Contentment reflects being satisfied with your station in life.
Oddly enough, this is a rare sentiment in racing circles. After all, most participants long for better equipment, more accomplished help and a chance to devote every waking moment to the sport they love. If happiness depended on the attainment of each of these items, many would hold their head in their hands and lament their fate.
Jordan Goldesberry is not one of those people.
The 2022 Bumper to Bumper Interstate Racing Ass’n Outlaw Sprint Series champion has a full life.
“I work like everybody else,” he said with a laugh.
Whether it is landscaping, plowing snow or starting a screen-printing business he does everything he can to provide a good life for his wife Kristin and daughter Lexia. Make no mistake about it, Goldesberry hungers to race and he is good at it. Yet, he understands there are obligations that must be balanced.
These life demands are no cause for complaint and he realizes that most of his IRA peers find themselves in similar circumstances.
There is one other thing he shares with his closest rivals. He takes sprint car racing very seriously and when the helmet goes on his full focus is on getting to the checkered flag first.
Born in 1990, he calls Springfield, Ill., home. The capital city of Illinois has a great racing heritage.
The list of those who have won on the famed mile track on the north edge of town is a veritable who’s-who in both open-wheel and full-bodied competition.
He’s too young to have experienced the days of Joe Shaheen’s “Little” Springfield Speedway, yet ironically one of his accounts for snow removal is the very corner where the famed bullring once sat.
With that as a backdrop one might surmise his family has a long racing history. Not so.
“My dad would go to the track and I think he might have helped scrape mud, but he wasn’t racing or anything like that,” Goldesberry related.
What prompted Jack Goldesberry to purchase a quarter midget for his son is unclear.
“I remember going to the races at Broadwell just north of Springfield and I remember watching the races for the first time,” Jordan Goldesberry said. “But I know when he got the quarter midget at first, I wouldn’t let him start it with me in it. He had to just push it around the yard because I was terrified to start it. One day he just flipped the switch and off I went.”
The journey began with the Sangamon County Quarter Midget Ass’n and it took off like a shot from there.
“It’s funny,” Goldesberry said. “Because we traveled more when I was racing quarter midgets than we have ever traveled since. We went to California, to Pennsylvania, to Hagerstown (Md.) and down to Florida. It is crazy to think how much we traveled back then for basically just a trophy. It was fun or we wouldn’t have kept doing it.”
The quarter midgets served him well until he was around 11 or 12 years old.
Then the father-and-son team purchased a 600cc micro sprint and raced occasionally at Bell-Claire Speedway and were regulars at Pike County Speedway in Pittsfield. Having completed that apprenticeship by the time he was 16, he was ready to go sprint car racing.
He began in 360 sprint cars and almost by chance his first appearance came at Missouri’s Lake Ozark Speedway. In time he made his way to the Iowa-based Sprint Invaders series and an initial win came in 2008 at the Tom Knowles Memorial at Spoon River Speedway in Canton, Ill.
He eventually added 410 sprint cars to his plate and regularly signed in with the Midwest Open Wheel Ass’n.
Once he got a taste of winning, he liked it.
Come back to read Part II tomorrow.