Brad Derry has six championships and more than 175 wins in his 18 years of racing. But there was always one victory that eluded him.
After years of trying, and more than one second place finish, Derry could never take the checkered flag at Adams County Speedway‘s annual Tradition race, the yearly season finale at the NASCAR-sanctioned track in Corning, Iowa.
Last October, Derry suited up in a different class than his usual Stock Car division, and in a car that was new to him but meaningful to many people in the stands and the pits at Adams County. The Hobby Stock car belonged to Jeremy Ribbey, a fan favorite who a month prior passed away unexpectedly.
One of Ribbey’s friends, Tyler Gray, asked Derry if he would like to race Ribbey’s car at the end of the season. Derry had known Ribbey through racing at Adams County and sharing an engine builder at Whitehead Machine Shop, the place Derry called “kind of the hub for all the Clarinda (Iowa) racers that raced Adams County Speedway.”
“Jeremy was always getting stuff fixed there and they were helping him out,” Derry said. “I’d give him a few pointers at times, even after I moved out of the hobby stocks. We’d just visit and talk.”
When Derry was first asked to drive Ribbey’s car, he had mixed emotions and had to take a few hours to think.
“He was a friend of all of ours in the local town,” Derry explained. “He was like a football coach, a baseball coach. He was a really, really well-to-do person in the community, a good influence on the kids. And I was just nervous because I was like, ‘What if you tear it up, or whatever?’
“His friend, Tyler Gray, said, ‘You’re not going to tear it up. Go out and win with it.’ So I said, ‘We’ll do our best.'”
The first time Derry ran the car was the final points night of the season last year at Adams County. He finished second.
The next race was the Tradition.
“I said, ‘Alright, we’re going to change some stuff,'” Derry said of his conversation with Gray ahead of the Tradition race. “He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘First of all, we’re going to put a seat in there I can fit in,’ because I’m quite a bit bigger guy than Jeremy was.
“And all we did was put that seat in it and go.”
Derry remembers buckling into the car and said he was “nervous as could be” that night. He started last in his heat race but came through with a win, which meant, with a re-draw, he would start the feature in the middle of the pack.
“Tyler just told me to go out and win the thing,” Derry said. “I was thinking under my breath, ‘Yeah, right.'”
Ultimately, it didn’t matter where he started, because he made his way to the front pretty quickly and won the race.
“We led that thing and led it by quite a bit,” Derry said. “It was kind of a Cinderella story, to be honest. I never dreamed that we would have done that. But it worked out.”
Even thinking back on the race six months later, Derry still gets emotional thinking about putting that car in Victory Lane.
“It was kind of surreal,” he said. “We took the checkered flag, and it was like, this race has eluded me even back when I drove hobby stocks. I finished second in the Tradition race multiple times, in my stock car, as well. To be able to get in somebody else’s equipment that passed away and be able to win that thing was amazing. It was just a very overwhelming feeling.
“Of course I had tears coming out of my eyes, because it was for a special reason, and I’m just glad we could do that for his family. There was a bunch of his family there that night and a whole lot of friends and people that came down afterward, and it’s just a surreal moment. Probably the biggest win of my career, emotionally, for sure.”
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The racing community at Adams County is tight-knit, something Derry has seen in his nearly two decades of racing. He has been going to races at the track since he was in second grade and began driving himself when he was 16.
“I was helping a friend race, and pretty soon I was working on his car more than he was,” Derry explained. “So I said, ‘If I’m going to be doing this I might as well get my own car.’ So I did.
“I was sitting up there in the stands and the whole time, after a couple years I was thinking, ‘How am I ever going to afford this?’ But if you work hard enough, you can make your dreams come true.
“It was pretty cool. It was a rude awakening. Everyone can bleacher-race, but when you actually start doing it yourself there’s a lot more involved with it. … But there’s nothing like winning at your home track, in my opinion.”
Derry is back in the Adams County Stock Cars division this year, and he has done well so far. Even though he does not yet have a win, he has three top-five finishes in three races and currently leads in points.
His goal this year is to win a track championship at both Adams County and I-80 Speedway, a NASCAR-sanctioned track in Greenwood, Nebraska. Derry won the track championship at both tracks in 2015.
Ribbey’s car is also still on the track. With the same 12G number and wrap, Gray is racing it this year as a rookie. He has one top 10 in three races at Adams County so far.
“He’s got a pretty big following with people who have transitioned over from Jeremy to Tyler,” Derry said.
Racing has changed a bit for Derry since he started as a teenager. He now has three children who come to the track with him every week. But even with the changes, it’s still the same family atmosphere at his home track, and it’s not something he plans on giving up any time soon.
“We’ve raced two nights a week since 2008,” he said. “When you’re a one-man show, when you work on everything during the week yourself, it’s pretty hard to keep everything up and keep going.
“I’m just very blessed to be able to do what I’ve been doing for the last 18 years.”
Plus, he’ll always have that one special win that meant so much to him and so many others.
“There’s a picture out there somewhere when I first got out of the car and I pointed up to him,” Derry said. “I don’t know who’s got that picture, but I pointed up to the stars and told him that this one was for him, and celebrated accordingly.”