“Steve Moore continued to drive the car after it became mine.”
Mac explained that, although he had a desire to be a driver, his time spent behind the wheel of a sprint car was brief, to say the least — starting and ending with a hot lap session at Golden Gate Speedway. “I go out for the first time and I‘m going around and around, and all of a sudden this six-cylinder stock car goes streaking by me. That shouldn‘t be the way it was. Another thing I noticed was that I could see the front tires and it was very distracting to me. I thought to myself, ‘I‘m meant to be the mechanic on this deal.‘ I‘ve been a mechanic ever since,” he adds with a laugh.
A turning point in his life came when he made the decision to launch his own business. “I was 40 years old and working for the telephone company, where I had been working since 1964. I told my wife Carol one night that we‘re gonna do something different. I bought this vacant lot in Tampa; I sat down with a drawing board and a T-square and designed my shop. The only thing I knew was auto parts and I wanted to own an auto parts store.”
Auto Craft opened its doors in 1980. For several years, Steele‘s father, Richard (although, he went by the name Dick) and his wife Carol managed the business while Steele continued to work for the telephone company. Steele‘s children, Dave and Shelly, even helped with the family business, delivering parts and picking up parts from the warehouse once they were old enough to drive.
“It was profitable enough that it paid everyone‘s salary and paid for my racing. I kept my sprint cars there and could work on them when I needed to.”
When Dave turned seven, Mac introduced his son to karting, and later TQ-midgets, quickly finding that the boy had a natural talent. In 1990, his final year in the midgets, Dave won an amazing 24 of 28 feature events. It was time to move his son into the family sprint car for the 1991 season.
Mac informed his regular driver, Paul Southwick, that Dave would race the smaller tracks and Southwick could continue to pilot the car on the larger ovals. “He was pretty good right from the beginning,” Steele says with some pride.
Although Dave didn‘t lay claim to any feature wins that rookie sprint car season, he earned a second-place finish at Lakeland and contributed to Steele claiming the 1991 Pavement Racing Organization owner‘s championship.
The following season, Dave would claim his first feature victory, at Lakeland on May 8 during a Central Florida Sprint Car Association event. The team would claim two additional Tampa Bay Area Racing Association (TBARA) victories and a top-five finish in the Little 500 that season. But the elder Steele admits that he struggled with nerves watching his son in action in a sprint car. “It made my stomach turn watching him on race days. I would have to make sure I had TUMS before we left for the race track.”
Dave‘s performances soon caught the attention of fellow Tampa car owner Jack Nowling. Nowling asked Dave to drive for him in late-1993, and Steele effectively lost his driver. But, Nowling was able to provide an opportunity for Dave to participate in USAC Silver Crown and USAC National Sprint Car Series events in the Midwest and begin considering whether to pursue racing professionally.
Dave went on to earn an Associate of Arts degree from Hillsborough Community College and had enrolled in the University of South Florida, but he found himself pulled toward the option of dropping out of college and moving north to seriously chase a racing career. “I told him there have been 70-year-olds going back to college. If you wanna pursue racing, you gotta do it while you‘re still young.” Thus began, in earnest, a Hall of Fame career.
“When Dave and I started racing together, it was never a goal to go north and do USAC stuff. That never entered my mind,” Steele shares. “We were just gonna race local and have fun. If it weren‘t for Jack Nowling, that would have never happened. Jack was the first guy to take Dave up north.”