Racing blood: Antigo family members succeeding in off-road racing world

ANTIGO — Growing up at his home located just outside of Antigo, Dylan Lewis often received unusual wake up calls.

“I’d hear a race truck fire up,” Dylan laughed. “That’s how I woke up most mornings.”

This state of affairs was not going to change. More often than not, the one firing up the race trucks was Dylan’s own father, Jesse Lewis, who for the past nearly 30 years has been deeply involved in off-road racing.

“I’ve been doing this since I was 12 years old,” said Jesse, now crew chief for Ryan Beat Motorspots, which fielded Pro Lite and Pro 2 race trucks at the Antigo Off-Road National over the weekend. “I started with sweeping floors and cleaning out semis and cleaning the car up, and just worked my way up. I’ve built 38 of these race cars from the ground up. I’ve been part of a team that’s won every single big off-road race there is — Mexico, Crandon, the Baja 500, the Baja 1000.”

Jesse even gave his son rides in some of these cars through the Antigo Lions Roaring Raceway parking lot — when he was just one year old. Dylan had little chance not to get hooked on the sport.

“Imagine being three or four years old and having a garage that’s packed with cool race cars — you can’t really have anything much more than that,” Dylan said. “Even hearing cars start and watching him up and down the road, going down the highway, going to all the races with him, going out west to races, I grew up doing it. It’s always something to look forward to in the summer.”

Long before Dylan was even born, when Jesse himself was just a boy, his passion for being around racing vehicles got the best of another young family member of his: his younger cousin, Trad Ronfeldt.

“The only reason I got into it was because of him,” Trad said. “I never had a brother, so Jesse always had the cool stuff. He had the cool three wheelers, he had the cool dirt bikes, he had the cool trucks. So I always looked up to him. I would always pedal my bike down there and watch. One day I got handed a broom and it just went from there.”

Like his older cousin, Trad has come a long way from sweeping floors.

He’s now a crew chief for Pro 4 truck racer Jimmy Henderson, a perennial top finisher in his class. Through off-road racing, Trad has traveled to the ends of the globe. He was part of crews that raced in Greenland, Saudi Arabia. Teams he led, too, won multiple points championships.

He even met his idol, Jeremy McGrath, one of the most successful motocross racers in history.

“The team we were working for at the time, we were in California, and Jeremy was actually driving with us,” Trad said. “I had my four wheeler there as a pit vehicle and he comes up to me and asks me if he can drive my four wheeler to staging. I was like, ‘Um, yeah.’ That to me was the coolest thing in the world, and we still talk to this day.”

Jesse, too, said the sport has taken him to places that, while growing up in Antigo, he scarcely could have imagined.

“It’s gotten me to almost every state in the United States, so that’s one highlight,” Jesse said. “Also, winning some pretty big races. We’ve had some celebrities — we built two seat trucks and Snoop Dogg rode in one of our cars. The NASCAR racer Jimmy Johnson drove a car that I worked on too. So we’ve gotten to meet some interesting people.”

Some might assume that as crew chiefs, both Trad and Jesse are living their dreams, doing this work they love. That might be true, but in reality, they said, their dream job comes with substantial pressure, especially related to perhaps their number one priority: meticulously preparing the car, which they build from the ground up, for races.

“The day after the race, the car’s completely torn apart,” Jesse said. “We always have to do that. That’s where you’re finding the little things. There’s a lot of stress on it and you’re pushing everything to the limit. You want to make the cars as light and as fast as possible and you just have to keep your eye on parts that might fail so you can fix them before they break. You got a $300,000 vehicle sitting there, and a 10 cent part failed, so you have to find that. We’re not waiting for the part to break to fix it — we have to catch it before it breaks. The years of experience, that’s why we get to the crew chief role: we know what to look for.”

“We weld them together, we cut the tubes. All the panels that are on the vehicle, everything you see there, we cut on a bandsaw and we break and we shear and make it into what it is. There’s a tremendous amount of shop time. The most stressful part is when it goes out on the track and you’re running everything through your head, going front to back in your mind of what you touched, and it feels like you’re going to throw up,” Trad said, Friday night, just after the conclusion of Henderson’s qualifying race. “This is the first time it hit the track, and we qualified first and I went in my motorhome and cried. It’s our life. It’s everything we’ve got.”

But Friday morning, Trad’s crew concluded that their truck’s sway bar, a vital part of the suspension, had bent. They spent 45 minutes wrestling in a replacement, worrying at one point that they might not make it out onto the track, which would have spelled disaster for the team’s title chances.

Jesse, too, knows well how quickly minute, unforeseen mechanical complications can transform a crew’s hopeful pre-race mood into frenzied panic.

“Last year here at this race, my driver went to put his neck restraint on and the little spring latch for his head restraint was stuck and it wouldn’t go on,” Jesse said. “So I was laying in the car with a wrench beating on his helmet to get it on before he could pull out onto the track. He almost couldn’t start because of a piece of his equipment. He made it on the track and we won the race.”

During their careers, the Antigo cousins have endured challenges far more trying than malfunctioning equipment.

In 2005, Jesse was part of off-roader Jason Baldwin’s crew. After competing in a desert race in Mexico, Baldwin took a flight on a small plane back to California that crashed in the ocean. Jesse had just eaten breakfast with him that morning. Trad, meanwhile, had worked with Kyle LeDuc, another celebrated racer. Last summer, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He died in November.

“Me and Kyle worked together for eight years, and Jesse and Jason were together for about the same time or more,” Trad said. “It kills me that he still has an issue with it. Because I know I’m going to have the same problem.”

Speaking with Trad, though, it’s clear he believes he got where he did because of positive influences in his life such as his late friend — and because of help from family members like Jesse and Dylan.

“I flew Dylan out and we built two vehicles for SEMA, the biggest car show in the world. He’s also good enough that we get him to help us out on our crew. He jumps from team to team — he’s helped his dad for some years, and he’s been with me some years. He’s with Jimmy this weekend. It’s not easy to find people that are that talented in that particular way and know what they’re doing. So it’s very, very rare, and obviously, he had enough people to look up to while he was growing up,” Trad said.

“Me personally, I was around Jesse. I was around Kyle. I never had the wrong people around me, and that was a big thing,” he continued. “To find people that have been around it long enough, know what they’re doing, know what to look for, can fabricate like we can and do everything that we do, it’s a hard shot to even find anybody like that. Obviously, this is a niche. You can’t just go to school for this — you have to be around it your whole life. That’s the only way and the only reason we know everything we know. We had good people teaching us on the way up.”