Just how much did Dustin Smith earn for winning two 200-lap enduro features this weekend? That’s right, $11,000: $5,000 each plus a $1,000 bonus for winning both. The victories came during the Midwest Championship Enduro 200 on Friday and Saturday at Clay County Fair Speedway in Spencer, Iowa.
“I built my car from an old modified chassis that I bought for $300 more than 11 years ago,” Smith, of Lake City, Iowa, said. “It was homemade from there — every and any doohickey we could dream up.”
Smith built the car with his brother Devin, a two-time IMCA Super Nationals stock car champion. Dustin won the IMCA Super Nationals, too, but in a hobby stock. Dustin’s also the 2009 national IMCA stock car champ. Both have two national IMCA hobby stock titles.
Regardless of their more recent record, the Smith brothers got their start in enduro racing during he 1990s. They recently returned to it to prepare a car for the Lone Star 600 in October at 105 Speedway in Cleveland, Texas.
“We used to knock out the windows and go racing,” said Dustin. “Things have evolved since then. Devin uses an old stock car chassis. We built bars around it and made it look like a station wagon.”
Despite the evolution of enduro racing over the years, it still offers relatively no-fuss racing, according to Dustin. That’s just what Midwest Championship Enduro 200 promoter Mike Vondrak wants.
“Two hundred laps, no cautions, no going on and off the track, no hot laps — just racing three- to four-cars wide, with cars rarely tearing each other up—that’s the incredible attraction to enduro racing,” Vondrak said. “The difference is that everyone knowing they have to go 200 laps instead of 20 laps, so they respect each other’s cars.
“Two hundred laps of seat time made me a better stock car driver. I learned how a track changes, how important it is to drive my lines, and how to be patient in passing other racers.”
As far as the $11,000 haul, Dustin Smith outlined how that will help the Smith family of racers.
“I’ll take that $11,000 and put it back into the other cars,” said Dustin. “That will pay for a lot of ball joints and suspension parts we may need.”
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.
