SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Jakeb Boxell has spent the last couple of seasons on the road with 4 Kings Racing as a mechanic and part-time driver on the team’s USAC efforts.
In 2026, the 20-year-old Zanesville, Indiana, native will get the opportunity to race for 4 Kings full-time in USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship competition in a two-car operation alongside teammate, Kevin Thomas Jr.
Boxell owns 15 career USAC National Midget starts dating back to his 2022 debut, and for the last couple of seasons, has been under the 4 Kings Racing stable. In 2025, he got the chance to make 12 feature starts and rewarded the team with a pair of top-five finishes at Indiana’s Bloomington Speedway (fifth) and a career-best result at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway (third).
For Boxell, it’s a testament that hard work and perseverance pays off, and now, he gets his opportunity on the 29-race tour in the coming year.
“Ever since I started racing, one of my big goals has been to run a full season with the USAC National Midgets,” Boxell stated. “We had pretty good runs last year, and Rex (Turner), Matt (Westfall), Fred (Edwards) and Phil (Westfall) all came together to make it happen and I am able to run full-time this upcoming year. I’m really excited.”
Speaking of Westfall, the Boxell and Westfall relationship goes back a ways. When Matt was a regular on the NAMARS Midget tour in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was Jakeb’s father, Greg, who was a crewman for the team. Greg worked at Bordner Welding, a longtime sponsor of Westfall’s racing efforts over the decades.
Jakeb began his racing career in karts before moving on to micro sprints and USAC’s Midwest Thunder Midgets. With the USAC MTM series, he won twice, in 2024 at Ohio’s Limaland Motorsports Park and again in 2025 at Indiana’s Circle City Raceway, a race in which he started 18th. In 2024, Boxell finished a solid third in points.
Reaching back even further, Jakeb’s great-granduncle owned a midget in the 1940s before moving on to boat racing. Greg Boxell raced karts for a time. But when Jakeb was born, his father purchased a kart for him, and together, they went racing, and it’s taken off from there.
A common thread throughout Jakeb’s early racing years was that his karts were built by Westfall. In fact, Westfall built all of Boxell’s karts over the years. Matt has known the Boxell family since Jakeb was in diapers. Now, as the crew chief for 4 Kings Racing, Westfall is one of Jakeb’s bosses. Way before they got the chance to work together, Jakeb considered Westfall to be his racing hero. Some things never change.
“It’s definitely got to be Matt,” Jakeb said. “People laugh at me and think it’s funny because he’s my boss. But four or five years ago, I would’ve never known he was going to be my boss. It’s just the history of the stuff that Matt’s done. He’s got USAC Sprint Car wins. He’s got midget, late model and modified championships. He’s done too much for him not to be one of my heroes. He’s the guy you want to look up to that does a whole lot of different racing and he’s really good at all of it.”
Boxell knows these cars in and out with his mechanical role in recent years. On a regular basis, he works on 4 Kings Racing’s Midget and Silver Crown stable and is seen at all USAC events turning the wrenches.
“When you work on them, you obviously know what the components do other than just dragging your suit bag from your car to the race track,” Boxell explained. “When you learn the technical stuff about it, it makes you a better race car driver in my eyes.
“I actually moved in with Matt two years ago when he called me. I work at the shop every day, and sometimes even through the weekend. If we’re busy, it’ll be a seven-day project,” Boxell explained. “I help put them together and we get them to the racetrack. I do maintenance, build cars and tear them apart. So, it’s pretty much from bare frame to race ready and from race ready to bare frame.”
As an added perk, Boxell will race alongside fellow USAC National Midget full-timer Kevin Thomas Jr., a six-time series winner who finished third in the standings one year ago.
“Between Matt being our crew chief and Kevin Thomas Jr. being my teammate, when we all have questions, we get into a circle,” Boxell said. “They’ve all raced a long time and I’m just the young buck here. They’ll explain to me what I need to change with my racecraft to make me better. Just having really good people to lean on and knowing that they’re going to support me and have confidence in me, that’s definitely a booster in my morale.”
