Scott Bloomquist, a superstar dirt-track racer who won more than 600 races and whose car bore the image of a skull and crossbones, died on Aug. 16 when the vintage single-engine plane that he was piloting crashed into a barn close to the airstrip on his family farm near Mooresburg, Tenn. He was 60.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that Bloomquist was the only person aboard the vintage Piper J-3 aircraft. In a statement confirming the death, Scott Bloomquist Racing posted a statement that described him as “one hell of a wheel man” and said, “Whether you cheered for him or booed for him, you still made noise, and Scott loved you all equally for that.”
Bloomquist was considered one of the greatest drivers on the circuits where he raced. He won nine championships, including four with the United Dirt Track Racing Association’s Hav-A-Tampa Series, three with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series and one with the World of Outlaws.
Tony Stewart, the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, owns the Eldora Speedway dirt track in Rossburg, Ohio, where Bloomquist won four elite World 100 races. Bloomquist, Stewart said in a statement, was “probably the smartest guy I’ve ever been around when it come to dirt racing.”
Stewart, who has raced on dirt tracks, added, “What he could do behind the wheel of a racecar was matched by the ingenuity he put into building his racecars.”
Bloomquist was known for his long hair, his loquaciousness, his deep knowledge of racecar building and his love of dirt racing’s freewheeling atmosphere. A mostly rural sport with about 800 tracks around the country where drivers aggressively navigate tracks that are either dry or muddy, dirt racing attracts families with its state-fair-like ambience, and fans revel in the clay dust that wafts from the tracks into their beers and burgers.
The sport is “very insular,” Adam Cornell, the owner and publisher of Dirt Empire magazine, said in an interview. “If you didn’t grow up with any exposure to it, you’d have no idea it exists. It doesn’t do a lot of outreach.”
Bloomquist was often compared to Dale Earnhardt Sr., the tough, crusty NASCAR star. But Bloomquist told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 that he viewed himself an outlaw and was too rebellious to exist in the buttoned-up, corporate environment of the modern NASCAR Cup Series.
“It’s not for me,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t be very good at being somebody’s poodle.”
But he had no doubt that he could succeed at the NASCAR level.
“I don’t think that anybody could ever question that I would be as good as any who ever lived and ran that series,” he told The Journal-Constitution.
Scott Dean Bloomquist was born on Nov. 14, 1963, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Ron Bloomquist, a pilot for AirCal, and Georgiana (Ryen) Bloomquist. While Scott was still a teenager in Corona, Calif., his father assembled his own stock car after seeing a fellow pilot race one. But his father wasn’t happy with the experience and gave the car to Scott, who began to win races with it.
Then, in 1982, he built a dirt-track car that won a race at Speedway 117 in Chula Vista, Calif. His father, he said, wanted to sell the car because the victory enhanced its value.
“He said he couldn’t afford to spend any more money on racing,” Bloomquist told The Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Ga., in 1998. But with the family planning a move to Tennessee, his father suggested an alternative: that Scott pay for the cost of the car by working on the family’s farm while he economized by catching fish and cooking potatoes.
“I knew that I had to do it to race,” he said.
And the victories piled up on the late-model dirt series: He won 94 races on the Lucas Oil circuit and 33 on the World of Outlaws circuit.
“He had a God-given talent that was unparalleled,” Gerald Newton, president of the National Dirt Late Model Hall Fame, which inducted Bloomquist in 2002, said in an interview. “Scott was never one to rough up a competitor on the track; he just knew where to race, he knew what it took to win.”
Bloomquist was already one of the dominant drivers in late-model dirt racing when his career was interrupted by an arrest on drug charges in 1993. He said later that he had been set up by a girlfriend who asked him to buy cocaine for her. After being acquitted of the felony charges, he was found guilty of two misdemeanors and received a six-month sentence. He said he eventually served about six weeks in a work-release program.
He took a break from racing, read books about the human spirit and rode Jet Skis around the lake on his property. When he returned to racing, he changed his car number from 18 to 0 and added the yin-yang symbol to the door panels to represent the new balance in his life.
“Racing is part of my life,” he told The Ledger-Enquirer, “but it’s not my whole life.”
In addition to his parents, Bloomquist is survived by his daughter, Ariel Bloomquist, and his sister, Shelley Bloomquist. His marriage to Katrina Rouse ended in divorce.
Bloomquist, who once won a race with only three working wheels, had one of his most significant victories at the World 100 at the Eldora Speedway in 2014. Leading after 19 laps, he was penalized for using an unsanctioned window net and sent to the back of the field. Undaunted, he retook the lead in the 72nd lap and held on to win the race.
Afterward, he bragged to reporters that “the show was over when they put me to the tail.” Had that not happened, he said with certainty and a smile, “I would have lapped the field, that’s what would have happened.”
“And,” he added, “that would have been entertaining but nothing like this was. I think everyone got to see just a classic.”
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