“One Sunday, he said: ‘I don‘t want to go, I don‘t want to race anymore because you get so mad when I make a mistake,‘” Gary Scelzi explained.
For the elder Scelzi, that was as jolting as a sudden stop at 300 mph. “I told him not to worry,” Gary Scelzi recalled. “I told him that we‘re gonna have fun. I don‘t care if you win or lose, as long as you don‘t get hurt.
“It made me think my desire to win went way beyond being a parent and it took that 6-year-old kid to make me understand it,” he added in a sober tone.
With a more lighthearted attitude, the younger Scelzi won a championship and eight races in a row, going unbeaten in the process, in karts that run about 40 mph.
“He never got beat and had a ball,” Gary Scelzi remembered fondly. “It was ridiculous. It got to the point where he would beat them so bad that he would slow down and let them pass him so he could catch them and pass them again. He didn‘t understand getting out in front.”
But before this story gets too “Capra-esque,” the hay bales would soon hit the fan, so to speak, and change the direction of the younger Scelzi‘s career. The next year, the ever-confident Scelzi moved up to a higher class of go-karts that hit speeds closer to that of a car on the freeway and learned a new arithmetic; that three into one doesn‘t add up.
In his first race, Scelzi was on the outside of three cars trying to go into the first turn at the same time and ended up in the hay bales. “Hay went flying everywhere,” the elder Scelzi recalled. “He had hay in his firesuit; hay in his helmet.”
At that point, the mater familia, Scelzi‘s mom, Julie, laid down the law. No seat belts. No roll cage. No racing.
That prompted Gary Scelzi to borrow a junior sprint car from Monte Faccinto so that Dominic Scelzi could make some laps. His first laps were at Visalia, 10 miles from the Tulare Thunderbowl and about a half-hour south of the family home in Fresno.
“The minute he got into that car it was wild,” Gary Scelzi said. Someone standing nearby, impressed by the laps the 6-year-old was turning, asked how long he had been driving those cars. The proud dad recalls his answer. “I said about 8 minutes.”
Gary Scelzi still remembers his kid‘s first win at Lemoore, a track that has honed the talent of a whole generation of California sprint car drivers, including Michael and Mitchell Faccinto, Cole and Carson Macedo and Cory Eliason, among others.
“I was in a Chicago hotel room and they had me on the phone while he was winning the race,” Scelzi recalled. “It‘s midnight and I‘m screaming and jumping up and down.”
For a time, the elder Scelzi was so emotional when his kid was racing that he limited Dominic‘s schedule. “I couldn‘t let him race on Saturdays on the weekends when I raced because I couldn‘t sleep whether he had a good night or a bad night,” Scelzi said. “My job was Sunday and I had to be sharp.”