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View From The PAS by Scott Daloisio |
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Steve Ostling Interview (PERRIS, CA, MAY 15 1999) Want to meet a real character? Want to meet the Mexican National Sprint Car Champion? Want to meet SCRA’s resident cosmetic surgeon? Well, look no further. We pinned him down for a half-hour before he climbed into the red #12 sprint car at Perris Auto Speedway on Saturday May 15th. Who is he you ask? Steve Ostling, a 36 year-old regular on the SCRA tour. Ostling is a whirlwind of activity. Before we started the interview he asked, “So you do some writing for Hoseheads?” Before I could answer, Ostling continued “I never get a chance to read it. I don’t have the patience.” He has a zest for life that is second to none. Ostling has a hard time answering a question without cracking up. It is no wonder that one of his favorite race drivers is NASCAR’s Kenny “Herman the German” Wallace. You think we are kidding about Ostling? Check it out for yourself. Read the first few questions, which ask about his adventures the previous weekend at Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix. Serious stuff to some. A disaster to many, but for Ostling it was a heck of a story that had him rolling with laughter. S.D.:
I had to be here at Perris Auto Speedway last week and didn’t go over
to Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix. However,
I heard that you and your crew chief had a rather exciting weekend (there were
two races). Lets start with you.
I heard a rock came through your face shield and hit you.
Is that true? OSTLING: Yeah, I seem to be a magnet for stuff flying up and hitting me. It didn’t go through the shield. It was a big old softball size hunk of something. It just smacked my helmet real good. It cut my cheek through the helmet and gave me a black eye. S.D.:
It happened in the main event. Was
it any deterrence to you? Did you
think of pulling in? OSTLING: No, we stayed out there. I was trying to pass Verne (his cousin Verne Sweeney) for fourth when it happened. After that I dropped back a little bit because it stunned me for a minute. I wasn’t worried about missing a piece of face or anything like that. So we hung in there and finished fifth and worried about it a little more later on. It was a little sore later, but while you are racing you do not worry too much about that stuff. S.D.:
Another question about your medical experiences in Phoenix.
Your crew chief. OSTLING: Yeah (laughing a lot). We were doing the routine stuff after the races, working on the motor. He tried to blow some fuel threw the fuel lines without hooking something else (up) and the fuel blew back into his mouth and he swallowed some. I guess it is pretty toxic stuff (laughing harder) so he spent the night in the hospital. S.D.:
That had to scare the heck out of everybody. OSTLING: (laughing even harder) Yeah, I think just about everybody but me. I was laughing so hard! I couldn’t help it. I knew he was going to be all right. I figured he could not have swallowed a whole lot. S.D.:
Easy, but painful way to get drunk. OSTLING: Actually that is what they did to fix him up in the hospital. They got him clinically drunk to slow down his metabolism. It took a while for all the tests to be run to find out how much he had in him. He got out the next morning about 8:30 with no hangover, so he was all right. S.D.:
Was he useful the next day? OSTLING: Oh yeah. He just had a sore throat. I guess it just burned his throat real bad. He was fine. S.D.:
A few seconds ago you mentioned trying to pass Verne Sweeney.
He is your cousin. Don’t you have quite a few other relatives who are or were
involved in sprint car racing? OSTLING: I am related to a bunch of them. Mike Sweeney (former CRA star), my Uncle Max (Sweeney, who lost his life in a midget crash at Ascot in the late 1970’s), Jac Haudenschild – my cousin is married to him. Bobby Hogle (legendary CRA star) is married to my aunt. My wife’s uncle is Tony Simon (Ex CRA & USAC star) and her other uncle is Rick Goudy (ex-CRA star). There is a bunch of them. S.D.:
Now the question is obvious. Do
these guys help you at all? OSTLING: No (laughing). No. You know you are pretty much on your own. S.D.:
There are a lot of main event wins between all of those guys. OSTLING: Yeah there is, but everybody drives the way they are going to drive. It is hard to teach somebody how to drive. You have to pick stuff up for yourself pretty much. It is real hard to tell somebody. I have got some bad habits that my crew chief is always trying to get me to do stuff to correct. Sooner or later I get around to doing them, but it takes a while. You get your habits and kind of go how you go. S.D.:
Okay, so what are your bad habits? OSTLING: I don’t know. I get the car in a little to sideways at some tracks and need to get it in straighter and maybe a little faster. I know I need to do it some times, but it is a matter of making the brain and the foot work together (laughing). S.D.:
How many years have you been racing sprint cars? I know you started back in the old CRA. OSTLING: I think this is my 14th or 15th year. S.D.:
How many main events have you won? OSTLING: Four, we have got to fix that up (he has four wins in 410 competition, but has also won in 360’s at Perris Auto Speedway). S.D.:
You waited a few years to win your first main event and then your second one was
pretty quick after that. OSTLING: The first one we won was at Ventura. It was just one of those nights. I think it was in 1995 and we had a new Drake (chassis). Right off the bat I knew we were going to win some races in the car because I liked it right out of the box. It was a few nights into the season and we won the race and then the next night at Bakersfield we won another one. We kind of got on a roll and I think we would have won three in a row, but at Hanford I got clipped by another car and kind of crashed. S.D.:
You had to do it different, too. You
waited until your car owner left town didn’t you? OSTLING: Yeah! You know I try not to do that, but it seems to happen that way. Three of the four we won has been when he has been gone (laughing). S.D.:
Why doesn’t he just stay away then? OSTLING: I don’t know (laughing). He was starting to get a guilty complex. I think we finally won one at Mojave when he was there. He felt all right about that. S.D.:
You race for a rather famous west car owner in Bill Pratt.
You two have been together for a long time haven’t you? OSTLING: I think I have been with him longer than anybody else has been with anybody else out here. It is probably nine years – ten years. S.D.:
What is the secret in keeping the driver/car owner combination together for so
long? I am sure there are a lot of
drivers and car owners who would love to know. OSTLING: I don’t know (laughing). If I can figure it out, I will let you know. They (they Bill and Evelyn Pratt) give me the stuff I want. At the same time, we are as easy going as we can be on his bank account. We try to watch the money. We do a lot of work on it (the car) and he does a lot of work. We seem to get along real good. S.D.:
Pratt has been at this a long time. Is
he pretty savvy when it comes to sprint cars? OSTLING: Yeah, he has been doing it a long time. I am not sure what all he can do. I think he likes to watch us do all the work. He washes it and takes care of it pretty good. We pretty much do all of the setup and putting it all together. He will put it together roughly during the off season. He gets it halfway together and we come and kind of fine tune it. S.D.:
You mentioned the setup. With SCRA
you run a few different racetracks. How
much of a variance is there on the setups at these tracks? OSTLING: We pretty much start with the same thing at every track weight wise. Other than changing stagger, we try to keep the car the same every race at the start. It is usually a pretty good starting spot and then we go from there. S.D.:
Last year at the start of the season you had some problems didn’t you?
It seemed like you should have put wheels on your roll cage. OSTLING: Yeah. That stuff seems to run in streaks. At least for me it does. Start of the season hasn’t been good for us for a few years. I think we wadded up a car every year the first night at Phoenix. Last year the same thing. The first night, first lap qualifying the throttle stuck and away we went. We crashed a few times and it wasn’t nothing I was really doing. Cars would fly out of the sky and land on me. That is the way it goes. You just have to race through it. Sooner or later it will change. S.D.:
Like you say, it was not what you were doing.
You seemed to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. It was not your
fault. Doesn’t that get discouraging? OSTLING: Yeah, it gets frustrating, but there is nothing you can do other than quit. That is not really an option right now. I still like racing. It’s more tiring working on the car and having the crew have to put cars together every week and stuff like that. We don’t have a lot of money so we try to use all of the same stuff if we can. Take it apart, have it all straightened out, put back together. That is the way it goes. Hopefully it doesn’t happen that way all the time. Knock on wood, we have been doing a little better this year. We haven’t been real fast. We got a new car and it took us a while to figure it out. We changed some stuff pretty recently and the car has been a lot better. I am looking for good things the rest of the season. S.D.:
What kind of car is it? OSTLING: It’s an Okie. Basically it is a copy of the Drake. They work together, kind of. It is a little different than the last one we had and we have another one we are supposed to pick up tomorrow so we have an extra one for the tour (Ron Shuman’s SCRA World Championship Series). Hopefully we won’t need it, but you know, we are not going back there without any spare parts. S.D.:
The tour. Do you like running those
tracks back east? OSTLING: Yeah, I didn’t go back last year (Indiana Sprintweek). I haven’t been back there for quite some time. It is fun to get out and get to different places. There is definitely a comfort factor coming here (Perris Auto Speedway) as often as we do. You have to have a little change of pace. I like steak, but I don’t think I could eat it every night. I have got to have something else every once in a while. S.D.:
Do the tracks out here compare to anything you are going to run back there? OSTLING: Everything is a little bit different. A lot of the ones back east are small. Perris has got really good dirt. Most of the time, when they get to work on it, it is really sticky. I think the tracks back there dry out a little quicker. Hopefully they won’t dry out to fast because most of the guys out here, our cars are made for a little stickier tracks. That is why I think they (SCRA) had such a hard time last year. They were all fast at the beginning of the night, but then the tracks dried out. The cars (SCRA) weren’t really made to do all the stuff that the guys back there can do to them. S.D.:
In addition you guys (SCRA) run a different type race.
On the small tracks back there, they all seem to run around the bottom.
Out here, on the bigger tracks, most of you guys seem to run up high.
That puts you guys at a disadvantage back there. OSTLING: Yeah. It is just whatever you are used to. Fortunately we get a cushion here so you run up against the cushion and you can still go fast (at the end of the night). Back there the tracks dry out pretty early before they can really build up much of a cushion, so the shortest way around is the fastest way around. The guys back there, their engines are a little higher up and little different offsets on the rear ends. Stuff like that so they can suck the wheels in a little farther and that makes the cars work a little better on the dry slick stuff. We checked on our car. We wanted to make it so we could raise the motor up for the tour. Started checking stuff out and it just won’t work without making a lot of changes. We would have to change the steering and all kinds of stuff. We will make it work (the way it is). S.D.:
In the 14 or 15 years you have raced you have been to a lot of different tracks.
Which one is you favorite? OSTLING: Gosh! Santa Maria is just a blast to drive, but it is hard to do anything there. Everybody goes real fast. This (Perris Auto Speedway) is definitely one of the tops. As far as facilities it is one of the cleanest we race at. My favorite has got to be Ventura. Small! Probably too small for us. There is a lot of banging and crashing there, but it is just fun (laughing). S.D.:
You get to go have fun next Saturday at Ventura. OSTLING: Yeah, I am looking forward to it. It has been pretty good to us. We have had a couple wins there and we have crashed a couple times there. You know, you take your chances. It is a real tight track, but the speed is real fast for such a little track. S.D.:
Qualifying is very important there? OSTLING: Yeah, pretty important. You don’t want to have to start behind guys. It is not as important as it is at some of the tracks that dry out pretty bad. He (promoter Jim Naylor) stays on the track pretty much all night and tries to keep it in shape so you can at least pass a little bit. It is small, but you can still pass. It is when they dry out that it is really hard to pass. Turns into a one groover. Qualifying on a dry slick track is real important. You need a good starting spot. S.D.:
You guys (SCRA) do not normally run on tracks that could be described as
dry slick do you? OSTLING: No, we have it pretty good out here. The guys back there are not used to the sticky stuff so much. Their tracks are probably sticky for qualifying. There is not much they can do to their cars to make them real good for qualifying. That is why when they come out here they usually don’t do to good right off the bat unless they are in a car from out here. S.D.:
Is that why our guys (SCRA) run real well in qualifying and do not always do so
well in the main events back there? Sticky
tracks like out here for qualifying and then it dries out. OSTLING: Right. That is something with experience our guys would probably learn more to do to the cars to make them work on the dry slick stuff. I think this year it will be a little different. It is not the Indiana Speedweek this year where they want all their guys to win. This is kind of an SCRA tour and I think the tracks will probably be a little more prepared the way we like them. S.D.:
You guys are going to North Vernon, Terre Haute, Hales Corners, Knoxville
and Eagle. Have you ever been to
Knoxville before? OSTLING: Yeah, I have been to Knoxville a couple of times. It is just a big, ol’ fast place. To me it’s like Phoenix. It’s not quite as banked, but it is similar to it. S.D.:
Earlier this year, I handed you a form and asked you to fill it out for me to
help me in the announcer’s booth. At
the bottom of it you wrote, “Some people take life to serious.”
Can you explain what you meant by that? OSTLING: Awe, you know. God, you are going to be here a long time. You start worrying about stuff and you are not going to be here a long time. I take care of my business, but at the same time I am going to have fun. It is to long (life) not to have fun. S.D.:
It is time for you to thank those sponsors. OSTLING: Feese Solid Surface Specialties. They manufacture showers, baths and stuff like that. RC Performance, J.F.K. Co., RC Performance, Frontier Cabinets and Gard Acoustic Company. They make suspended t-bar ceilings in commercial buildings. S.D.:
How about the family? OSTLING: I have a wife, Shelly and a daughter Taylor. She is 7. We have been married 10 years. They come to the races most of the time. S.D.:
Anything else we should know about you? OSTLING: I love doing this. We do it for the fans as well as ourselves. I hope we always put on a good show for you. We appreciate all the fans.
On this Saturday night, Perris Auto Speedway seemed to have Ostling’s
number in qualifying. So much so
that he uncharacteristically almost missed the heats and would have been
relegated to the consolation. However,
his time was just quick enough to put him on the pole for his heat race.
Whatever the problem was in qualifying, the Mexican National Champion had
it figured out by the time racing began. He
smoked the competition and won his heat by a half straightaway.
Problem was, his poor qualifying run had him starting dead last (22nd)
in the 30 lap main event. From there, Ostling put on a dazzling show and passed
twelve cars to finish 10th overall.
He is currently 8th in
the SCRA standings and with more performances like last Saturday, the top five
is not far off. |
