Freddie Rahmer, the 28-year-old son of National Sprint Car Hall of Famer Fred Rahmer, has emerged from his father’s shadow to become one of the top 410 sprint car racers in central Pennsylvania.
Here are the highlights from Rahmer’s 2023 season:
■ Led the nation with 17 410 sprint car victories;
■ Scored 14 of those feature wins en route to a fourth consecutive track title at Lincoln Speedway near Abbottstown, Pa.;
■ Won two features and captured his third straight track crown at Williams Grove Speedway in Mechanicsburg, Pa.;
■ Edged Danny Dietrich by four points to earn the J&S Classics Central PA Sprint Car Series championship.
Fans wouldn’t know it from that list, but racing a winged sprint car has never been Rahmer’s primary occupation. Instead, he earned a mechanical engineering degree from Penn State University in 2018 and works for a company that specializes in the fabrication of custom stainless steel equipment.
“It’s tough to race for a living and I’m glad we didn’t go down that route,” Rahmer told SPEED SPORT. “I never really thought about racing full time. My parents (Debbie and Fred Rahmer) were big on making sure we all got really good educations after high school, got college degrees.
“I always knew I was going to race as much as I could, but I’m glad I did what we did and got college out of the way. I have a really good job and I still get to race like 70-plus times a year at a lot of good tracks.
“Luckily, I have a boss who lets me take off here and there, a few hours early and different times to make it even possible,” Rahmer continued. “If I had a traditional 8 to 5, there’s absolutely no way I could do it.”
Rahmer, who resides in his hometown of Salfordville, Pa., splits his racing schedule between the No. 8 sprint car owned by Rich Eichelberger and his family’s No. 51 entry.
“Rich Eichelberger’s shop is in Dillsburg and I race for him at the Grove and Lincoln, and some other tracks. I go up there some after work during the week and most of the time we stay over after Lincoln even if we’re not racing on Sunday to get a jump on the following week,” Rahmer explained. “He has good guys that help wrench. If I’m not helping get that car ready, I’m working in our shop to prepare our car, or preparing shocks at our shop for the weekend. We put a lot of time into it and that’s the only way it works.”
During the season, Rahmer has a routine that accommodates both his work schedule and his racing schedule.
“Unless something’s goofy on a Friday, I work from 7 to 2:30 and I leave an hour early from my job. Then, my wife (Arynne) and I head out to Williams Grove. Sometimes my dad may go along,” Rahmer explained. “We go straight out there and usually get there about the time they open. We go over a couple of things on the car and we are pretty much ready thanks to the preparation during the week. Sometimes, if it’s a bigger show I’ll just work half a day, so we can be mentally prepared without rushing around for the entire day.”
Freddie Rahmer, his brother Brandon and sister Chessie are triplets, and the siblings developed a unique bond while growing up as a racing family.
“My dad raced for a living and a lot of the races were Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and a majority of the weekends, especially during the summer, we would stay in a motorhome from track to track,” Freddie Rahmer recalled. “It was great because we were always together. It made us very close, and we are still very close, if not closer now that we are older.”
Their father’s schedule delayed the inevitable, but Freddie and Brandon Rahmer eventually went from working on race cars to driving them.
“We didn’t run karts or anything like that because it takes so much time to be competitive. We started racing when we were probably 14, running in this Speedster class up here,” Freddie Rahmer recalled. “We probably only ran 10 to 15 shows the first year or two, maybe a little bit more than that. A friend of ours would take us on nights if my dad was racing somewhere else. So there for a while, the first two or three years, we didn’t race much at all because dad was doing it for a living and we helped a lot. We didn’t want it to distract from that, so we didn’t race very much until dad retired from driving.”
Fred Rahmer hung up his helmet at the end of the 2013 season but remains active as a car owner, crew chief, mechanic and mentor to his sons.
“I don’t know, honestly,” Freddie Rahmer responded when asked about the best advice he’s received from his father. “The biggest thing outside the car, my dad probably worked harder than a majority of the people in racing or in anything; he’s very dedicated and he taught that to me and my siblings.
“My dad was also big on being composed inside the race car. That’s something you can say but it takes a while to learn. He’s been an owner, driver, mechanic and on all sides of this thing for a long time. He’s good about trying to keep you level-headed.”
Rahmer says he’ll be looking for better results this season while running basically the same schedule as last year.
“We’ll probably run about 50 races in Rich Eichelberger’s car — Williams Grove, Lincoln predominantly, then some Susquehanna (BAPS Motor Speedway) shows and maybe some specialty shows in between there,” he said. “In our family car, we’re gonna run all of the Port Royal shows, Selinsgrove, Bridgeport, Grandview, Hagerstown, things like that. We would like to do a little bit of traveling so I get out of my comfort zone and I can improve as a driver – maybe go to Lernerville or go back to Charlotte, we only went there once. Or maybe even a trip to somewhere else to try to get to the next level. We’ve achieved some good things in 2023, but we want to step it up a notch.”
With the split at the top of the sprint car pyramid, Rahmer sees an opportunity.
“We’ll run all of the Outlaws shows and all of the High Limit races in our area,” he said. “We’ll support them both. It will be an interesting year. We’re not on one side or the other. I like to run the best I can and have a chance at winning when either one shows up.”
Rahmer points to beating the World of Outlaws as his greatest accomplishment, so far.
“The best single night would have been in 2018 when I won the Outlaws show at Lincoln,” he said. “I think I have 60 wins exactly at the moment, and every one of them is important. It’s also a big deal for myself and my family to win the Williams Grove and Lincoln points. There’s a lot of history there, we grew up there and that’s important to us.”
It’s no exaggeration that central Pennsylvania sprint car fans have literally watched Freddie Rahmer go from toddler to track champion, but the second-generation driver says fans rarely see his true personality.
“Away from the race track, I’m a totally different person than what fans normally see,” Rahmer shared. “When we are at the race track, it’s very serious, very quiet. Away from the track, I’m a lot more open and easy-going — I like to joke around.”
Rahmer, who exchanged wedding vows with girlfriend Arynne Moody in late November, has one simple goal for his future racing endeavors.
“I would like to do a little bit of traveling here and there, but I always want to run in Pennsylvania and be one of the top guys around here,” he said. “My goal is to be the best we can be wherever we show up.”