Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: No drivers said it quite like Bloomquist
Scott Bloomquist won more than 600 races during his Hall of Fame career. I saw quite a few of them during my days as a writer.
And you know what? Bloomquist could’ve won every race I covered and I would’ve been fine with it. I knew that he’d provide me, a journalist looking for a story, something interesting and fresh — and maybe even wild or crazy — every time.
That was Scott Bloomquist. The man whose life so shockingly ended Friday morning at the age of 60 in a vintage plane crash at his family’s farm in Mooresburg, Tenn., was not only the best Dirt Late Model driver of all time but the most interesting one as well.
Bloomquist was a reporter’s delight. Just about every interview I did with him had me walking away saying to myself: “That was some good stuff.” I probably pumped my fist a few times, too, in satisfaction over the material I had obtained.
Sure, Bloomquist long cultivated an aura of invincibility around him and he knowingly fed it with his comments. He was often calculating — you knew he was searching to find the precise words when he’d pause and close his eyes to think for a second or two — but he inevitably seemed to come up with the right ones. It’s why he produced so many classic quotes and soundbites.
No race car driver I’ve interviewed — and there have been hundreds of them among several divisions since I began my run in motorsports media as a 16-year-old trade paper writer in 1989 — has compared to Bloomquist. He was colorful and introspective, unafraid to tackle any question thrown his way. He would often punctuate a statement he considered especially humorous with a big belly laugh, and he would, of course, include a healthy dose of pronouncements that demonstrated his ultra-high confidence level.
The first time I interviewed Bloomquist was way back in September 1996, during my first year as a full-timer editor and writer for Area Auto Racing News in Trenton, N.J. I sprinkled in some Dirt Late Model specials amid my focus on covering the Northeast’s big-block modified beat and that took me to the Pittsburgher 100 at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway in Imperial, Pa. After a long rain delay pushed the feature from its scheduled afternoon start to Sunday evening and made the giant half-mile oval’s surface supersonic-fast, Bloomquist lost the race on the final lap to West Virginian Tim Hitt.
This didn’t seem to be the best scenario to meet a superstar driver. I was familiar enough with Dirt Late Model racing to know that Bloomquist had a quirky, outsider’s persona — this was especially true in his mid-‘90s era — so I wondered how receptive he’d be when I approached him. To my surprise, when I didn’t find him at his trailer and a crewman directed me to his motorhome, he came out after a knock and discussed his bitter defeat with me.
So there was my introduction to Scott Bloomquist. As much of a larger-than-life figure that he was, I never had a problem getting an interview with him (aside from after his 2015 Dream disqualification at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, when he was so distraught over losing the $100,000 prize to a failed weigh-in that he never came out of his hauler to comment). I only spoke with him a relative handful of times between that night at PPMS and my full-time move to the Dirt Late Model world in June 2006 when I started as the World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series public relations director, but over the last 18 years, including the last 10 in my stint with DirtonDirt.com, I've had countless interactions with him.
Sometimes — well, actually more often than that — I’d have to wait a while outside Bloomquist’s hauler to talk with him. But staking him out was always worth it because interviewing Bloomquist was never boring. At any moment he might pop out a memorable quip, like after his victory in the 2014 Dirt Track World Championship at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park when he called his double-dip of the DTWC and World 100 that year the very appropriate “world domination.”
One of my favorite memories of Bloomquist will forever be his amazing rally to capture the 2014 World 100 at Eldora. That was the year Bloomquist was sent to the rear while leading on lap 20 for racing with “an unapproved device” — specifically, a piece of Lexan embedded in his car’s driver’s-side window net. He said in a press conference afterward that he “would have lapped the field” if he hadn’t been penalized to the back of the pack, but his most forceful comment about the kerfuffle came much later in the pit area when he finally emerged from his toterhome to meet his waiting fans.
I hit Bloomquist up with my questions as he sat on the back of his trailer and posed for photos with fans. He summed up the situation and directed his ire to his rivals who complained to officials about his window net.
“Obviously it didn’t matter, but it sure did create enough of a stir,” Bloomquist said, his eyebrows raising. “And the ones that thought it mattered and the ones that cried the most — which, I know who those are — they can stick it up their ass," adding a descriptive expletive.
That brought a cheer from the fans within earshot of Bloomquist. “You tell ‘em Scott!” one fan yelled. Right there was the defiant Scott Bloomquist so many fans loved.
I got great quotes from Bloomquist in a variety of ways and locations.
In June 2018, for instance, I interviewed Bloomquist by phone while away with my family in Charleston, S.C., after a doctor told him he wouldn’t need the season-ending surgery on his left rotator cuff he was expecting and could continue racing. He said dramatically that his day “started with gray skies” because he thought he would be sidelined but “then the skies turned blue” upon learning the more positive opinion.
After the 2020 USA Nationals at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wis., Bloomquist was by himself washing off dirty tires with a hose when he addressed Tyler Erb’s DQ for running into Bobby Pierce under caution by telling me, “We’ve all lost our temper I guess, but there comes a point in time when you just gotta make a little notch on the damn nightstand and come back to fight another day and not show your ass, OK?”
I can recall going into Bloomquist’s hauler after the second World 100 in 2021 — the last time he led laps (1-18, in this case) in an event he won four times — to ask him about his fade to a 16th-place finish. He went on to talk for 10 minutes about the intricacies of tires and other factors while sitting on folded-down bed with his trusty dog, Buddy, sleeping under a blanket alongside him.
And in June of this year I climbed to the roof of Bloomquist’s trailer during Saturday’s Dream finale program to ask him about the wild series of flips he had just experienced in turn three following heat-race contact with Shannon Babb. A cut on his left hand and wrist was wrapped in a blue bandage but he was otherwise uninjured. In addition, despite a victory drought nearing four years as he battled physical struggles related to his serious March 2019 motorcycle crash and surgery for prostate cancer in 2023, he remained steadfast in his ability, asserting “people can see, I haven’t lost a damn thing, other than my financial support basically to be able to continue to do this.”
What would end up being my final interview with Bloomquist, following July 14’s Schaeffer’s Southern Nationals at Volunteer Speedway in Bulls Gap, Tenn., was a classic in every way except the fact that he didn’t win the race. He had retired from the 40-lap feature early while running in the top five because of power-steering trouble in his Terry Wolfenbarger-owned car, but I wanted to check in with him for the first time since his Eldora crash and his hospital visit just a few days later due to an allergic reaction to a bug bite.
I waited for a few minutes outside his hauler before he waved me in. Bloomquist had just taken a shower following a steamy night of racing and was dressed in just a pair of shorts. He sat down on a couch, shirtless and pulling a brush through his long, wet hair, as I sat across from him and began asking questions.
Bloomquist was in vintage form. He pulled off a Band-Aid from the lower portion of his right leg to reveal the small mark on his skin that was where he had been bitten by a horsefly June 11 while he was outside his shop washing his transporter late. He described how the numbness still in his leg since his motorcycle crash left him unable to feel the horsefly, which he said “was just down there going to town” on his leg long enough for blood to be pouring from it by the time he realized what was happening. Then he spoke about the allergic reaction that lowered his blood pressure to a dangerous level and put him in briefly in the hospital.
It was one of the most unique blow-by-blow accounts I had ever heard from Bloomquist or any other driver. It was quintessential Bloomquist.
What I remember most from those 10-or-so minutes with Bloomquist, however, was when his 18-year-old daughter, Ariel, came into the toterhome and sat next to her father. She put her left arm around his back and leaned her head on his shoulder as he continued to talk.
There in front of me was a gentle, father-daughter moment, one that came back to me shortly after I heard of Bloomquist’s tragic passing on Friday morning. Because as much as I will miss never having another opportunity to interview the Dirt Late Model legend, I know it pales in comparison to Ariel no longer having her father.
