Maria Cofer showed up to her first race in White City, Ore., with her dad, a horse trailer and a box stock car that sported a clunky intermediate frame as she was too tall to fit in the standard car body.
While the operation was a bit thrown together, the 100-mile drive across the California-Oregon border was made with purpose. Cofer was there to put her growing love for motorsports to the test and determine if racing was, in fact, her calling.
Spoiler alert: It was.
“I was serious. I knew as soon as we started that it was something that I loved,” Cofer said. “I wanted to drive.”
While drag racing is the vein of motorsports that travels back the farthest in the Cofer family tree — with her dad’s uncle and grandfather, John and Herb Batto — the younger Cofer found herself pulled in a different direction. When asked where it all started, she recalled the day she asked her dad to take her to a go-kart race in Red Bluff, Calif. — over two hours away from their ranch up north in Macdoel.
“He lit up. We went on a Saturday to watch the race and then on Monday, we were picking up my first race car,” Cofer said.
Following the tried-and-true path of young racers, Cofer first took the wheel of a QRC outlaw kart. Then, at age 17, she made transitioned to midgets. Later, a deal with Toyota led to some stock car testing, but the California native was content to let her late model career fade after a single race.
“That’s where my heart is at, it will always be on the dirt,” Cofer said. “I just looked up to my dad so much and I really wanted to follow in his footsteps.”
Johnny Cofer was a USAC midget driver during the 1980s and ’90s. He collected 10 feature wins in the USAC Western States Midget Series, one Western championship and two wins on the national circuit. Injury eventually led him away from driving in the late ’90s.
A few decades later, Johnny was back, but in a completely different capacity. He and Cofer established themselves as a duo at the track beginning with that first road trip to Oregon. Johnny has fielded midget cars for her to drive — under the Cofer Racing banner — and has stayed close with her as crew chief on the weekends.
But with his wisdom and years of experience as a midget driver, he was careful not to apply too much pressure to his daughter’s budding career. As she puts it, they took it one race at a time and didn’t discuss the long-term goals too often.
“All we did was go after the championship that year, and that’s what we would focus on,” Cofer said. “There was never any pressure to make it a NASCAR career, or something like that.”
By the time Cofer started on the national midget circuit, the father-daughter team had put hundreds of miles on the horse trailer, towing it to regional races across the West Coast. One highlight of their California adventures included winning the Bay Cities Racing Ass’n Dirt Midget Series championship in 2017.
Cofer was the first woman to do so.
But in 2017, something a little less known to the world occurred — something that took a silent toll on Cofer for the next five years.
“I had a pretty big flip at Southern Oregon Speedway and I just didn’t feel right for about a year after that,” Cofer said. “And it scared me a little bit.”
Once the initial injuries wore off, Cofer did her best to shake it off and put her nose to the grindstone again. Things picked up the following year when she received an offer from Toyota to run a few national USAC events in 2018, which she eagerly agreed to do.
From 2018 to 2021, Cofer made annual appearances at the Chili Bowl Nationals, raced off-and-on in the POWRi midget league and on the USAC national midget tour, and spent a year away from the sport to “come into her own” off the track.
But the Cofer name was still circulating in the dirt track industry, which became evident when she took an out-of-the-blue call from Brent Cox, team principal of Abacus Racing, in mid-2021.
Cox had a full-time midget ride waiting for her with his newly-formed race team.
By September, the then 22-year-old was signed and making headlines as the driver of Abacus Racing’s No. 57 entry. The pair debuted at the BC39 at The Dirt Track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in mid-August and had plans to run the final seven races of the USAC season.
“We were pretty good right out of the gate, which is always a plus with a new team,” Cofer said. “We were expecting to take the whole year just to get our feet underneath us, but it felt like after five races, we were right there with everybody else.”
On Sept. 22, Cofer earned her first fast qualifier award in the USAC National Midget Series at Gas City (Ind.) I-69 Speedway.
But that wasn’t the most memorable part of the night.
By becoming the fast qualifier, Cofer and her father wrote themselves into the record books as the 17th parent-child duo and second father-daughter duo to set fast times since the series’ inception in 1956. Johnny earned the qualifying award in 1995 at Ventura (Calif.) Raceway.
“It’s surreal when those types of articles come out and you’re like, wow, we made it. Who would’ve thought — I mean, we were racing outlaw karts out of a horse trailer,” Cofer said with a laugh.
She entered 2022 with Abacus Racing as a force to be reckoned with — her dad continued to lead her crew. However, as the year went on, Cofer began to wrestle more with the gnawing feeling that it was time to step away from racing.
The aftermath from her wreck at Southern Oregon Speedway in 2017 had lingered, and for the past several years, severe headaches impacted Cofer’s daily life.
“I never said anything about it. As a driver, you sweep it under the rug and keep going,” Cofer said. “It took me a long time to be able to have that conversation with my dad, just because I loved racing with him so much.”
It became a problem Cofer could no longer ignore by October of 2022, when she formally announced her retirement and departure from Abacus Racing. As her exit from the dirt track world mirrored the way her father left the sport more than 20 years earlier, Johnny acted as a comforting voice throughout the process.
“He completely understood and agreed that, this is a sport that, if you’re not 110 percent committed, you shouldn’t be in the car at all,” Cofer said. “It wasn’t fair to the team to not be fully committed … That’s why I stepped away.”
It might’ve been one of the hardest decisions the 23-year-old has ever made, but long-term concerns about her overall health took precedence over her desire for a long-term career in racing. After all, the pressure was never to make it big.
At the beginning, it was just a daughter’s dream to follow in her dad’s footsteps. And in the end, that’s exactly what she did.