MALTA, N.Y. — Racing is full of great people, but few are nicer or more concerned about the future of their segment of the sport than Skip Matczak.
The longtime supermodified owner has concentrated on midget racing at Vermont’s Bear Ridge Speedway in recent years, but he knows his days as the leader of the sportsman midget series are numbered.
“It’s hard nowadays,” says the Connecticut-based owner of Seals-It, which caters to racers at all levels. “You can’t get any new help with skills needed to race. I’ve got eight cars and we field four all the time, with one kept for local stars if we travel.”
The group runs what Matczak calls a “sportsman-type” midget, a full midget chassis with power provided by self-starting 200-horsepower Oldsmobile, Ford Focus or Chevrolet Echo Tech powerplants.
“You can buy a competitive car for $12,000 and right-rear Hoosiers sell for less than a tire for a modified, so they’re not an expensive race car,” Matczak said. “But we race for free pit passes and no purse. C.V. “Butch” Elms at Bear Ridge lets us in early and out early and is great to work with but there is no purse involved. It’s all for fun.
“The division was inspired by Chris Economaki, a great friend of mine. He thought that midget racing had gotten way too expensive,” Matczak explained. “He told me to use the spec engines and not to start out at a leased track, ‘because halfway through the year the promoter will go broke and you’ll be all done.’ That was 13 years ago.
“I called Butch and told him I represented a group that included modified great Ray Miller and Indy 500 rookie-of-the-year Denny Zimmerman and it all came together. Butch and April May even travel to Albany-Saratoga with us to run the show. How many other promoters would go to a different track to help out?”
Matczak, who made the weekly 600-mile round trip to Oswego (N.Y.) Speedway for many years, appreciates that the Bear Ridge schedule features the midgets on alternate Saturdays, giving the racers a chance to do other things with their families.
“We do it for fun,” he says. “I’ve had Kenny Schrader and Johnny Heydenreich race with us and they put on a hell of a show besides being fun to hang out with. The downside is that Ray Miller, who has four cars, and I are both 81. It’s hard keeping everyone happy and I’ve been hoping our dream would continue to grow so we could retire. It’s a big job organizing everything.
“This year, we lost our USAC sanction so we had to make a deal with DIRT,” Matczak continued. “We need to be aligned with a major sanction for the insurance. And there is always something that needs to be done to keep everyone going.”
Not that Matczak, who has been involved with his family’s Allyn Tool machine shop business since his youth, is averse to hard work. Besides running his two businesses, he won three consecutive Oswego championships and one International Classic with driver Doug Didero before moving on.
“We had a homebuilt car and motor operating out of a two-stall garage, so we did OK,” Matczak recalled. “We should have won our last ever race there, the Classic, but we ran out of fuel while leading with two to go. That would have been a great way to go out, winning a second Classic.”
Matczak’s memories date to the 1960s when another supermodified hero, Bentley Warren, drove for him on the USAC sprint car trail.
“We weren’t much on the dirt but we did well on the asphalt,” Matczak noted. “We won Pocono twice and he was a great talent, though a bit wild. I remember coming home from Hershey, Pa., one night and I was sleeping while Bentley drove the tow car because I had to work the next day. I woke up when I smelled smoke and I looked out and saw flames coming up the sides of the tow car. Bentley was going 100 mph and when I asked him why he was going so fast, he just said: ‘I’m trying to blow the fire out,’ and kept going.
“Tasi Vatis was helping us out with fuel and advice and one fall he asked us to meet him in New York for lunch,” Matczak continued. “At the end, he asked Bentley what he was doing next season and Bentley said he was going to drive for me. ‘That’s too bad,’ said Tasi, ‘because I was hoping you’d run my car at Indy.’ All our effort had finally paid off. Bentley was great in Indy cars and if he hadn’t gotten hurt, he would have been one of their biggest stars with the talent he had.”
Matczak’s memories and racing stories are priceless, but time to hot lap arrived. Hopefully, someone will take Skip’s place in the organization and maintain it to his high standards. But not tonight!
This story appeared in the June 7, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
