The father-and-son duo Pat Bealer and Zack Bealer won on back-to-back nights during the East Coast Indoor Dirt Nationals in Trenton, New Jersey. A week before that, though, it didn’t seem like either one would even race the event.
Zack intended to run the sprint fielded by Jared Lilly. Wire harness problems prevented that from happening. When Zack found out the issue, he immediately called his father, Pat, who was racing in Florida at Marion County Speedway in Ocala, Florida. Zack asked his father if he could ship his car home ASAP. Pat called his friend Kyle Knecht to see if he could add the car to his trailer on the way back to Pennsylvania. Knecht agreed and the car arrived Tuesday and Zack immediately got to work.
Meanwhile, Zack’s wife, Morgan Rochelle Bealer, who was going to drive a car owned by Gary Collucci, received some surprise news. She was pregnant with their second child. Morgan vacated the seat and they decided Pat would be a good fit. Pat hopped on a plane and arrived Friday.
Both father and son qualified for the Friday feature, an impressive feat considering the 96-car field. With five laps to go, Zack engaged in an epic battle with Kenny Miller III, besting him to win the feature in his father’s car. Pat finished fifth, and both father and son earned a spot in Saturday’s championship race.
The next day, Pat Bealer shined. He duked it out with Anthony Perrego and made a daring three-wide move amidst lapped traffic to win the Saturday feature.
(For more on Perrego, read “Anthony Perrego: On the Rise in the Super DIRTcar Series.”)
“I teased my son that I got the biggest check,” Pat, who collected $5,000, said. “He didn’t do bad, though, getting $2,250 for his win.”
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.
