By all accounts, Zach Zeitner had a good year. Let’s start with the obvious: He earned the IMCA late model national championship.
Add to that three track titles: Crawford County Speedway, Park Jefferson International Speedway and Shelby County Speedway.
And he visited victory lane 16 times in 38 starts.
Yet, Zach had even more to celebrate.
In October he and his wife, Sydney, introduced their second son, Lawson, who will join his old brother Baker in cheering for Zach.
To support his family and make racing feasible, he works as a full-time supervisor for the public works of La Vista, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha. In the winter, he becomes the “snow boss,” overseeing the city’s snow removal operations. On the side, he mows lawns to earn extra cash. It’s a busy life for Zach.
“It has been hard juggling family life, work and racing,” Zach says. “When you are running good, you want to keep on running good, but you have to show up for your family. You’re a husband and father first.”
Family is big for Zach. His father, Al, and his brothers, Mel, Dale and Leon, all race. So do their sons, including Zach’s cousins Corey, Justin and Kevin.
“I watched my dad and uncles race at I-80 Speedway and at Shelby County Speedway [since I was a kid,” Zach says. “When I started racing, there were seven of us still racing in the late model division.”
All in all, 2025 was quite the year for Zach Zeitner and his family.
“In all the years the eight of us have raced, this was the first national championship for our family,” Zach says. “Next season we’ll pick up where we left off — we won five of the last six features we were in. We’ll go for championship number two.”
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.
