On Monday, Kelly Shryock won his 100th IMCA stock car feature. Add to that 622 modified victories and that’s a whole lot of winning. His secret to success? SWAG. No, that’s not some Gen Z way of saying swagger.
“Scientific wild ass guesses,” Kelly said of what SWAG stood for. “I put a couple of SWAGs into play every night I race. It’s my simple philosophy — try this and try that — because what works today may not work tomorrow. But those SWAGs that worked are filed away to use in another scenario.”
Before stock cars, Kelly made a name for himself in modifieds across an alphabet soup of sanctions, including IMCA, USRA, WISSOTA and UMP. He started racing stock cars when his friend Pete Alexander let Kelly drive his backup car at Hancock County Speedway.
“I had such a blast I wanted to keep driving one,” Kelly, of Fertile, Iowa, said. “The next year, one of my modified sponsors, Mike Hauan, built a stock car for me and I have been racing in the division ever since.”
For Kelly Shryock, the stock car offered a refreshing experience of something new.
“It’s tougher to get a win in a stock car race,” Kelly said. “The cars have to be driver driven for them to win. You only have so much race car when driving a stock car. A driver has to learn … [how to] make a stock car do different things by changing your driving style a little bit.”
Geometry matters in a stock car, but not in the way you might think.
“Stock cars are not raced wide open 90% of the time like modifieds are,” Kelly said. “In stock cars, it’s all about angles. If you can’t hit the spot where you want to exit, you have to reposition your car on entry. You have to negotiate this without scrubbing traction. It’s important that your steering be 10° to 15° from straight to right, and 10° to 15° degrees straight to left. The steering wheel, working in that range, will get you there.”
The stock car also offers far less tunability with its suspension setup.
“There are no Heim joints, no pull bars, no adjusting pinion angles or checking spring loads like there are on a modified,” Kelly said. “I usually go up or down one or two holes on the trailing arm, and that’s it.”
Kelly, 61, feels he has several years of driving ahead of him. Proving that point, he went on a five-race winning streak this year.
“I’m no spring chicken,” Kelly said. “Right now, I am able and competitive, even at this age. Yet, I feel I never know when a win will be my last win.”
Kelly Shryock recognizes that his career may be nearing its sunset. He sold his Skyrocket modified-building business to Jim Chisholm of Balanced Speed. Kelly still owns the stock car side of his chassis-building business.
“I spent much of my life thrashing in the winter and thrashing in the summer,” Kelly said. “It was time to slow life down a bit. Before you know it, when you wake up and look in the mirror, there is an old guy looking back at you. Some day [I’ll] step back and go to the track not to race, but to help people.”
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.
