Vado Speedway Park
Good stories abound for California WWS entrant
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt.com managing editor
Shawn DeForest's 1998 Rocket Chassis. (Katrina Kniss Photography)
Shawn DeForest of Livermore, Calif., knows it’s a long shot to become a rare California winner at the Rio Grande Waste Services Wild West Shootout. But the 55-year-old dirt racer would at least like to have the opportunity at making a feature lineup or two after mechanical problems and headaches hampered him last January at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park. | Complete WWS coverage
His primary aim is to “have a good time and finish the best we can. Just (compete) and not have drama like we had last year of breaking parts,” DeForest said in a Wednesday phone interview while preparing his shocks for the January miniseries. “I'm going back because I had a great time even though we worked our ass off and had to do a lot of work” in last year’s ill-fated bid.
Driving a Dennis Souza-owned MasterSbilt Race Car this time around, DeForest is expected to be among more than 50 drivers competing in the Super Late Model portion of the Wild West Shootout at Vado’s 3/8-mile oval that launches with Saturday’s $25,000-to-win opener. The miniseries continues with $10,000-to-win events Sunday and Wednesday, and concludes next weekend with $10,000-to-win events Friday and Saturday and Jan. 12’s $25,000-to-win finale. Most teams plan to gather for Friday evening practice at the Royal Jones-owned facility south of Las Cruces.
Only a few California-based drivers have contended for victories during January action in the Southwest over the last 25 seasons, but the lure of competing with some of the nation’s best drivers — Bobby Pierce, Mike Marlar, Tyler Erb, Brandon Sheppard among them — makes it worthwhile.
“It's that whole racing camaraderie, right?” DeForest said, recalling last year’s struggles in a Dave Papenhausen-owned car at Vado. “Everybody helped us out, everybody offered up their shop to do this, to do that, I needed to make some parts because of a different oil pump and different bracketry and (teams) let me come into their shop and use their mill and their lathe, right? They don't have to do that, but they did.”
Keeping pace with superstar drivers is unlikely, DeForest knows, saying that “a lofty, lofty goal would be just to make a main event, pick one. I don't care. But that's a very tall order.”
DeForest, however, did have his own moment in January miniseries action in 2003 at the former Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix, Ariz., when he pressured Hall of Fame driver and race winner Bill Frye of Greenbrier, Ark., before mechanical woes cost him a second-place finish.
“We needed (Frye) to have a really bad day and we needed not to lose the fuel pump belt,” DeForest said. “We’d have been all right, but still a good story.”
DeForest, a dirt racer for nearly 30 years and two-time winner on the former CarQuest Dirt Late Model Tour based in Bakersfield, Calif., has another good story about his most recent victory in October’s season finale on the California-based Xtreme Late Model Series at Marysville Raceway.
DeForest's triumph on the Limited Late Model circuit came in a vintage race car — a 1998 Rocket Chassis.
“I have all these old race cars and I like racing these things, so I took one of them out of mothballs and changed some things,” DeForest said, moving bars and cross members while employing the modern technology of a spring smasher to evaluate suspension setups. “Nobody has any data on a 1998 black front end (Rocket), but it's amazing how similar a lot of this stuff still is … they didn't move pick up points around too much.
“We put the car together for this past October and went out there and just absolutely killed him. It was great,” he said. “We basically got to run two races (in 2024) and we won the first one right out of the box when we showed up. And we should have won the second one. The following weekend, we went to Antioch Speedway and set fast time won the heat race, led the first 18 laps (of the feature) and got a flat tire.”
That reconstructed Rocket was a race car DeForest drove during what’s now considered the glory days of Super Late Model racing in California. Relatively inexperienced in his mid-20s, he suddenly found himself as the West’s lone Rocket Chassis dealer for Mark Richards and Steve Baker of Shinnston, W.Va.
"I called a bunch of chassis manufacturers just because I was a young kid, didn't know anything about nothing,” DeForest recalls, “and Mark Richards was the only one who returned my phone call.”
That connection helped propel DeForest’s CarQuest Dirt Late Model Tour success — he had a 1999 victory at Watsonville (Calif.) Speedway and 2002 win at Bakersfield Speedway — and nearly broke through in Arizona in his run at Manzanita.
A Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in October 2003 slowed his racing pursuits for a time, but a now healthy DeForest says he’s always managed to make at least one start in a Late Model or modified every season, including when he drove one of Dennis Souza’s Late Models to a pair of victories at Antioch in 2019.
“We’re good friends and he hit me up and wanted to know if I wanted to go to Vado and we kind of put together a little deal and we’re going to see how it goes,” DeForest said.
Souza and DeForest’s oldest brother Rich will be among supporters along with friends Jim Reid, Johnny Eskew and Kenny Neu. DeForest’s 28-year-old son Ryan will also be in Vado competing in the X-mod division.
After last year’s Vado run in Dave Papenhausen’s Longhorn Chassis was hampered by two broken engines, oil pump damage and finally a broken steering rack, DeForest hopes he’s at least on the track throughout 2025’s miniseries.
“We had intentions of running all of them,” he said, “and this year we're gonna try it again see if we can't make them all.”
