Kinser: A Racing Career Like No Other

by Steve Kinser with Dave Argabright

“Winning is celebration and happiness, and losing is . . . not good. I wanted people to see me as a successful racer. I wanted to be seen as a confident person. If you aren’t winning, people look at you differently. They just do. I wanted people to see me as a winner and that’s who I wanted to be.”

This is a personal story for that’s what writer Dave Argabright does; he helps various people tell their stories in their own voice, their own style. Argabright has been collaborating with some of motorsports greatest writing and producing their autobiographies for a goodly while so now it just comes naturally to him. We’ve previously told you about a couple of them.

Some subjects, such as this one with and about Steve Kinser, were made easier for Argabright as he and Kinser have been friends for nigh onto 45+ years having started their respective careers at the same time. Plus both live in Indiana less than 100 miles from one another. So, when Argabright writes that Kinser is the “real deal,” he’s writing from his own first-hand experiences and knowledge.

The statistics of the “real deal’s” racing career are pretty spectacular; 20 World of Outlaws championships, 12 Knoxville Nationals titles, and 963 total race wins over the 41 years he competed—with 958 of them in sprint cars. That translates to upward of a third to half the year spent on the road, away from home. Yet this isn’t a book full of those race statistics or even a litany of recounting individual races. Those statistics are saved for the 35 pages of Appendices. Thus the text of Kinser’s story is freed to concentrate on the more personal, introspective aspect of this highly successful racer in ways he rarely let on regarding during his career.

The book is generously illustrated too with the 88 images presented in one 32-page segment bound in just past the book’s mid-point. We share a couple of the photo page pairs here. Each image is nicely captioned. And the Index is very thorough thus genuinely useful.

Kinser was born into a sprint car racing household and family. His dad Bob Kinser was a successful weekend racer with the entire family at the track cheering him on. Steve just knew from his very youngest that that’s what he wanted to do; but not just on weekends. Driving race cars—sprint cars specifically—was to be his fulltime career. As he says/writes on the book’s early pages, “I was blessed and fortunate to have the life I dreamed of. I had all the sprint car racing I could want, and then some. My life happened at a very fast pace.”

The story Kinser/Argabright tell very much reflects that fast pace, keeping the reader engaged and the pages turning. At first Steve Kinser was “just” the hired driver. A distant cousin, Karl Kinser, owned and maintained the car(s). Later Steve Kinser would become a team and car owner as well but he ever and always stressed it was always a team effort. “It was almost like we made an unspoken commitment to each other that we were absolutely, positively going to give this deal every last drop of our energy and focus. Our race car would be the best-prepared and fastest car on the track; our driver would be the most determined and fiercest competitor out there. Nothing less than that was acceptable.”

While the book tells a very personal story it is not an ego-centric telling. Rather it credits all the folks and the fans Kinser encounters along the way. As Kinser expressed it, “The main thing I wanted to do was say thank you to a lot of people who helped us along the way, and a lot of fans who were good to us. I was very fortunate to get to race as long as I did, and our fans and friends made it all possible.”

The concluding two chapters tell of Kinser’s realization as he turned 56 in 2010 that “My body was hurting a lot more after we crashed.” Then “as the 2013 racing season went on something inside of me began to say, okay, it’s time . . . The more I thought about it, that felt like it was the right time to bring my driving career to an end.” After describing what his days are and have been like since his retirement Steve Kinser concludes with, “When it’s done, maybe you’ll be a mellow guy like me, able to look back at what we did and smile.”