Kurt Danko wasn’t the first teenager to buy a car without telling his parents. The difference was this car had only one seat and it came with a trailer to haul it around.
Danko, who was 18 at the time and a recent graduate of Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, had purchased a Camaro race car and a trailer to go with it.
“He came into the house and said he wanted to buy a race car,” said his dad, Bob Danko of Prospect Heights. “Of course, I told him no. Then he said, `It’s too late, Dad; I already bought it.’ That put us in a tough spot.”
Five years later, Kurt Danko, 23, is one of the up-and-coming drivers at the Rockford Speedway, which opened in 1948 and is one of only two area tracks sanctioned by NASCAR (Santa Fe Speedway in Hinsdale is the other). Most of the drivers Danko races against are in their 30s and 40s.
Nearly every Saturday night from early April until late September, Danko can be found flying around Rockford’s quarter-mile concrete, banked-oval track. Danko, who lives in Island Lake with his wife, Sharon, also races occasionally in NASCAR Northern Series events in La Crosse, Wis.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Elko, Minn.
Danko took Rockford by storm in 1990, when he was the Speedway’s Late Model Rookie of the Year. The next year he won the Most Improved Driver award and, in 1992, he finished 11th of about 20 drivers in the season point standings. His 1993 season ended early after a serious crash, and a Memorial Day crash has made for a tough season this year.
Racing a stock car can be a struggle, and there’s no end to the things drivers must do: find the money to keep his car on the track, deal with safety concerns, entice promoters to invest in his team, recruit a volunteer pit crew, compete against more experienced drivers, rebuild his car after running into a wall and give up much of his free time. But he’s willing to do it to keep his dream alive.
While Bob Danko is usually in the pit area throughout the evening of his son’s racing, he still has mixed emotions. As for Kurt’s mother, Sharon, she won’t even go to the track. She stays at home on Saturday nights and tries to think about other things.
“Kurt is my only son,” Bob Danko said. “It’s a tough situation to be in. Do you encourage Kurt, knowing how hard he works at chasing his dream? Or do you discourage him, when you consider the safety concerns and when you think about what a tough life he’s setting himself up for? But when we realized how serious he was, we decided to stand behind him.”
Swede Johnson of Rockford is the Raceway’s competition director. “Kurt is an extremely talented young racer-heavy on the young,” Johnson said. “In a lot of ways, he’s still in the learning process. But he’s also very determined, and he’s gained the respect of his peers. Lots of drivers’ careers begin and end here in Rockford, and they know that going in. But Kurt has bigger aspirations and could make it happen.”
A night of racing at the Rockford Speedway begins for Danko about 1:30 p.m., when he hooks his trailer to his pickup truck and begins the 90-minute drive to Rockford. One Saturday night earlier in the summer was more hectic than usual. Danko had been involved in a serious accident five weeks earlier when he was racing at the La Crosse Fairgrounds Speedway, and this was the first night he had his car ready to race.
The Memorial Day crash occurred on lap 44 of a 50-lap feature race. Coming out of turn 4, the right front wheel of Danko’s car made contact with another car, and both racers went careering into the wall.
“We were going about 95 miles per hour coming out of the turn, and within 20 feet we were going 0. That was a pretty abrupt stop,” said Danko, who has never been seriously hurt in a racing accident. “But the car did its job and absorbed the impact. We ended up throwing away the front half of the car.”
Danko, who has worked at his dad’s Precision Car Care shop in Arlington Heights since he was 17, learned most of what he knows about cars by working with his father.
Danko stores his car in the garage of friend and crew member David Wasmund of Wauconda. In a typical week, barring any major problems, Danko spends about 20 hours working to improve his car. “There are so many things to do,” he said. “I’m always triple-checking and quadruple-checking everything.”
Danko rented a backup car so he could keep racing at Rockford this year while his own car was being rebuilt, but on this night he was back in his own No. 101 racer, after several all-nighters in the garage.
Danko’s car, with its heavy-duty roll cage, Good Year Racing Eagle tires and removable steering wheel, has no doors. There are five gauges, telling the oil temperature, water temperature, oil pressure, RPMs and voltage. There’s only one custom-formed seat, and a fire extinguisher is Danko’s co-pilot.
Racing a late-model stock car is an expensive pursuit. Building a brand-new car runs about $24,000. It costs about $20,000 a year for Danko to compete at Rockford; that has to cover entry fees, gas for the pickup, hotel bills, racing fuel, motor oil, tires and all sorts of other expenses. “And one trip into the wall can throw your budget all out of whack,” he said.
Annual sponsorships, most of which Danko is responsible for getting, contribute about $7,000. Primary sponsors are his dad’s Precision Car Care; his uncle Norm Danko’s racing shop, D&H Motorsports, in Sun Prairie, Wis.; Angle Tool in Elk Grove Village; R.A. Adams Enterprises in McHenry; and Wholesale to the Installer in Elk Grove Village.
Associate sponsors, which donate parts and equipment, include Auto Meter gauges, B&V Racing Enterprises, Bassett wheels, Bilstein Shocks, Country Kitchen restaurants, Dorman fasteners, DuPont, Fel-Pro gaskets, Fresh Air Systems, Goodridge hoses, Quarter Master clutches, Split Fire spark plugs and Super-X chemicals. Each gets a sticker or decal on Danko’s car. Anything not covered by the sponsors is Danko’s responsibility.
Roger Freeman of Arlington Heights, product manager for Fel-Pro in Skokie, said Fel-Pro sponsors about 200 drivers across the country. “Kurt is a good spokesperson for our company,” he said. “He and his team go about racing in a very professional way, and Kurt does well racing against a lot of crafty veterans.”
In a good year, Danko can make $5,000 or so on the track. Even when you combine sponsorships and winnings, Danko is in the hole at the end of the year, a fact that’s not lost on his wife. But she’s a fan, this day, showing her racing loyalty with a black-and-white checkered watchband.
“We’ve made a lot of sacrifices, sure, but things seem to work out,” said Sharon, a 1985 Hersey graduate who married Rick in 1992. “The way I see it, the car was here before me, and there’s no way I could ask Rick to give it up. Besides, I love to watch him race. I drove his car around the track here at Rockford once, and it was a huge rush. I can understand why he loves it so much. It’s an addiction.”
Danko admits to being occasionally frustrated. “I’m doing the work of three or four people,” he said. “I’m the driver, I hustle for sponsorships, I build the car and I work on the car. Sometimes it seems like it never ends, and what’s frustrating is that no matter how hard you work, you’re dictated to by your financial situation. Every year there are new rules and new technology, and if you don’t keep up you’ll fall behind very quickly.”
Danko, his wife and the crew arrive at the racetrack at about 3 p.m., which is when the non-stop tinkering on the car begins. The uninitiated might think that drivers simply climb in the car and roar around the track, but that’s far from the truth. Danko, acting crew chief Steve Smith of Belvidere and his other volunteers spend two hours working on the engine, tires, suspension, brakes, transmission and everything else, looking to improve the car.
At 4:45 p.m., Danko hurries to put the various promotional decals on his car. At 5 p.m., he changes into his triple-layer fire-resistant driver’s suit, and by 5:30 p.m. he roars onto the track for practice laps. Then it’s back into the pits, where the car is jacked up and worked on all over again, followed by a second round of practice laps, followed by more adjustments. Then the car is weighed by track officials.
Crew member Dave Swanson, a tool and die maker from Lake Zurich, has worked with Danko for three years. “I don’t have any desire to drive,” he said. “Working on the car is a hobby for me. Our wives are friends, and we went out one night to look at Kurt’s car, and I got hooked. It’s a challenge, week in and week out, to create new ideas with the goal of making the car lighter and faster.”
Along with Swanson, Smith and Bob and Norm Danko, other crew members include Dave Wasmund of Wauconda, his brother Doug Wasmund of Hoffman Estates, Karl Steiger of Arlington Heights and Tim Juskiewicz of Prospect Heights.
About 6:15 p.m., it’s time for qualifying, when drivers each take two timed laps around the track to determine their starting positions. Then the car goes back for more work as Danko attends a drivers meeting. Before the feature race, each car competes in a 12-lap race against eight or nine other cars.
Uncle Norm Danko of Moston, Wis., raced at tracks in Wilmot, Wis., and Waukegan years ago. “Kurt’s a very good kid, very dedicated. Anybody who would wreck a car as bad as he did and then come back has guts,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to watch him, although I do get nervous. He’s not just another driver out there, he’s my nephew. But he has very quick reactions and knows how to get out of jams.”
After all the practice laps, qualifying heats and 12-lap sprints are out of the way, it’s time for the 50-lap feature, the event that most of the 4,000 racing fans in attendance came to see. Imagine a track around a high school football field. Now put 18 bulky stock cars operated by hard-charging drivers traveling upwards of 85 m.p.h. What do you have? Loud chaos.
Danko is leery about setting specific goals, although in a perfect world his racing career would culminate at the Daytona 500, driving against the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Hut Stricklin and Rusty Wallace, who used to race at Rockford.
“I want to concentrate on what I’m doing now and work my way up the ladder,” he said. “I get bleary-eyed looking too far ahead. When I started this whole thing, I’d only had my driver’s license for two years. And I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way.”
While Sharon cleans the inside of the windshield, Danko buckles the intricate system of safety belts (“the best that money can buy,” he says), then hooks up the Fresh Air Systems tube that circulates clean air into his helmet. The 18 cars leave the pit area and head out onto the track.
After two pace laps, the green flag is dropped, and Danko, who started on the inside of the first row, bursts into the lead. Holding a conversation in the stands is almost impossible, as the 18 high-powered engines scream around the track. A car spins out on the fourth lap, which brings out the yellow caution flag.
“I don’t think about how racing feels when I’m doing it,” Danko said later. “You have to focus so much. It’s all concentration, 100 percent. There’s no time for daydreaming. You’re too busy looking at the cars in front of you, making sure you have room to react if somebody spins, looking in your rearview mirror, watching for the more aggressive drivers.
“Most of the guys I race against are a lot older and see me as a punk kid. But that doesn’t bother me. The way I see it, on the track we’re all equals. Am I scared? Before the start of the race it’s the worst, but when the green flag drops, the adrenaline takes over.”
Driver Tom Gille, 33, of Rockford, who has the grizzled look of a stock car driver, described his fellow driver as “wild when he first got out here, just like we all are. But Kurt’s got a good head on his shoulders, and he’s 80 percent better than when he first started. When he first came to the track, I was scared to run with him. But those days are gone. Now I’ll run with him all day long.”
After a three-minute delay, it’s back to racing, and Danko holds the lead through 17 laps. After getting tied up in traffic, Danko drops to third place. Then, 13 laps later, disaster strikes. His 2-year-old engine is blown, tonight’s racing is over, and Danko and his wife are faced with another crisis: Where do they get the $6,000 for a new engine?
The driver and his crew are disconsolate in the pits, as Dennis Miller of South Beloit, Wis., wins the race by a half-length. (Drivers earn $75 to start the feature race and $350 to win it. Qualifying race winners receive $30.)
Bob Danko tries to keep his chin up. “Racing is a week-to-week deal, and we all know that,” he said.
Drivers receive points depending on where they finish in qualifying, qualifying races and the feature race. In a typical night an average driver earns about 100 points. “If you miss one night of racing, the points you lose are hard to make up,” Kurt Danko said. “Of course, the more points you earn, the higher you finish at the end of the season, and the easier it is to gain sponsors during the off-season.”
After the feature race, the pits are opened up, and racing fans of all ages descend on the drivers, asking for autographs and looking at the cars. Danko has seen better nights, but he puts on a happy face for the young fans, signing everything they thrust in front of him. “This is tough,” he said, pointing to his blown engine and leaning on his wife’s shoulder for support. “But we’ve been down before and bounced back.”
Sure enough, after a week full of telephone calls and late nights in the garage, Danko is able to get an engine built and placed in his car. And just like his dad predicted, he’s back on the track the following Saturday night, driving 85 m.p.h. to who knows where.
