending to help.

The pretending part of his life was over. This was the real stuff.

“Stepping it up and trying to get sponsors is tough,” Skylar said. “We are doing what we can with what we have. It’s tough out there right now. It would be great to have a $100,000 a year sponsor. We could really do some great things with something like that.”

That, Skylar and Steve both know, is almost like winning the lottery. In the meantime, the learning curve continues.

“Each track you go to, you get faster,” Skylar said. “It is tough, especially with the car counts, but it forces you to get your act together.”

Skylar, a freshman at Western Technical College, had his best finish come at Madison International Speedway when he took fourth in a Big 8 event there. He desperately wants a win, and would love for that first Big 8 checkered flag in front of his hometown track in West Salem.

“It can happen,” said Skylar, who also raced another series this season, the Wisconsin Challenge Series, where he finished 11th in points. “With 40 cars at each show and only 25 getting in, once you get in, anything can happen.”

It didn’t happen Saturday night as Skylar finished 25th in the Big 8 Oktoberfest Feature, but it was a good season. Now, he’s already thinking about next season and what he needs to do to take another step up the racing ladder.

It starts with twisting and turning. Wrenches, remember?

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