When former racers spend time reminiscing about their careers, it is uncanny how many of them are drawn to stories about the race that got away.
When former racers spend time reminiscing about their careers, it is uncanny how many of them are drawn to stories about the race that got away. Some are tales of unbelievably bad luck, such as an errant rock hitting a kill switch, or a seemingly insignificant part that faltered at the wrong time. Mike Brooks has those stories too, but with a significant twist. Brooks enjoyed a career to be proud of, and it rightfully landed him in the Knoxville Raceway Hall of Fame. Yet, the simplest nod from Dame Fortune or, notably, Mother Nature would have profoundly tilted the narrative about him. You see, in his case, two of the races that got away just happened to be two of the most important sprint car races in the land.
Mike was born to Chester and Alice Brooks in Marshalltown, Iowa in 1944. Soon thereafter, the family moved to the Knoxville area. Alice would serve as a homemaker and tend to the family‘s small farm, while Chester would find work in the boiler room at the Veterans Administration Hospital that now sits largely vacant adjacent to Knoxville Raceway.
Sixty years ago, the census of Knoxville, just under 8,000, was about the same as it is today. Then, as it is now, the race track was an important facet of community life. One thing‘s for certain, young Mike Brooks didn‘t miss many races starting in the 1950‘s and counted legend Earl Wagner as one of his heroes.
By the time Brooks was 16, he was working in the trucking business, still too young to obtain a chauffeur‘s license required to legally make runs for his firm. With a wink, he hints that he might have snuck out on the road a time or two. He already wanted to race, but it was perfectly clear that to do so he would largely be on his own.
Even in a town where the racetrack was the main attraction, in his words, his parents considered racing “dumb.” In fact, his father never saw him race, and his mother made one trip to the race track late in her life. Where the will is strong, obstacles can be toppled. Friends Dwayne Robuck and Larry Klein, the son of the proprietor of a local Standard service station, were willing to chip in and make things happen. “We got a 1955 Chevy,” Mike says, “gutted it, put in roll bars, put a hopped up small block in it and went super stock racing.”
In racing, it is funny how quickly plans change. “When we started out, two of us were going to race,” Brooks recalls. “Jim Rihard was going to run it over at Oskaloosa and I was going to race it at Newton. We didn‘t have a quick change rear end, and we had to change the pumpkin because we were using a ¾-ton pickup rear end. In Jim‘s first race at Oskaloosa, he wasn‘t doing well and we were giving him a hard time.
“I think it was in the B-Feature, he went off in turn three, rolled over and caught on fire. We just had a tractor gas tank. We all went over there and he was nowhere to be found. He just took off running. He was scared to death, so he never raced again. We fixed it up and I ran it all the time after that.”
He finished second at Newton his first time out. Shortly after that, he finished in the runner-up spot again, but this time he crossed the stripe upside down. In that timeframe, he raced against Archie Ergenbright, who captured a track championship at Newton. Archie would later become well known to fans of Knoxville Raceway, and also be inducted to the track‘s hall of fame. In the early going there were a slew of top-five runs, but Brooks soon got a lesson that is all too familiar to novices in the sport. He realized that many of his peers had him outgunned. “I realized some of these guys had chassis from Nichels Engineering,” he says with a laugh, “and those people were building cars for NASCAR.” Nonetheless, he persisted, and got his first win at Newton in 1968.
Before he made his way to sprint cars, he gave late models a try. Iowa is certainly known for sprint car racing, but the state has produced a plethora of outstanding late model drivers as well. Brooks decided to wade into those deep waters, and acquitted himself nicely. “I raced a late model at Des Moines,” Mike says. “And at that time the State Fairgrounds was competing against Knoxville, and doing pretty well. They had some pretty big names showing up there. I drove for a guy named Dick Elliott out of Mt. Ayr, Iowa. He had a Chevelle, and it went pretty darn good. We were third in points and he serviced the thing and started it up without any oil in it. It blew it up, and it pissed him off so much he just parked it.”
While all of this had been reasonably satisfying, it was time to go back to the place that had captured his imagination, and where the marquee names were Wagner, Blundy and Weld.