CARVER, Minn. – The autumn and winter months in the Minneapolis suburbs produce short, cold days and long, colder nights. This is when Jacob Goede hibernates.
That is, according to his wife, Erica, and three daughters, Reese, Johanna and Audrey. They’re the ones who watch him fall asleep on the family room couch, tablet in hand and television tuned to something involving race cars, seemingly every offseason evening.
He doesn’t mind when the girls give him flak or laugh when the tablet falls on his chest. The snoozing is necessary after the grueling spring and summer months, when the days are longer and warmer; when Goede spends his evenings not on the couch, but in the detached garage adjacent to the family’s house.
In 2025, Goede’s efforts in that modest race shop translated to a NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series Division I national championship, his second such title after winning his first in 2019. He scored 10 victories, 26 top fives and 29 top 10s in 32 late model feature races at LaCrosse Fairgrounds Speedway and Dells Raceway Park in Wisconsin, plus his home track of Elko Speedway in Minnesota.
Jacob is thankful for Erica, a former racer herself who understands the grind a national title chase requires. Reese, Johanna and Audrey get it, too; they all race quarter midgets at Little Elko Speedway on Sundays. The family that makes fun of his winter rest is also the support beam that gets him through his summer … whatever the opposite of rest is.
From mid-April through late September, Jacob Goede consumed himself with his national championship pursuit. It’s why he raced full-time at LaCrosse despite that venue being a three-hour drive from home. Car counts at LaCrosse are strong, and the size of the track allows drivers more room to maneuver when needed. More travel, but also more opportunity for points.
Goede, 40, did all this in addition to working his full-time job as a mechanical engineer at MTS Systems. He did it while supporting his daughters through softball season. He did it with the help of just a few family members in the garage once or twice a week.
Mercifully, the drudge is on hold as Goede celebrates his title. For now, his time spent in the shop is at a minimum.
“Erica’s giving me crap because I haven’t turned the garage heater on yet because I’m cheap,” Goede said. “I keep it 55. If you keep it too warm, you start sweating.
“And I sweat plenty during the summer.”
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Goede’s primary pro late model is near totaled from a crash this summer, but he won’t let go of the ride that’s been so good to him. He has somewhere between 70 and 80 race winner stickers lining the roll bars around his seat.
Zip tied to one of those bars is a small toy car.
Sometime more than a decade ago, a young fan approached Goede in Victory Lane at Elko and handed him the toy car as a gift. For reasons Goede can’t totally explain, he attached the little car to a support bar in his late model and – without the boy knowing – has left it there ever since.
“I’m like, ‘You know what, I’m going to have that thing ride along with me,'” Goede said. “That kid’s grown into a teenager by now. If a kid wanted to give up his matchbox car for me, I thought it was a cool deal. Might as well ride along. It doesn’t weigh anything.”
The toy car is less of a good luck charm and more of a representation of what makes Goede tick. He’s loyal to his family, and after more than two decades of racing late models with that family, he knows what works.
Goede began racing a quarter midget at age 7, when his father John worked at a salvage yard and built his own race cars. Now, naturally, Jacob Goede does the same thing.
“He kind of instilled in me that attitude,” Jacob said of John. “I loved going out to the junkyard and rummaging through stuff. It kind of carried me into my present-day life, I guess. I enjoy working on these things. We do all our own tin work, body work, assembly work, all that. It definitely stemmed from my dad from the early ages.”
By “we,” Goede means himself and his brother Matt, who joins him in the shop typically once a week. Sometimes, if you-know-what hits the fan, his dad and father-in-law lend their help. That’s the extent of Goede’s crew.
Jacob is adamant that he couldn’t race without Matt’s help. Matt raced stock cars, as well, and employed a driving style similar to that of his brother. So Matt can simply watch Jacob’s car on the track and know what it’s doing right or wrong without any additional communication.
The small circle is Jacob Goede’s preference. These are the only people he trusts working on his race car. Plus, he’s found that training others to do what he does takes more time than simply doing it himself.
Three late models occupy the space inside Goede’s garage, the walls of which are covered with race winner banners, trophies and Victory Lane photos. He has two pro late models – the wrecked primary car and the secondary car he drove to a handful of wins to close the season. He also has a super late model; he says that one takes up most of his time and money even though he rarely races it.
Goede built the primary pro late model more than a decade ago, and he built the backup car as he was chasing his first national championship. He’s maintained both for years in case he felt he had another shot at a title.
That opportunity arrived in 2025, when Dells joined NASCAR as a Weekly Series track. Goede suddenly had another local(ish) venue at which to collect national points, so he informed his family he would “get serious” about racing again.
The girls were bewildered. Wait, now he’s serious, as if he wasn’t before?
Goede began his season with an 11th-place finish in Dells’ Icebreaker on April 12. A month later, he scored his first win at the same track. The next week, LaCrosse’s season began, and Goede scored two wins there before the second week of June.
Remarkable consistency carried Goede through the rest of the summer. He finished outside the top five on just a handful of occasions, and when he returned to Elko late in the season as he continued to chase points, he won all four of his starts.
The Sept. 20 finale at his home track was the perfect exclamation point. In the first late model feature of the night, he beat Tim Anderson to the finish line in a near photo finish.
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The wall of Victory Lane photos in the back of Goede’s garage is like a time machine. He began collecting images from Elko’s track photographer in 2014. That’s when the victories began pouring in. He raced at Elko from 2002-07 but competed on regional late model tours from 2008-13. When life brought him back to his home track full-time – freshly married with a baby – he hit the ground running thanks to what he’d learned over the previous decade.
“You see the progression of our family,” Goede said, pointing at the wall of photos. “2014, we just had Reese, and my wife was pregnant with Johanna. And then, 2016, picked up Audrey. So you see them from babies to now teenagers with Reese.”
Now the girls are adding their own Victory Lane memories to the family’s lore.
Goede’s nephew several years back began competing in quarter midgets, and Reese, 7 at the time, wanted to watch her cousin. She quickly realized she wanted to race, too, and her dad’s arm did not need even a slight twist.
Goede’s father had saved his quarter midget from when he was a kid, so he dusted the car off and prepared it for Reese. They were testing just a couple weeks after her initial request. Reese began racing the next season, and each year after that, another Goede girl joined the field.
In 2025, all three girls raced quarter midgets at Little Elko, a smaller oval located across the street from the 3/8-mile track their dad has dominated for more than a decade.
“So not only am I trying to prepare late models, but I’m also trying to keep up with these things,” Jacob Goede said. “It’s pretty special watching your kids do something that you love as well. I really enjoy it … I’m probably a little too intense sometimes.
“The coolest part is watching them put it together. You try and teach, and there’s been times where it can be so frustrating. I wish I could just dump my brain into theirs so they can just do the things I know how to do. But when you see them start to figure it out. … Or, sometimes, you don’t even talk about things, and it’s like, ‘Hey, how did you figure that out?’ So that’s the coolest part for me. When they’re truly happy when they win or make a good pass or something like that.”
The 2025 season was a climax of fulfillment for Goede. His second title delivered more emotion than the first.
He’s older, and his kids are now of the age where they know and understand what their dad accomplished. The family is busier than it was six years ago. Goede has to miss more of the girls’ practices, games and performances simply because the schedule is so full. Still, he calls the effort “a family operation.”
For example, one week this summer, he and his dad prepared his super late model for a Thursday test. They then swapped motors in the Dells car to go to a test at LaCrosse that Friday. That night, they pulled the still-hot motor out of the car, replaced it with the crate motor and raced at Elko on Saturday.
That grind is a source of pride. Goede recalls the first time he attended the NASCAR Regional awards banquet in 2014 and the videos he watched at the ceremony. He wondered how he could ever compete with drivers who seemingly benefitted from full-time efforts. Now he’s that guy even though his operation is nowhere near a full-time detail.
“I guess I use it as motivation,” he said. “Weekly racing doesn’t have to be a full-time gig. I have a full-time job, and we race on the weekends. It gets busy. Summers are maybe a lack of sleep sometimes.
“Whatever. It’s what I love to do.”
Goede isn’t sure whether he’ll chase national points again in 2026. He’s still exhausted from the effort in 2025.
“It’s all you think about,” he said. “Every moment, that’s what you concern yourself with. It’s a different style of racing than going after track points. You’re watching stuff you have no control over, drivers you don’t know. It consumes you. … We’ll see.”
His future in a race car depends on his kids. If they want to continue behind the wheel, he’ll need to devote more time and energy to their development. Goede admits he’d be fine getting out of the late models and serving as crew chief for his daughters, but only if they’re willing to dedicate themselves to the craft. He’s too competitive to give up the seat otherwise.
He’s not worried about the future, though, with the present offering so much satisfaction. He’ll proceed through the winter celebrating his latest national championship accordingly.
Yes, he’ll spend invaluable time with his girls and occasionally wander out to his scarcely heated garage to work on his race cars.
But he’ll also sleep on the couch.