When Robert Bell headed onto the track for the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Nationals, he used a motorized wheelchair to push his midget to the line. In this instance, fellow racer Christopher Larson, of Round Rock, Texas, helped steer the race car while Bell manned the wheelchair. The two switched places when Bell came off the track.
“I’m using a wheelchair not because I am handicapped, but because I need to save my energy to drive,” Bell, 57, of Colfax, Iowa, said. “I survived Covid-19 this past year, and got pneumonia. But, the wheelchair was something I have been using for three years. It has plenty of power to move the car around.”
Bell, a corn and bean farmer, finds a way to race despite meager means. For example, he buys GM Ecotec engines in quantity.
“I pay about $50 for them,” said Bell. “We’re the lowest of the low-budget racers. We work in a garage with a dirt floor. We have a potbelly stove and old carpets on the dirt.
“Desire — that is what keeps me going.”
Bell had an up-and-down week during the Chili Bowl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He started it off with a blown engine in practice.
“I found a friend to get me an engine and drop it off in Kansas City,” Bell said. “I drove four hours there from Tulsa on Monday night and back to Tulsa on Tuesday morning.”
On Thursday, Bell and his lone crew member, Tim St. Arnold, had his car ready to go. He qualified well enough to start on the pole of the third heat race on Thursday.
“We were in a heat with the hot hitters, but I felt we had a chance — my car was running so good,” said Bell. “But the car wouldn’t run. It turned out to be the crank sensor wire. It broke off when a dirt clod hit it during the hot-lap session.”
Bell looked to change his luck on Saturday.
“We were second fastest in hot laps and started on the pole of the M-main,” Bell said. “But, again, the car wouldn’t run. The pulley came off the crankshaft. I forgot to use Loctite.”
While heartbroken that his Chili Bowl ended there, Robert Bell tried to remain positive about the experience.
“We did have fast times in time trials and hot laps — that was the good that came out of a long weekend,” said Bell. “I’ll be back next year, showing all these guys we can do it. We had a chance to win the heat race and the M-feature. The chances just got by us.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
