As the calendar flipped to early November, all Dominic Scelzi needed to do at the Stockton Dirt Track was show up. After a dominant run of six victories and 13 podium finishes over the 20-race schedule, Scelzi could wrap up his first 410 sprint car championship with the NARC-King of the West-Fujitsu Series.
As the calendar flipped to early November, all Dominic Scelzi needed to do at the Stockton Dirt Track was show up. After a dominant run of six victories and 13 podium finishes over the 20-race schedule, Scelzi could wrap up his first 410 sprint car championship with the NARC-King of the West-Fujitsu Series. He only had to take a qualifying lap to claim show-up points.
But Scelzi doesn‘t do “show-up.” He never learned how. Not when your dad, the pater familia of this racing family, is a four-time NHRA world champion in some of the fastest cars on the planet. Gary Scelzi never taught either of his sons that just showing up was good enough.
As the night ended, Scelzi had to roll his battered car into victory circle to accept his championship accolades. It came following a rare DNF when he was caught up in a three-car incident while running in a podium slot.
It was a rare night in a year of unrivaled success. Scelzi and crew chief Jimmy Carr had a season that athletes in many sports dream about. Baseball players imagine hitting a home run to clinch the World Series. Golfers dream about sinking a putt to beat Tiger Woods. Many racers can only dream of beating Helio Castroneves at Indy.
Scelzi‘s 22 victories and two championships — he also won the Kings of Thunder 360 series championship at the Thunderbowl in Tulare and Hanford‘s Keller Auto Speedway — in a single season was the stuff of dreams, especially for a driver who almost quit racing when he doubted he could win.
Throughout the season, as the wins and post-race interviews piled up, Scelzi repeatedly described being “humbled” by his reversal of fortune.
“I‘ve never had this kind of success, not even close,” he said, about a year “that has changed my life.” Indeed, he won nearly as many races in a single year as the 27 he won over nine previous years driving a sprint car.
At Stockton, Scelzi captured a championship he had dreamed about and chased often, only to have it outrun him. Sometimes it was inconsistent results on the race track. Twice, his broken body derailed him, once while he was leading the points chase.
But the year that changed Scelzi‘s life was the result of a two-year rebuilding effort and, in a sense, nearly a lifetime in the making. Teaming Carr with Scelzi culminated a lifelong friendship between the two families that began when Scelzi the Younger was still wearing onesies.
And the year that changed the life of a driver who almost quit also rejuvenated a road-weary veteran crew chief who was ready to ride off into California sunsets on his Harley-Davidson.
The combination of the two was like a May-December bromance on a team infused with a nitro-like competitive attitude trickling down from its mentor.
Scelzi sat in a sprint car for the first time wearing a onesie and couldn‘t have known then that it was a harbinger of a future career. But five years later, when he was old enough to understand what he was looking at, he fell in love with sprint cars.
“My dad was a sprint car fan and he and Danny Lasoski were good friends who had met before I was born,” Scelzi recalls. The family had flown from an NHRA event in St Louis where his dad had been racing to take in a charity modified race and the World of Outlaws sprint cars in Sedelia, Mo.
“It was the first time I had ever seen a sprint car and I immediately fell in love,” Scelzi said. “I had never seen or heard of what a sprint car was or what they were about, but when they started them up, I turned to my mom and said that‘s what I‘m going to do.”
If this was Hollywood, that would be a great lead-in line to a Frank Capra classic movie, whose work was so sappy that filmdom called it “Capra-Corny.”
In keeping with that script, Scelzi showed championship-winning speed at the age of six. But the path from that championship to this one had its share of deep valleys. And ironically, the intensity that fueled Scelzi‘s run to this year‘s title almost derailed his career before it began.
Scelzi‘s introduction to racing was intended to be a bonding between father and son in a junior go-kart. “I was always home on Wednesdays,” recalled the elder Scelzi, who was a full-time NHRA racer at the time. “We would make laps all afternoon until six o‘clock and go home and on Thursday at 5 a.m., I was headed to the airport for wherever I had to go.”
The pair would also race on Sundays when Gary was home.