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Father and son speed shop builds engines for sprint car customers worldwide

Sprint car racing is one of those sports that’s a little hard to imagine until you have experienced it. What it is, in essence, is twenty smallish open-wheeled roadsters powered by engines putting out 800+ horsepower, racing wheel-to-wheel at speeds up to 150 mph on short oval, often dirt, tracks. Popular in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, sprint car racing can be an expensive sport to compete in. The special racing engines can cost $30,000-$50,000, and, they run on methanol instead of gasoline, after 20 or so race nights, the engines need to be worked on by specialized mechanics. And that’s just the engines.

It’s a big-money activity, and has been a stepping stone for a number of high profile champions in the field of motor sports, including Jeff Gordon, Kasey Kahne, Tony Stewart, and Ed Carpenter. But if you picture big-city garages in New York or LA making the top sprint car engines, think again.

An unmarked and unassuming white clapboard building in quiet Holbrook, NE gives no indication that loud, exciting and very, very quick Sprint car racing engines are being built and tested inside. Don and Dan Vonderfecht, a father-son partnership, own and manage D&F Service & Speed. They build, maintain, rebuild and test engines that are sold to Sprint car and NASCAR racing customers from New York to Australia.

“Most people don’t realize we’re building racing engines for customers worldwide in here, and that our testing and machining equipment is state-of-the-art and the best in the Midwest,” Don said.

‘I loved engines from day one’

Don  Vonderfecht, the dad of the father-son engineering team, grew up on a farm near Holbrook. He inherited a passion for mechanics from his father who rebuilt airplane engines, flew them, sold them and then rebuilt another. Don said, “I loved engines from day one, but I never did get excited about airplanes.”  Vonderfecht graduated from a technical school in Nebraska with a degree in auto mechanics. He was employed as a mechanic at a Chevrolet-Cadillac dealer in Holdrege for a few years, during which time he acquired an enthusiasm for sprint racing that would cause him to compete for 33 years on tracks from Canada to Texas.

In 1964 he opened his own shop in Holbrook. “I did mechanic work and kept racing, but I gradually lost interest in general mechanics,” said  Vonderfecht. “I figured that anyone could keep a pickup running, but racing engines require advanced mechanical skill and precision.”

Like his dad Dan  Vonderfecht was fascinated with racing engines. Don said, “Dan hung around the shop after school and showed me he had a talent for mechanics. Before too many years he became my crew chief at the track.” Dan adds, “We were good enough to run big races, and our win record was respectable.” His dad added, “We always had a good looking race car, and we were professionals.”

Winning races wins customers

The  Vonderfecht’s engines and their mechanical expertise attracted notice from other drivers, and their customer base grew because their engines were winning races.

“If you aren’t winning, you don’t have business,” Dan said, noting Bill Nutter, a Sprint car champion from Medford, Oregon won the biggest race on West Coast with a D&F engine.

The  Vonderfechts do all their own machining. They modify Chevy V8 and aluminum blocks to extremely precise standards. Don says, “We have machining and testing equipment equivalent to any used in NASCAR shops to bore the blocks, deck surface heads, and get the kind of accuracy that is equivalent to the width of a human hair. We apply our own coatings on the engines using a ceramic coating that was developed in the space program and withstands 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” The ceramic retains heat, and heat is horse power in a racing engine.

The D&F team adapts their engines to the individual racing driver and to the rules of the race. Don says, “We build engines for hard chargers who run the high line, and smoother drivers who drive lower on the track.” They modify the engines according to the length of the track, usually either 1/2- or 3/8-mile, and the rules of the race.

It takes approximately three weeks to build an engine, after which they are shipped from Holbrook to the East Coast, West Coast, and across the globe.

Small town advantages

Don and Dan appreciate the low overhead and relative freedom small towns allow for a business such as theirs. Now that Dan has a family, he appreciates that small towns are a safe place to raise kids, and that the proximity to his house means he can easily get home during the day.

On the downside, UPS doesn’t stop daily and the nearest parts store is 200 miles away, so it sometimes takes three or four days to get needed parts.

Regardless of where you work, Don’s advice is, “Do your work because you love it. Money is unimportant. I make enough money to do what I want to do. I don’t start every day thinking about how much money I make.”

To really appreciate the excitement and energy of sprint car racing, Don and Dan recommend seeing a race at Knoxville, Iowa, the national capitol of sprint car racing. The sport attracts 30,000 people per race in Knoxville and is worth $8 million to the town. Dan says, “The residents of Knoxville, Iowa never complain about the noise of race car engines.” See the schedule and videos of Sprint car races at www.knoxvilleraceway.com.

If you go to Knoxville, you might see Dan and Don  Vonderfecht there. Dan says, “We go to the Knoxville, Iowa races every year to see our customer’s race and see the engines we built at work.”

“Car racing is most popular sport in the United States,” Don concludes. “Rural Nebraskans don’t realize the advantages to the economy they can have when they build race tracks and sponsor racing events.”

Something to think about. You might call it “Vroom to Grow.”

Who to Contact

D&F Service & Speed
Don and Dan Vanderfecht
317 Center Ave.
PO Box 11
Holbrook, NE 68948
308-493-5448
308-962-7086
E-mail: Daniel@atcjet.net

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