A life behind the wheel

Bob Schaeffer has a career as a professional sprint car driver

By JEFF CASPERSEN/Post Independent Staff

NEW CASTLE — Bob Schaeffer is addicted to speed. Not the kind you get off a street corner, but the kind you experience zooming around an oval track at 100-plus mph.

That’s why the 54-year-old New Castle resident can’t pry himself out from behind the wheel of the sprint cars he mans virtually every weekend.

That’s why he’ll log more than 30,000 miles of travel — running race after race, all over the United States — this summer.

That’s why, despite taking a break or two from racing in his 30-plus year career, Schaeffer always finds himself back on the track.

“As long as I’m still competitive, I’ll keep racing,” he said. “If I feel I can’t run and win races, it’s time to get out. I enjoy racing. It’s like a drug. I’ve done a lot of things outside racing. I rode a bull in the rodeo. I’ve been hangliding. I fell off a cliff on skis. I’ve done a lot of crazy stuff and nothing gets in the blood like auto racing does. It’s an addiction.”

Schaeffer is a weekend warrior in every sense of the phrase. He runs a sunglass company — based out of New Castle — by day before shifting into auto racer mode on weekends.

“I wish (racing) was my full-time job,” he joked. “But my work gives me the freedom to travel around.”

Admittedly in the twilight of his racing career, Schaeffer currently races for a Denver-based team owned by John Schmitz. The two, along with their crew, Schmitz’s wife, Schaeffer’s girlfriend and his sister, travel nationally to participate in the United States Auto Club Sprint Car Series and regionally in the American Sprint Car Series.

Schaeffer mans a winged sprint car in the dirt-track ASCS and a recently built — and expensive — asphalt sprint car in the USAC.

Schmitz, a former racer himself, couldn’t be happier to have Schaeffer aboard.

“I couldn’t ask for a better guy,” he said. “He’s a professional driver. He is consistent. He’s not a top No. 1 winner, because he doesn’t take stupid chances. You can go out there and pile up equipment every time and you might win more, but Bob doesn’t pile up equipment. He doesn’t abuse it, and he’s always in the top three or four or five.”

Schaeffer’s consistent style lends itself to points championships but that’s not the aim in 2007. Schmitz and Schaeffer, more or less in it for the fun of the sport, pick and choose races based primarily on purse and preference.

“We just go out and have a good time, and win,” said Schmitz, who owns and operates a Denver-area construction company. “We do whatever we can do. I’m not one of those guys that’s big on points. We just want to stay competitive and have a good time.”

A racer is born

Schaeffer grew up in the little town of Fleetwood, Penn., some nine miles from the much larger city of Reading, where his love for racing was born.

When he was a mere 5 years old, Schaeffer’s uncle would take him to races at Reading Fairgrounds. It didn’t take the youngster long to latch on to the sport.

“That’s all I wanted to do,” he recalled. “Other kids in high school, they all went to parties on weekends. Once I was old enough, I was terror on wheels. I wanted to be a race car driver then. I didn’t know how I was going to make it happen, but that’s what I wanted to do.”

Though he didn’t race in any organized circuits until he was in his 20s, Schaeffer tore up the back-country roads of his childhood stomping ground.

“Many times I’d miss turns and end up in the cornfield,” he said with a grin and chuckle before throwing out a necessary disclaimer. “And I don’t recommend taking racing to the streets.”

Schaeffer’s racing career officially began a few years later when he took up kart racing in the mid-1970s. He won more than 250 kart races, four track championships and two national titles running various kart circuits.

In the racing offseason, he’d make the most of skiing’s peak season as a season ski instructor in Vail.

“I kept going back summer after summer,” he said. “I’d teach and then go back to Pennsylvania in the summer to race go-karts.”

He also mixed in stints in stock cars and midgets before moving to Florida in 1987. There, Schaeffer gained notoriety as a sprint car racer competing in the Florida Mini Sprint Association.

Tearing up Florida tracks, Schaeffer won his fair share of points championships, including four straight from 1995 to 1998. During the four-peat, he competed in 123 races and won 62. He finished out of the top five just five times.

After moving to Colorado in 2000 and a brief racing hiatus, Schaeffer got back into the sprint cars in 2001, racing select events in various circuits before hooking on with Schmitz this season.

Opportunity lost

Racing nearly was Schaeffer’s day job.

Back in the mid-1980s, the veteran driver had a stock car opportunity lined up in the Grand National Series, the modern-day equivalent of NASCAR’s Busch Series.
But fate dealt Schaeffer a devastating blow.

“The guy I was going to race for, his wife decided racing horses would be more fun than racing cars,” he recalled. “That was the biggest of best chance of all things. It definitely hurt the most. I was almost to the top of the sport, and then it fell through.”

The would-be owner went as far as to buy a car and put together a team that would have been based in North Carolina before tabling the operation.

“He heard what I was doing and got in touch with me,” said Schaeffer, who had made a name for himself racing karts with the World Karting Tour and International Karting Federation. “It was really disheartening when it fell through. You put all the time in and think you finally make it. I just was not in a position financially to do it myself.”

And the financial battle is one fought by many a driver, Schaeffer notes. That and the battle of self-promotion.

“I never had the big bucks to get to the next series,” he said. “I drove for a lot of people over the years. My one opportunity fell through.”

If Schaeffer has any regrets, he wishes he had been better at tooting his own horn.

“I’ve never been one to go out of my own way,” he said. “You’ve really got to blow your own horn. You have to promote yourself. If you’re good enough, you need to do it.”

And Schaeffer never doubted his talent.

But, in the increasingly sponsor-driven racing world, having a total package to sell is as vital as ever.

“You have to be good with personal appearances, good with the media, the complete package,” Schaeffer explained. “You have to be fast, present yourself, be well-spoken and marketable. You can be the best driver in the world but if you’re not marketable, you’re not going to keep moving up.”

The boat to stardom may have sailed past Schaeffer some time ago, but he long ago realized his childhood dream.

“Some kids want to be cops or fireman,” he said. “I just wanted to be a race car driver.”