King of the Mud – Ed Sanger

By Gary Jacobson – Post Bulletin

Rochester, Minn. (1975) – Chasing down Ed Sanger for an extended interview is just about as difficult as chasing him down on a dirt track. The Waterloo, Iowa, stock car driver and race car builder is always busy. If he isn’t competing, he’s building. If he’s not doing maintenance on his cars, he’s selling parts to other drivers. Then there’s the 200-acre farm he just purchased last year near New Hampton.

I had been trying to get together with Sanger for an interview since June. “I’ll be a lot easier to talk to as soon as I get all of my beans in,” he said at the time.

Among all of the planting, rock routing, cultivating, and racing – Sanger runs between 80 and 90 races a year, putting over 30,000 miles on his hauler – I finally got a chance to speak with the short track specialist, sitting with him at the Country Kitchen, not far from the Sanger Racing Garage on Falls Avenue in Waterloo.

Ed Sanger is generally regarded as the premier stock car builder and driver in Iowa. He may hold that same distinction anywhere on dirt. In a sport where many operations with heavily financial backing often have difficulty surviving, Sanger has thrived on his own skill and shrewd business sense. He builds winning cars, and he’s built a winning racing business.

Sanger concentrates on his racing activity in the upper Midwest, but he also ranges far from his Iowa home base to compete at tracks in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Indiana. His biggest win came last fall in the World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. Sanger collected $7,300 for the feature victory, bettering some 120 other late model drivers from all over the United States. In February, he hauled his bright yellow #95 Camaro to Volusia County Speedway in Barberville, Fla., for a special series of dirt races held in conjunction with Speed Weeks in Daytona Beach. He finished third overall after four nights of competition. The field included NASCAR veteran and former Daytona 500 champion Tiny Lund of Cross, S.C.

Sanger was supposed to go down to South Carolina this winter and race with Lund, a former Harlan, Iowa, native. But Lund was tragically killed in a racing accident in Talladega, Ala., this past Sunday during a NASCAR Grand National race.

What makes Sanger run so hard? His stock car racing genius is probably best spelled D.E.T.E.R.M.I.N.A.T.I.O.N. and hard work. The 34-year-old farm boy from McGregor, Iowa, has been racing for 10 years, but they’ve been years of total commitment. He has made racing his life’s work. He thrives on its competition.

“You go through high school, and you compete in football and track,” Sanger said, explaining why he first started racing. “You thrive on that competition.”

“You’re competing for grades in class. They used to line up your test scores up on the wall. You get out of high school and go to college. College was kind of dry for me. I didn’t have enough money to be fanciful, so I had to work all the time. Well, that got to be old after a while, so I quit school after two years.”

“Then I started working. You’re working for someone else, punching in, punching out, taking your paycheck home, and it’s all spent. The same thing next week, punch in, punch out, take your paycheck home, and it’s all spent. You don’t get nowhere. There was no competition. But I was always looking for competition.”

“Then I started going to the stock car races and I see all of this competition, and I see where it might be possible for me to build a race car. I gathered enough information, so I knew what I was doing, and then me and a friend decided we were going to build one. He’s going to put up the money for the car, and I was going to do all of the mechanical work. That’s how I got started. The next year I was racing.”

Each of the past two seasons – his best from a gross income point of view – Sanger has grossed around $42,500 in prize money from racing his own car. So far this year, he’s won about $30,000 in prize money, winning 24 feature races. His best year for feature wins was 1973 with 40 feature wins; 1971 produced 37 feature wins. “I don’t know of anyone who has won any more than that on dirt tracks,” Sanger pointed out. “I don’t know of anyone who has won 40 features in one year on dirt.”

Last winter, Sanger Racing produced 22 Camaro chassis for other drivers. Sanger expects the car building business and related part sales to gross $250,000 this year. In 1974, he had sales of $113,000. He’s planning on building a new garage soon with a separate room just for selling race parts. When that facility is completed, he expects his gross sales to double 1975’s total, reaching the half million-dollar plateau.

The former Pontiac garage manager loves being his own boss.

“I could never be satisfied working at the John Deere plant (in Waterloo),” Sanger said. “I worked there three times, and I always quit about the day my 90-day contract was up. I quit just about the time I was ready to gain some rights. I said, “I don’t want to get hooked into this goddamn place just waiting to die. There’s 10,000 workers down there, waiting to die, waiting to retire. I didn’t want it. I’d rather slip around on the outside here, instead of being in prison. I’ll slip around on the outside and see if I can eek out a living.”

A short laugh accompanied Sanger’s use of word “eek”. He admits he’s done “pretty well” in racing. Pretty well, indeed. In 1971, he netted nearly $108,000 off his race cars. Some $32,000 of that came from the car he personally campaigned. In addition, he owned five other cars which were driven by Stan Stover and Red Dralle, both of Waterloo. Few big time, nationally known stock car drivers can boast of such success.

“1971 was a terrific year, just like they say in the whiskey business,” Sanger recalled. “It’s the year that really set me on my feet. Ever since, I’ve been kind of treading water because the costs have risen so much. In ’71, we were still racing on SuperSport tires.”

Sanger says the total maintenance expense for his car in 1971 was $5,800. Last year, that figure crept closer to $25,000.

One of the primary reasons for Sanger’s success in racing is analytical, almost philosophical, approach to problems. Ask him a question and watch him mold an answer, probing all the angles, getting to the substance of the problem in a peeling fashion, removing one layer of meaning and moving on to the next. You don’t get yes and no answers when you query Ed Sanger. You get a solid mixture of technological understanding, theory, and conviction. And if he doesn’t agree with you, you’ll get that too. Occasionally, he loses his temper. I’ve seen him curse uncontrollably and vow to park an offending driver.

But most of the time he keeps himself well under control, even when disagreeing with promoters. Recently, several Iowa racing promoters have been actively engaging in changing rules to bring down the costs of building and maintaining race cars. Sanger, like the industrialists at the turn of the century, wants a hands-off policy instead.

“You fix your rules the way you want them, and you fix your purse,” he tells them. Let us decide how much money we want to spend on our race cars. We’ll seek our own level.”

Ed Sanger would have gotten along famously with John D. Rockenfeller.

Reliability is the key to making money with a race car stresses Sanger, who claims he’s never loss money on a car he’s personally raced. “You can win and win and win and then blow, but the guy whose been running steadily every night is going to make more money than you for sure,” he said. “Because if you win five in a row and then blow in one, you’ve canceled out three wins as far as costs go. I once figured that if I end up finishing third in every race I entered, I would’ve earned more money than doing what I did. Counting first place finishes is one measurement of how successful you are. But it’s not as important as the money you win.”

Sanger arrives at his reliability through simplicity of construction. The simpler the cars are, the easier they are to put together and work on. Every piece has a function. There’s something like 140 pieces in one of my own chassis,” he says. “If I could cut that down, I would, because it would mean less work for me.”

Sanger considers dirt track racing a greater challenge than asphalt racing. “On asphalt, it’s all the car, on dirt you have to drive it. Take a young driver and put him in the best car at the track,” Sanger explained. “On asphalt he’ll run right up front from the start. On dirt, he’ll finish last. On asphalt, you have to put in a year’s apprenticeship, one dirt, it’s three years minimum.”

During Sanger’s apprenticeship days, he christened himself “Captain Crunch”. “You see, we were racing on a quarter-mile then and part of the game was crashing around,” Sanger explained. “I thought it was appropriate that I was captain of the crunchers, so I painted it on my car. The game’s changed since.”

“I served my apprenticeship. Every night of the week I was in the garage until after midnight. My relatives and neighbors would come over and laugh. They couldn’t figure out why I was working so hard. Well, I don’t work that hard now. But if someone wants to follow me around for a year, I’ll guarantee that they’ll get tired.”

Coming from a man wearing faded blue jeans, a blue work shirt, and with grease and dirt streaked on his hands, you get the unmistakable conviction that you’re hearing it straight. Yes, you would get tired.