At 58 years old, no one needs to remind Terry McCarl that his days of pounding the cushion in a winged sprint car are rapidly coming to an end.
“Yea, I’m slowly fading away,” the second-generation racer from Altoona, Iowa, told SPEED SPORT. “My wife (Lori) wishes I would have quit last fall, but I tell her, ‘I’m still pretty decent.’
“I don’t like those guys who retire and come back, and retire and come back. I probably won’t say, ‘I retire,’ until I really mean it. Right now, I’m helping the boys (sons Austin and Carson) get their careers going. It’s so hard to find good crew members and, of course, find the money to race competitively.
“I don’t want to do it if I can’t race for feature wins and go for championships. I don’t want to just show up and race. The end’s probably pretty close, but you never know. It might be this weekend, or it might be next year.”
After running primarily a 410 sprint car throughout his career, McCarl is now a regular in the 360 sprint car division. In fact, he’s the defending 360 champion at Iowa’s Knoxville Raceway, his home track.
“I want to race the 410, but I don’t want to race against my sons. It’s really hard. I’m really competitive and I don’t want to beat them. I also don’t want to be involved with them if we get into a crash,” McCarl explained. “As a father, it’s something that’s very difficult to do. Especially as competitive as I am. I went down to a 360 so I can still race at Knoxville. It’s only 30 minutes from my house.
“When you want to win a championship and beat the guys — there are some really good teams in the 360 division at Knoxville — it takes a lot of money to do that. I don’t have the sponsorship or the crew to do it as hard or as well as I want to, so I thought it would be better to help the boys. I think I’ve run like 10 times this year. I won a couple in Florida and ran third at East Bay in the finale. We’ve run OK at Knoxville, but I’ve kind of missed the boat a little bit because I haven’t been that focused. I’ll try to run a 360 in the 410 Nationals, and I’ll probably run another 20 times this year.”
Born into a racing family, McCarl’s father, Lenard, was a successful sprint car driver at Knoxville Raceway and other midwestern tracks.
“My dad did not want me and my two brothers to race,” McCarl recalled. “He would not help us. He broke both of his legs twice, broke his back, he got hurt a lot. He didn’t want us to race. Consequently, I didn’t race anything until I was 18. I bought a go-kart on my own and raced it for a year.
“Then, a kind of sad thing happened. A good friend of ours, Daryl Arend and his son Chris, they ran their red No. 1a sprint car for years and had a lot of different drivers in their car at Knoxville and in this area. Chris came down with cancer and he didn’t survive,” McCarl shared. “He was young and was Daryl’s right-hand man with the team. A lot of people thought Daryl was going to quit racing and he might have, but I called and asked him if he would let me drive his car in 1985 and, shockingly, he let me. Until two weeks before I raced at Knoxville, I’d never even started a sprint car.”
McCarl was named rookie of the year at Knoxville in 1985, launching a lifelong journey that has taken him from weekend warrior to the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame (2017).
“When I got out of high school, I went to college and then I installed IBM phone systems for a regional company here in the Midwest,” he said. “I had a company car and a good job, retirement and all that type of stuff, but I quit it to become a race car driver.
“My dad told me that once you get racing in your blood, it’s hard to ever get it out. When you get used to this lifestyle — this gypsy lifestyle — it’s hard to go back to what some would call a normal life.”
Those who keep track of the numbers claim McCarl has won more than 300 sprint car features. His résumé includes 59 triumphs and seven championships in Knoxville’s headlining division. He’s also a 13-time winner with the World of Outlaws, has 15 victories with the All Star Circuit of Champions and has topped the 360 Knoxville Nationals four times.
“I’m really into the history of racing, so being in the Hall of Fame means a lot to me and I’m pretty proud of that,” McCarl responded when asked about his greatest accomplishment in racing. “I won a lot of races, but I never won the big ones. I think we were fast enough a few years and close enough to win the Kings Royal and the Knoxville Nationals. I’m pretty proud of that.