Defending Kingsport Speedway late model champion Zeke Shell has been racing for more than two decades, and he’s had his dad by his side for all of it.

But his dad, Pat, wasn’t into racing when Shell was a kid. He was more into music. He was the lead singer for an 80’s hair metal band called Mercy.

In his spare time, Pat had a Corvette he would tinker with in the garage, and the younger Shell would tag along, helping, taking things apart, and putting them back together.

That’s when Pat got the idea to see if his son could drive a car as well as he could put one together.

“He went out and bought a really old, outdated go-kart and we went to a track, Beechnut Raceway. First time ever,” Zeke Shell said. “And we did very, very good, apparently. We didn’t know what we were doing. We raced out of the back of a pickup truck.”

Not long after, the Shells’ focus turned from music to cars.

“I was raised in a mosh pit, and grew up at a dirt track,” Shell said.

That first race came when Shell was 8 years old. Now, the 32-year-old is celebrating his first championship at Kingsport Speedway, a .375-mile semi-banked concrete oval in Kingsport, Tennessee, just minutes from Bristol Motor Speedway.

Zeke has been racing at “The Concrete Jungle” since it reopened in 2011. He not only won the track championship last year, but also the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series Tennessee championship.

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Other than crew chief, Pat Shell has worked just about every job on his son’s team over the years, from spotting to building – “Pretty much whatever it takes to keep it running,” Zeke Shell said.

The two have worked together for so long, it’s second nature to Shell.

“Me and my father, we started at a pretty young age and just did our best for as long as we could with what we had to work with. It was more of a father/son activity. We just had fun. We took it serious, but some people go camping once a week, some people go on a picnic once a week or a movie night. We go racing.”

“He’s a part of it every day, every step of the way… I’ve always had him. I don’t know what it’s like to not have him.”

Shell is now starting to get to see the side of racing from a father’s point-of-view too. He has a 4-year-old daughter, Bristol, who is growing up around the sport just like he did.

“She is in love with racing,” Shell said. “She’s always under the car with me. She knows her wrenches. She loves race cars.”

Zeke Shell Racing Facebook

Even though Shell has been racing so long it’s become a way of life more than a hobby, he admits last season’s championship chase felt different than in years past.

“The team wanted it more than anything. I think that’s really what drove that car to success,” he said. “There was nothing that this track or the other drivers were able to throw at it that stopped it.

“If they had to carry that car across the finish line it was going to be there.”

This year, there’s a different excitement around the team as they prepare for another full season. As long as there’s funding, Shell expects to race another full season at Kingsport as they prepare to defend their title.

There’s very little that could keep him away. And thankfully, he has a family who loves it as much as he does.

“Everything in my life is scheduled around racing. Birthdays, events, vacations, my finances, it’s all around racing,” Shell said. “Honestly, it’s just, it’s another day. I am excited for this year but I know I’ve got a target on my back and at the end of all the races there can only be one best. And hopefully it’s us again. But if not, as long as we had fun, nobody got hurt, everything was enjoyable. Because let’s face it, I’m in my 30s. This is it. This is as far as I’m going. And I’m fine with that… So I kind of have to put my values in order, and as long as I’m still a good father and husband and I can still afford to do it, then we had a successful year.”

“Honestly, the only thing that could probably keep me from it is my little girl and my wife, and they are definitely a racer family. So I don’t foresee us having any issues with coming here and taking more podiums.”

Kingsport Speedway will begin the season this Saturday night.

Kingsport Speedway Schedule

Idaho Track Joins NASCAR Whelen All-American Series

Dylan Kane’s mind is filled with childhood memories of watching races at Stateline Speedway. He grew up going with his dad to the track that’s only 10 minutes from his Idaho home.

“Just something that started on the weekends, we’d go here and there,” Kane said. “I was young, young. I remember going out there on weekends and falling asleep at the track and fell in love with it.”

Kane’s father passed away in 2009, and Kane started racing at his home track right after.

This summer will be Kane’s 10th at Stateline, a quarter-mile banked oval track built in 1974 in Kootenai County, Idaho. Last summer was his first away from his home track when he ran in the Northwest Mini Stock Tour, traveling around Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

But this summer he’ll be back home, and the announcement the track would be going NASCAR sanctioned this summer is the reason why.

Stateline made the announcement it will be part of the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series for the 2019 racing season last week at its membership meeting. Kane and other drivers didn’t know what to expect after just hearing there would be an announcement. He hadn’t heard ahead of time what we coming.

“Everyone was like ‘what’s this announcement? Are they changing something? Are they selling it? What’s going on?” he said. “And I see a guy sitting in the background and he’s got a NASCAR T-shirt and a visor on and I’m like ‘holy cow.’

“You see all these other tracks, you see them on TV with K&N East and West and all these big circuits they go to and you never think small town Idaho or Spokane, Washington is going to have anything like this. So it’s kind of unreal.”

Stateline is located in Post Falls, Idaho, a town with a population of about 33,000, just outside of Spokane, Washington.

Kane, now 26, will run a full-time schedule in Stateline’s Division IV mini stock division. While he said the original idea was to return to the Northwest tour, he wants to see the perks NASCAR will bring to Idaho. He thinks having the NASCAR name will help with advertising and getting sponsors.

“As far as a fan base locally, I think it’s going to draw a much larger crowd, I think it’s going to be a lot more efficient racing, I think the structure behind it is going to be better and I think it’s going to bring a lot to the table for Stateline,” he said. “As a track, as a family, it’s going to be a big deal for everybody involved across the board. Your local drivers, your traveling drivers.

“I think it’s going to be easier. If you tell them you run for a NASCAR-sanctioned track, under NASCAR as a division, I think it puts it in a different bracket than just a local racetrack with 4-cylinders or super lates or modifieds. I think it’s just going to bring a lot more out to it for your local drivers and crew and everybody involved.”

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Returning to his home track also brings added comfort to Kane. It’s where he learned to drive and has spent nearly a decade perfecting his skills and getting comfortable with his crew enough to be able to move on to bigger tracks and series. He’s learned a lot in his time at Stateline.

“You learn that there’s a lot more to it than a guy getting in a car and going left,” he said. “I’ve learned that you have to have a lot of trust in your spotters, your crew chiefs, your set up guys have got to be with you 100 percent, and you’ve got to be 100 percent getting into it.

“I think what I’ve learned most is probably patience really. Not going out and winning it the first time. You’re not going to go out and set the place on fire. You have to learn the ropes and learn who you’re running with and how your crew handles things, different situations, different tracks, and you’ve all got to come together and make it as a group. When you win it’s a team, or we, not just me or I. Everybody is in it 100 percent.”

Kane believes the track is going NASCAR to make the racing better for the drivers and make them feel appreciated.

For him and his team, they appreciate the chance to come back home and try to run for a championship on their own turf.

“We’ve ran different tracks and come together a lot more as a crew between the traveling and different setups and things like that, he said. “So I think this year our main focus is to go out for a championship and try and do as well as we can in that NASCAR division and see if we can take it somewhere else, to another track and just play around with it and have fun.”

Stateline Speedway will open the season on April 20.

Stateline Speedway Schedule

Racing was always in Sylvia Porter’s blood. It was something she was born into. Her father, Rupert Porter, built Anderson Motor Speedway, in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1963, and put Sylvia to work in the concession stand when she was 13.

But running the track was never something Sylvia wanted to do growing up.

“I ran from it when I was younger,” Sylvia said this week. “I grew up there.”

Sylvia went away to college at The University of South Carolina, and spent two-and-a-half years traveling the country with NASCAR. But 15 years ago she returned home.

Now, she’s running the track her dad built with her mom, Shirley, making sure the family legacy lives on.

“I had no thought of coming back. It’s funny how things work out,” she said. “I fell in love with it all over again. I was older and wiser and I had got a lot of things out of my system just traveling. When you’re older you appreciate things more. So I had no doubt when I came back.”

Rupert Porter passed away nearly 10 years ago, and Shirley and Sylvia have been running the race track by themselves ever since.

Shirley has been at Anderson, a .375-mile asphalt oval, since it opened 56 years ago. Rupert got the idea to open the track because of his interest in drag and street racing. He and a business partner found the property to build about 35 minutes from their home in Seneca, South Carolina, where the Porters still live today. The initial building of the track was partially funded by Rupert selling the dirt removed from the area to the state of South Carolina to help build Interstate 85.

At the time, Shirley was working as an elementary school teacher while Rupert built apartments and commercial buildings. He then recruited her to join him in the real estate business.

“As you can see, I’m a woman of many, many hats,” Shirley said.

Anderson Motor Speedway

Anderson has always been a family track, and to this day they run it the same way. The employees, fans, and neighbors are all considered family, and Sylvia said many of the employees have been there since it opened.

“We love our community,” Sylvia said. “We just try to be good, do the right thing and be good to our neighbors. We love our young race fans,we love our older race fans.We’re very blessed that we’ve been able to be there all 55 years.”

“We are a family-oriented track and we just work really, really hard to make it the best that we possibly can,” Shirley added.

Even though the Porters have been around racing nearly their entire lives, once Rupert opened the track he never got behind the wheel again. Shirley and Sylvia, too, have never given it a try.

“I have a bunch of speeding tickets,” Sylvia said with a laugh. “I have a lead foot. I like to drive fast, which is terrible, but I’m usually in a hurry because I’m running late.”

But the mother-daughter duo have learned to appreciate the sport, and are very hands-on at the track, spending their days buying food for concessions, loading freezers, ordering and unloading tires, paperwork, booking and getting organized for Friday nights..

“It’s a labor of love, but we do enjoy it,” Sylvia said. “I have a great staff. In racing, especially at this level, everybody works a different job and everybody comes together on Friday nights to make this happen.”

“It’s always such a joy,” Shirley said. “I’m a greeter. I like to go down to the front gate and meet all of the race fans as they come in.”

Anderson will open the season this Friday night with late models, modifieds, mini stocks, legends, and pure stock.

AMS Schedule

When the season kicks off, not only will the Porter family be represented working at the track, they’ll also be in the stands. Rupert’s brothers are on the top row for every race, making the family atmosphere even more special.

“They come every Friday night,” Sylvia said. “It brings us joy that two of my dad’s brothers who he loved so much come and they watch the races and they enjoy Friday night down there. I’m sure they’re proud of the accomplishments dad made.”

Another constant presence at the track is the Shriners, an organization Rupert was a part of. The track holds an annual Shriners race for the children’s hospital in Greenville, South Carolina.

All of these aspects are what brought Sylvia back to her home track. And she has no regrets.

“I do it because I love the sport,” Sylvia said. “But more than that: I love the people. There are some really good people in racing. When the chips are down, they might fight on the track, they might battle on the track, but when things go wrong, someone’s health is in trouble, someone’s house burns down or there’s a crisis, that’s the first people you can look to is your competitor there at the racetrack lending a helping hand. That’s what I love about the sport. To be honest, that’s why I still do it.”

“Momma and I just try to continue that tradition and we plan to for as long as we’re physically able to.”

Friday’s opener at Anderson will begin at 8 p.m.

“We’re hoping for a better weather condition this year,” Shirley said. “Let’s just hope the weather is good to us this year and we’re all ready and ready to go.”

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