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Racing to the Top - Christi Hoenshell

Greenwood, MO —
Christi Hoenshell is a natural- born race car driver. Mike Hoenshell, her dad, thinks so. And so does Christi.

You have to be when, at 10-years-old, Christi climbed into a junior sprint car and zoomed around a dirt track. Was she nervous? No. Was she intimidated? No. Was she excited about going fast. Definitely.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “It was just an adrenaline rush. I guess it just came natural to me.”

The car, a junior sprint car powered by a go cart engine, fueled Hoenshell to “rookie of the year” honors in the junior sprint division.
Mike recalled a story when they were watching a race at the Sweet Springs Motorsports Complex when she was 9 years old.

“We were just going down there as spectators, and the little junior sprint cars came out with these little kids driving them. I just remember looking over at her and said ‘you think you can drive one of them,’ ” Mike said.

Three weeks later, the family bought her a junior sprint car. She was 9 years old at the time.
Maybe she’s comfortable racing because of her family. Mike raced street stock cars at Lakeside Speedway and I-70 Speedway. Her grandfather, Don Hoenshell, raced midget cars.

“It’s in my blood,” Christi said with a laugh and smile.

But Mike was a bag of nerves when he saw Christi whip around the dirt track. “My heart was beating so fast, I could feel it in my throat,” he says.

Now, the 19-year-old Greenwood resident races full-sized sprint cars. She will be racing at 6:30 tonight at Valley Speedway in Grain Valley.

“I’m very competitive. I like to win. I don’t go out there to get second place,” she says.

From 2002 to 2004, Christi raced micro sprint cars, which were mid-sized sprint cars that have 600 cc engines (about 100 horsepower) During this time, the teenager was the only girl in the field. Christi routinely beat men drivers. She captured eight feature wins and six second place finishes in 2004, earning track champion.

“It’s something to behold and see what she’s done in racing so far,” Mike says. When she started moving up to bigger cars, she was racing against men 30 and 40 years old. It’s funny to see their reaction when they get beat.”
Being a teenage girl among men inspired her to drive hard.
“People think girls can’t race,” Christi says, “and that drives me that much harder to prove to them that you can race.”

All race car drivers wreck. And Christi is no different.

Christi remembers the first time she flipped her car. It was in 2001 at a track in Garden City, Kan.
She qualified third. The two cars in front of her wrecked in front of her on the first lap.

“I launched over the right rear tire of one of the cars and got the altitude record for the night,” she says. “I did three or four barrel rolls in the air. I was about 10 feet in the air, hit the ground and rolled about two more times. It happened so fast that all I saw was the sky when I launched up.”

Mike was the first one at the crash site, praying that Christi was OK. Turns out, she sprained her wrist in the violent crash.

Was she shaken up? No way, she says.

“I was so mad because they started the race without me. I wanted to be racing again.”

Christi won the following week’s race.

“I remember heading back from Garden City and I asked her ‘do you want to keep drivin’?’ She looked at me and said ‘fix the car, dad.’ I figured it was going to scare her (the crash) but she said she wanted to go back out.”

Christi has flipped numerous times after that first crash, but nothing serious.

Now she races full-size sprint cars, powered by a Chevrolet 305 cubic inch small-block motor. The motor is fueled by a carburetor. Her competition runs fuel injection like most cars. This puts Christi at a disadvantage because the engine is less powerful.
But drivers can make a difference, even with limited equipment. Once, Christi was in third place in the final laps of a race. She was sitting back, waiting for an opening where she could pass them.

“On the last lap, they were so close together. Somehow, I squeezed my car between them and passed them. My dad was standing in the third corner, like up against the fence. “After I passed them, I saw my dad jump like 5 feet in the air because he was so happy. I was going for the checkered flag when I saw him do that. I just started laughing while I was racing.”

Christi races primarily at Valley Speedway and a few times at the dirt track at I-70 Speedway in Odessa.
She finished fifth out of 19 cars during the feature race at Valley on Oct. 11, her best finish of the year. Many of the races she was going to enter got rained out.

The Hoenshells plan to devote more money and time at racing going into 2009. Mike said his company, Insight Mechanical Contractors, is the primary sponsor. Basically, Mike builds the car and Christi drives it. But she works on the car, too.

The two work on the car at night throughout the week leading up to the day’s race. They spend about 20 hours a week working on it at their home in Greenwood, south of Lee’s Summit.

Her current car cost $25,000, not cheap in recessionary times. “It gets real expensive doing it,” Mike says. “Just the upkeep in the car, and the wearing of the parts out, buying tires and shocks.”

Christi is not a full-time racer. The majority of drivers have jobs other than racing.
She attends Metropolitan Community College-Longview. She plans on transferring to Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.

She’s going to major in mechanical engineering.
“I would love to be a full-time racer,” Christi admits.

She had an opportunity to race full time. In 2006, she was displaying her sprint car at the Kansas Motor Speedway. She met James Hylton, the owner and driver of a car that raced in the ARCA-RE/MAX Series, which is two steps below the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
The family traveled with Hylton, a former crew chief of NASCAR legend Richard Petty, to tracks around the country so she could learn stock car racing. Hylton asked her to drive the car.

But the sponsorship deal fell through, which means no money and no racing.

“This is what I want to do,” she says. “That’s why I’m going into mechanical engineering because if I can’t race, I want to keep something in the background of racing. I always want to be involved in it. Any chance I could get to race professionally would be great.”
Her dream is racing an Indy Car. Heck, just driving one would be awesome, she says.

So when Christi mentions Indy Car driving, automatic comparisons are made with the most popular Indy Car driver, Danica Patrick.

Yes, there are similarities between Christi and Danica. They’re both attractive, young and competitive.

Mike says with a grin that his daughter can beat Danica.

“The thing I don’t agree with what she did was when she posed half-naked on these cars trying to get media attention,” she says. “I personally would never do that.”

On the track, she calls herself a tom boy. Off the track,she’s a “girlie-girl.” In fact, she was a cheerleader in high school.

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