After years in modifieds and sprint cars, Jon Haegele returned to his roots — enduro racing.
“I raced eight years in a sprint car and it just got to be too much, so I stepped away,” Haegele, of Ivyland, Pennsylvania, said. “I started racing enduros at the beginning of my career, right after .25 midgets. My dad ran enduros at the old tracks of Nazareth [in Pennsylvania] and Flemington [in New Jersey]. He always had enduro cars around. I remembered how much fun enduro racing was.”
In 2022, Haegele, along with his father, Steve, and uncle Rick, picked up a 1975 Chevrolet Nova to turn into an enduro car. They race it in the big car class of the Outlaw Enduro Racing Series at Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania.
“It’s Sunday afternoon and we just say, ‘Let’s go racing,’” said Haegele of the appeal of the class that doesn’t run every weekend. “There is no monotony of weekly racing’s thrashing every night to get the car ready week after week. We just load up the car and go.”
Last Sunday, Haegele won his feature after battling Brandon Guyer.
“We have two neighbors, Brandon and Travis Guyer, who race against us,” Haegele said. “The rivalry goes back to our dads and the late Tim Pauch, who was also part of the neighborhood.”
Then Haegele lent his car to his father to compete in the mechanics race. His father wound up winning it, beating the Guyer brothers’ father, Doug.
“To beat Doug — we go back a long way — was exciting,” said Haegele’s father, Steve. “To win on the same night as Jon was special to us. All I can say is that the thrill is still there, in the enduro division.”
At the end of the day, Jon Haegele proudly showed off his winnings — a trophy and $230.
“We live an hour or so away from the track, and that money will cover our gas,” Haegele said. “We were paid for having fun.”
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.
