Twenty-plus years is a long time, as Mathias Lux can attest to. Finally, though, Mathias cracked victory lane, winning the IMCA stock car feature last Saturday at Worthington Speedway after a three-way battle with Justin Luinenburg and Connor Vande Weerd.
“I’m a huge Dale Earnhardt fan — he hadn’t won at Daytona for 20 years,” Mathias, of Hartley, Iowa, said. “That kept playing in my head over and over as I kept trying to win a feature,”
Mathias had started racing in enduros in 2000. He then moved into weekly racing, starting with bombers, then hobby stocks and eventually stock cars. In stock cars, he made headlines in the way he wished he hadn’t, with a long flip down the backstretch at Buena Vista Raceway, earning the worst wreck of 2014 honors by Speed Shift TV.
In 2017, Mathias started Reaper Chassis building a stock car for himself and for others in that division as well as hobby stocks. While his customers had success, Mathias still couldn’t find victory lane.
“It always seemed that if something could happen during a race, it happened to me,” he said. “I was so close so many times.”
Mathias discovered an issue preventing him from experiencing success while working on a customer’s car, owned by Mike Hansen.
“It was a left-rear shock problem,” Mathias said. “We put Mike’s shock on my car and when we scaled it, we got a completely different result then we were used to.”
Mathias enlisted the help of Wade Cross, of FX Suspension, to obtain the load numbers he needed.
Last Saturday at Worthington Speedway, Mathias Lux came to the track with just one crew member, Matthew Daigle. He told Mathias, “I’ll only help you if you put on a show.”
Mathias came through, holding off Justin Luinenburg and Connor Vande Weerd in the closing laps.
“On the last lap I felt like I was slow, but I wasn’t,” Mathias said. “I had no idea who was behind me but I knew Justin was probably there, and he won three championships at Worthington Speedway.”
When flagger Matt Stubbe greeted Mathias in victory lane, Mathias asked him, “What do I do? I never did this before.”
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.
