INDIANAPOLIS — Perris Auto Speedway, 75 miles east of Los Angeles, 2002. Damion Gardner is there for “maybe the second or third time.” He comes from Concord, Calif., up in the Bay Area, and although he’s done some winning in winged 360 sprint cars, this non-winged stuff is new to him.
On his first trip to Perris, Gardner “tried to knock the fence down in qualifying. I just didn’t know how hard to drive it into the corners.”
He unloads his equipment, ready to take another shot. He doesn’t know it yet, but this is the last bit of calm before what, upon reflection, can properly be termed a storm.
The calm was intentional. Gardner says, “When I started driving sprint cars, I remember looking at the top guys and consciously telling myself, ‘These guys are men. They don’t (bleep) around. They feed their families based on how they run. They aren’t going to let some punk come in and jack them around.’ That was on my mind.”
In a couple of hours, this kid Gardner, still a nobody, will beat a pair of somebodies named Cory Kruseman and Richard “Gas Man” Griffin to win the trophy dash.
“All of a sudden,” he says, “people knew who I was.”
The storm had broken and it would blow across Southern California for the next 20 years, throwing off stray gusts felt clear to the Atlantic.
His record in the premier West Coast series for non-winged sprint cars — under CRA, SCRA or USAC-CRA — is staggering: 10 championships, nine in a row, and 108 feature wins. The last of those victories broke a tie with the late Dean Thompson and put Gardner atop the all-time tally. And who knows how big those numbers would be had Gardner not spent six seasons in the Midwest, following the USAC national sprint car trail.
Now he has called it a career, and things are going to be a lot less colorful without him.
There had been no racing in his blue-collar family, but his father provided the advice Gardner drove by. As a boy, Damion was small, so his dad said, “If you ever have to fight, remember, you don’t have the luxury of being big.”
“The lesson,” says Gardner, “was that if you’re going to do something, do it with everything you’ve got.”
Taking those words to heart, he careened through “junky four-wheelers” on a backyard oval; fairgrounds truck-pulls; bomber stock cars at northern California tracks; and a stretch in dwarf cars. In 1998, at age 24, he bought a winged 360 to race at Placerville Speedway, where he was fast but inconsistent.
Once he found non-winged racing, things clicked. Tight on money, he picked up occasional rides with Harlan Willis and Billy Wilkerson. By 2004, Gardner was a hired gun in Ron Chaffin’s No. 50, replacing the retiring Griffin, a five-time champ. With Bruce Bromme Jr. on the wrenches, Gardner won 32 times over three seasons and earned the 2005 USAC-CRA title.
His desire was as bright as a welding flash. “I always understood that people want to see someone who tries, and I was fortunate that people saw that in me,” Gardner said.
One was Pace Electronics owner Pat Kehoe, who offered to back a Gardner assault on USAC’s national series. Racing out of Indiana from 2007-’12, they recorded 13 national wins, five on the way to finishing second to Levi Jones in the 2010 standings.
But Kehoe’s death in 2012 marked a turning point. Gardner moved home that winter and took a job wheeling the potent No. 4 owned by Mark Alexander and wrenched by Mark’s brother Steve. Between 2013 and last season, they won the USAC-CRA crown every year but 2020, when COVID-19 snuffed the entire schedule.
Gardner’s focus was fierce: “Once in a while, I’d notice that everybody was talking about some new guy on the way up. My job was to stomp that guy’s fire out.”
But now he’s tired. Not physically, but mentally. Tired of “the politics.” Tired of post-race drama; social media is loaded with clips of Gardner and various rivals yelling about whose slide jobs were worse.
And, yes, tired of changing times and changing attitudes. He says, “I don’t know if it’s because the new generation of drivers is younger than drivers used to be, but things are different. I’ve had young guys come up after they beat me, upset because I didn’t tell them, ‘Hey, good job!’ Are they serious? It never crossed my mind that Richard Griffin should congratulate me after I’d won a race. I’m pretty sure the Gas Man was pissed off when I beat him.
“That stuff wears on you. I reached a point where I said, ‘I’ve done what I want to do. You guys can have it.’”
Gardner is 48. A while ago, he began supplementing his racing income by fabricating “stuff for high-end homes” for two contractor friends. He likes the challenge and the money. Back in Concord, there’s “a nice house that could use a little work” and a girlfriend who’s been with him for six years. He’s not scared that his future weekends will look different. He’s ready for the calm after the storm.
His body of work includes that pile of USAC-CRA hardware, three wins in the Oval Nationals at Perris, and a huge midget score in the 2008 Chili Bowl. But more satisfying are the gifts he’s been given by mechanics without them even knowing it.
“The best,” he says, “is when you win a race and you look over at Bruce Bromme or Steve Alexander, and you see in their smirk that they can’t believe what you just did.
“Those are my moments, the ones that mean the most.”
The National Sprint Car Hall of Fame beckons. But first, Damion Gardner’s got a few things to do around the house.
This story appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
