Rookie vs. veteran
Slinger title race comes down to friendly rivals: one veteran, one rookie
From opposite ends of the career spectrum, two rivals and friends meet for the Slinger Speedway title.
“I’m standing along the wall, talking to a bunch of little kids and he walked up and said, ‘Yeah, I gotta start school Wednesday.’ I’m like, oh, my God, I can’t remember high school.” Rich Bickle, 60, on meeting 17-year-old rookie Luke Fenhaus, left
Dave Kallmann
If a fan with a vivid imagination had set out six months ago to come up with a creative ending to a racing season, these might have been options:
● A 60-year-old racing for the final time at the racetrack that helped launch his career wins the title again, completing a 32-year circle.
● A 17-year-old rookie adds a track championship to the list of lifetime accomplishments he checked off there in a single week.
Either would be compelling.
But if you put two such fanciful storylines on a collision course, what you get is Sunday night at Slinger Speedway.
“It's something I haven't chased since '89 and really wasn't planning on doing it,” said Rich Bickle, one of the premier short-track asphalt racers of
the 1980s and ’90s who is approaching the end of a 45-year career. “But then we were leading and running up front and I thought, what a way to go out.
“It’s just been fun. It’s been a fun ride.”
To win the title at a track Bickle ranks in his top-five favorites of the 226 at which he has raced, he will need a near perfect night and some luck. A gap of 25 points to Luke Fenhaus means if Bickle is fastest in qualifying and wins the feature, he’d still need Fenhaus to finish worse than second.
Expect a clean fight if they’re together on the track. As the two have battled back and forth this season at Slinger and elsewhere, they have developed a friendship and mutual respect despite the generation gap.
“We laughed pretty hard there Sunday night standing by the fence,” said Bickle, an Edgerton native who won the 1983 and ’89 Slinger titles.
“He walked up to me at intermission. I’m standing along the wall, talking to a bunch of little kids and he walked up and said, ‘Yeah, I gotta start school Wednesday.’ I’m like, oh, my God, I can’t remember high school.”
Fenhaus is a senior at Wausau East High School. Highlights of his summer break include winning the prestigious Slinger Nationals in July, earning a spot into Slinger’s round of the nationally televised Superstar Racing Experience four days later and finishing second, between IndyCar’s Marco Andretti and three-time NASCAR champion Tony Stewart.
“I’d love to get another win,” Fenhaus said. “The wins are huge for the Kulwicki Driver Development Program.”
The KDDP honors the legacy of 1992 NASCAR champion Alan Kulwicki, the 1977 and ’78 Slinger champ, and offers career guidance and financial support to young drivers. To emerge as champion among the seven finalists would be worth more than $54,000 to Fenhaus, and he is the early leader.
“So I’m hoping to get another win,” he said. “That’s the goal, just run good Sunday and try and get fast time again and go for the win. If that happens, the points will take care of themselves.”
There are two ways to look at the spread between the leaders.
The first is qualifying, which pays points to the fastest five. Fenhaus led the way in time trials in eight of the nine regular events and Bickle the other. The disparity there alone accounts for 59 points.
“I’ve tried not to look at that, but that’s kind of what kept me in the points the first five, six races,” said Fenhaus, who has one regular-season feature win. “We’ve just got to find a little bit more for our race run.”
Then there were two spectacular turns in the first half of August that wiped out a 51-point lead by Bickle and nearly Bickle himself.
Racing in a pack four laps into the Aug. 1 feature — the night he set the fastest time — Bickle was pinched into the backstretch wall and climbed the fence, where his car was torn to shreds. A fence post pierced the car but missed Bickle.
“I went from driver to passenger in less than a second and I’ve never wrecked a car that bad,” said Bickle, who spent more than 15 years in NASCAR, mostly part time.
“The car was just a rocket. And in four laps it went from a rocket and me thinking I’m going to win this race so easy it’s ridiculous to almost going through the fence and killing people.”
Fenhaus finished third and trimmed 26 points from Bickle’s lead. Then the next round, two weeks later, Bickle crashed with Alex Prunty and finished 11th while Fenhaus won his first regularseason feature to score maximum points. The 49-point swing gave Fenhaus his first lead since June, and the gap stayed at 25 last week.
Adding one more layer to the championship races is that Fenhaus and Bickle also both compete on the ARCA Midwest Tour, which has its richest race of the season Saturday night in Wisconsin Dells.
Bickle’s team has pondered which car to take to which race, given the one they would have preferred for both races was reduced to a few parts and a heap of scrap a month ago. Fenhaus has looked into contingency plans in case of a crash Saturday but is fully expecting to put in a long night turning the car around.
Then it’ll come down to 103 laps Sunday, three in qualifying and 100 in the feature. Regardless of the outcome, the champion will have a good story to tell.
“Rich is a really good guy. I really enjoy him,” Fenhaus said. “It was cool to get that connection on his last year of racing.
“He’s a hard racer, he’s very aggressive, he’s always on top of the wheel, but if you’re on his bad side, that might be a bad thing. But luckily we’ve hit off that connection, talked quite a bit and we’ve got along really well. Now I’m just going into this next one and hopefully it stays like that.”