KING OF THE OUTLAWS : With 5 U.S. Titles in Row and 22 Wins in Last 24 Races, Steve Kinser Is the Man to Beat in Sprint Car Racing

When it comes time to select a Driver of the Year, the choice will come down to Dale Earnhardt, the NASCAR stock car champion, and Bobby Rahal, the Indy car champion. It’s nearly always that way, but perhaps it’s time to look at another field--sprint cars.

Steve Kinser, a powerfully built 32-year-old former wrestler from Bloomington, Ind., has amassed a record in the World of Outlaws this year--and over the past 10 years--that defies comparison.

Earnhardt has won 11 of 26 races, Rahal 3 of 14 in Indy cars and 3 of 5 in International Motor Sports Assn. sports car events. Neither is close to Kinser.

Kinser has won 44 of 67 races, a remarkable .656 average. More noteworthy is that he has won 22 of the last 24. In 10 years with the Outlaws, Kinser has won 212 races, including the U.S. Nationals at Knoxville, Iowa--the Indianapolis 500 of sprint car racing--the last five years in a row. He’s won $1,785,000 in purse money.

He is known as King of the Outlaws.

So it’s only sprint cars, you say, a funny bunch of roughnecks calling themselves Outlaws.

Once it was that way, back in 1978 when a promoter named Ted Johnson gathered together a group of drivers disenchanted with the United States Auto Club circuit, scheduled a few races for a $2,000 minimum purse and called his series the World of Outlaws.

In the 21st annual Pacific Coast Nationals, starting tonight at Ascot Park, the purse will be $93,000 for three nights of winged racing and a Sunday night for non-winged California Racing Assn. cars. The Outlaws’ season payoff this year is $3.3 million.

The Outlaws are the most truly national series in racing, competing in 22 states from New York, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, across the Midwest to California and Arizona. Attendance for the season, when it ends next week in Phoenix, is expected to top 1 million.

Kinser, who has clinched his eighth championship, and his fifth in succession, is the catalyst.

He is the man the fans come to see, and he is the man to beat.

“I came along at the right time, and because I did, there are a lot of good, young drivers in the Outlaws today,” Kinser said. “When I started in racing, no one wanted to give a young guy a chance. The purses weren’t enough to allow an owner to have a hired gun. Most of the guys ran their own equipment, and most of them were older guys who could afford it.

“Now the purses are up where an owner can have his hired gun. That’s really what I am, a hired gun to drive what’s provided me. Seeing me making so much money has attracted a lot of young drivers and if they’re good, there are owners out there waiting for them.”

Kinser readily admits that he has a secret weapon: Karl Kinser, his car owner and chief mechanic.

“Karl’s not really related to me,” he said. “Oh, maybe he’s a distant, distant cousin, but that man out-works, out-thinks and out-performs anybody in racing. He deserves 85% of the credit when I win a race. I know that.

“My equipment is better than anybody’s, so I have a little edge every time I go out on the track. People think we grew up together, but the truth is I didn’t know who Karl was until I started driving for him in 1978. I sure don’t want to leave him now, though.”

There are so many Kinsers in southern Indiana that you need a score card to keep them straight. Some nights, on bull ring tracks in such hamlets as Putnamville, Brownstown, Warsaw, Liberty and Haubstadt, as many as three or four Kinsers may be in the same race.

Bobby Kinser, 56, who is Steve’s father, is still a racer. He holds the track record at Kokomo for sprint cars, drove on the USAC circuit for years and still wins his share of races.

Mark Kinser, 24, is Karl’s son and runs the World of Outlaws circuit as Steve’s teammate. In 1985 he became the second-youngest winner of a World of Outlaws feature race and this year is sixth in driver points.

Kelly Kinser, 28, is Steve’s cousin and races sprint cars on the All-Star circuit around Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Randy Kinser, 27, is Bobby’s son and Steve’s younger brother. He drives occasionally with the Outlaws and has toured Australia with his brother.

Sheldon Kinser, 44, is another distant cousin. He was the best known until Steve came along. Sheldon won the USAC sprint car championship three times and drove six times in the Indianapolis 500. His best finish was a sixth in 1981, his last year at Indy, but now his career is over. Sheldon has cancer of the throat and is not expected to live the year.

“It seems that Kinser’s a popular name around Bloomington,” Steve said. “The fact that so many of us are racers makes us seem like one big family.”

There is something of a familial atmosphere around the Kinser household. Steve’s wife, Dana, is not a racer but her father, Owen Snyder, raced midgets under an assumed name because his boss did not approve of racing. Her stepfather, Jim McQueen, is a USAC sprint car mechanic, and her brother, Owen Jr., is chief mechanic for Rick Galles’ Indy car team of Geoff Brabham and Jeff McPherson.

“She and the kids (sons Stevie and Kraig, with another child due in January) live the same life I do,” Kinser said. “They travel with me as much as they can, either in the motor home or on airplanes. I try to convince her that when we’re traveling, it’s like a vacation, but I don’t think I’m very convincing. She loves the racing, though. We’re just one big racing family.”

If 85% of his success stems from Karl, Steve credits his wrestling career at Bloomington High School for much of the remaining 15%. Kinser was runner-up in the Indiana state prep tournament as a sophomore and was champion in both his junior and senior years.

“I’m sure that wrestling has been a big help to me in driving a sprint car,” Kinser said. “I had a coach who stressed the mental importance in competition, that you do your winning in your head. He also made our drills go fast, always telling us to rely on quickness. Wrestling was big in high school around Bloomington and I’m glad because I think the lessons I learned on the mat give me a little edge right now.”

Kinser was champion in the 132-pound class. Today he is a muscular 190.

“People don’t believe I weighed 132 once, but I was a starving boy back then,” he said, laughing. “Karl works like the dickens to make my car the lightest one on the track, and then he goes out and hires one of the heaviest drivers.

“That weight hurts in qualifying when you try to get all the speed out of the car you can but sometimes I think in a race it might be a little advantage to have that extra weight on the back end of the race car. It feels like it helps keep it stable. At least I tell Karl that.”

The powerful sprint cars are second only to dragsters in weight-to-horsepower ratio. Kinser’s No. 11 Gambler, for instance, weighs 1,300 pounds and its 410-cubic-inch engine puts out 730-750 horsepower. The engines come from aluminum blocks made by Ronnie Shavers of Torrance, but as Steve says, “All the extra horsepower stuff is done in our shop by Karl because we like to keep it to ourselves.

“I’ll admit it, the other guys don’t have the horsepower that’s in my car and I want to keep it that way. When we had our work done outside, it wasn’t long before everyone had what we knew. We’ve made three motor builders rich in the last three years.”

For someone who became so successful so quickly, Kinser is unusual in that he didn’t start racing until he was 21.

“I grew up around racing, watching my dad run sprint cars, but there was never any money in it so when I got out of high school I went to work as a hod carrier and bricklayer, like my dad. He used to work four days a week so he could go racing three. It was pretty tough duty raising a family of kids at the same time.

“I’m sure glad they started paying money to drive sprint cars because three years was long enough to be laying brick. In 1976 I drove in a couple of races and the next year I won the Bloomington track championship.

“What really opened things up for me was that Karl noticed me. He had Dick Gaines driving for him, and he was really good. Karl knew my equipment wasn’t nearly as good as his, so when I started giving Dick a good run for his money, Karl talked to me about driving for him.”

That stroke of good fortune coincided with the birth of the World of Outlaws in 1978. The Kinsers won the first championship and, except for two years when Sammy Swindell won, the Outlaws have become Kinser’s private domain.

Curiously, despite his winning elsewhere, Kinser has never won a major race at Ascot Park. He has won a couple of main events, but never the Pacific Coast Nationals.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I like Ascot and I usually run strong here, but I just haven’t won. I’ve been second four times and I don’t think Buster Venard beat me more than a couple of inches in ’78. That was my first race out here and it’s the closest I’ve come to winning.

“Ascot has a character of its own with really tight corners and two long straightaways. What makes it special is all the history behind it. It’s also the only track in the country that still runs sprint cars without wings. That makes it tough on the local guys when the Outlaws come in for a winged show. Realistically, they don’t have a chance.

“I started out driving without wings, so I know how they both handle, but I prefer the wings because they’re safer, they’re about two seconds a lap faster and they’re smoother to drive. If you get in a corner too hot in a non-wing car and hit the cushion wrong, you’re going to pay for it.

“In a wing car, you can usually work yourself out of it. It’s harder to get a winged car upside down, too. As many races as I run, if I ran without a wing all the time I doubt if I’d sitting here as healthy as I am today.”

The trademark of winged cars is a 5 x 5 airfoil, called the billboard, mounted above the driver’s head like some empty grocery box.