6/26/2025
Bloomington Speedway
Jordan Goldesberry: Back in Contention
Jordan Goldesberry had high expectations coming into the 2024 season and with good reason. He had a solid team, and he understood the ups and downs that can derail any racing operation. Circled on the calendar was a series of races in Indiana and he reasoned this might be the place where title hopes could rise or fall. He made the show at Lincoln Park Speedway, which was no small feat given the number of cars on hand. Then came the next round at Bloomington. “We had been having a decent year before that,” he recalls, “we had a few top 5s but that is when the wheels started to fall off. In the heat race the fuel line came off but we transferred out of the B main. Then the brake caliper ripped off about halfway through, so we were lucky to finish because the track was already black slick from the heats.”
There were a few lessons learned from the experience but in the end there is more to Jordan Goldesberry than racing.
While contentment is the product of many variables at the core it reflects being satisfied with your station in life. Oddly enough, this is a rare sentiment in racing circles. After all, most participants long for better equipment, more accomplished help, and a chance to devote every waking moment to the sport they love. If happiness depended on the attainment of each of these items many would be forced to hold their head in their hands and lament their fate.
Jordan Goldesberry is not one of those people. The 2022 Bumper to Bumper Interstate Racing Association Outlaw Sprint Series champion has a full life. With a laugh he says, “I work like everybody else.” Whether it is landscaping, plowing snow, or starting a screen printing business, he does everything he can to provide a good life for his wife Kristin and daughter Lexia. Make no mistake about it, Goldesberry hungers to race, and he is good at it. Yet, he understands that there are multiple obligations that must be balanced. These demands are no cause for complaint, and he realizes that most of his IRA peers find themselves in similar circumstances. There is one other thing he shares with his closest rivals. He takes sprint car racing very seriously, and when the helmet goes on his full focus is on getting to the checkered flag first.
Born in 1990, he calls Springfield, Illinois home. The capital city of Illinois has a great racing heritage. The list of those who have won on the famed mile track on the north edge of town is a veritable who’s who in both open wheel and full bodied competition. Then there was the short track. He’s too young to have experienced the days of Joe Shaheen’s “Little” Springfield Speedway, yet ironically one of his accounts for snow removal is the very corner where the famed bullring once sat.
With that as a backdrop one might surmise that his family has a long
racing history. Not so, Jordan says, “My dad would go to the track, and I think he might have helped scrape mud, but he wasn’t racing or anything like that.” Given this context, what prompted Jack Goldesberry to purchase a quarter midget for his son is unclear. “I remember going to the races at Broadwell just north of Springfield,” he says, “and I remember watching the races for the first time. But I know when he got the quarter midget at first, I wouldn’t let him start it with me in it. He had to just push it around the yard because I was terrified to start it. One day he just flipped the switch and off I went.”
The journey truly began with the Sangamon County Quarter Midget Association, and it took off like a shot from there. “It’s funny,” he says, “because we traveled more when I was racing quarter midgets than we have ever travelled since. We went to California, Pennsylvania, to Hagerstown (Md.) and down to Florida. It is crazy to think how much we travelled back then for basically just a trophy. It was fun or we wouldn’t have kept doing it.”
The quarter midgets served him well until he was around eleven or twelve years old. Then the father and son team purchased a 600cc micro and raced occasionally at Bell-Claire Speedway and were regulars at Pike County Speedway in Pittsfield. Having completed that apprenticeship by the time he blew sixteen candles out on the birthday cake he was ready to go sprint car racing.
He began in 360 sprint cars and almost by chance his first appearance came at Missouri’s Lake Ozark Speedway. In time he made his way to the Iowa-based Sprint Invaders series, and an initial win came in 2008 at the Tom Knowles Memorial at Spoon River Speedway in Canton, Illinois. He would eventually add 410 sprint cars to his plate and regularly signed in with the Midwest Open Wheel Association (MOWA).
Once he got a taste of winning, he liked it. What makes Goldesberry’s success even sweeter is that this is a classic family operation. “It is really just me and my dad,” he says, “and we have a neighbor who comes with us, but as for the hands-on work it is just me and dad in the shop every night. Again, that is just like everybody else at our level. We don’t have a crew chief or anything like that, we just do what we can with what we got.” Then he pauses and quickly adds, “Don’t get me wrong we have a lot of great helpers and supporters that allow us to do it.” He quickly notes that the most needed encouragement comes from within his own household.
Things had developed into a bit of a routine then a funny thing happened that altered his racing universe. Slowly but surely Jordan and Jack Goldesberry began pointing their rig in a different direction. “We always talked about going to Wisconsin,” he recalls, “and then around 2011 or 2012 we finally did it. We could race closer to home, but we just loved racing up there, the tracks were awesome. Steve Sinclair and the IRA run a professional show. At first, we went up there for a handful of races, then we were running seventy percent of them, then it was eighty percent. Finally, in 2022 we ran every show for the first time and won the championship.
Snaring a title at any level is not easy when you have a job, a family, and the tracks are at minimum four to five hours away. Goldesberry admits when there is a sixty percent chance of rain it is hard to commit to those long drives. However, on balance the people and the experience have been enough to keep him coming back. What also helps is having a solid sponsorship package behind him. Backing from Rockstar Energy Drink ensures that his racecars stand out from the pack. Naturally, he has to do his part on and off the racetrack to justify their investment. He is doing something right because additional corporate partners are prepared to come on board in a multi-year deal.
When you develop these kinds of partnerships everyone wants to know your secret recipe. Sometimes it isn’t all that complicated. Perhaps he is being humble when he says, “We were at the right place at the right time and knew the right people. We tried it the first year with Rockstar and they loved it.” Goldesberry is under no illusions. The external funding allows him to continue to have success in his arena, but he isn’t going to turn his entire life upside down to chase a shiny object. “I am not in position to do this on a full time basis with work and a family,” he says, “but this helps tremendously. We made it work before, but this makes you wonder how we did do it.”
Jordan also survey’s the racing landscape, checks out the calendar, and takes a big healthy gulp of reality. The High Limit Series or the World of Outlaws is not in the cards. “I’m not young anymore,” he says, “I mean, I don’t consider myself old either, but you look around. For example. look at Brenham Crouch who won our title in 2023. These kids are so good. I have been racing sprint cars for seventeen years now and I feel like I am better now than I ever have been. But I probably didn’t excel as quickly as the kids do now. I wanted to make it happen probably ten years ago and I would have given everything up to try it. But not now. We are comfortable where we are. We are having fun as a family and I’m just not willing to be on the road all the time even if the opportunity was there. I just don’t think the timing is right.”
The record shows that Goldsberry has a point. In many respects his 2023 season was as good as his championship campaign, but when all the markers were tallied, he fell one position shy of his goal. He scored wins quickly at Beaver Dam, 141 Speedway, and at Plymouth. In fact, his hot start had him thinking backing up his 2022 title was right there in his grasp. In the end he feels the consistency just wasn’t there, particularly in the middle section of the season.
The main obstacle in his path was the aforementioned Crouch. There was disappointment, but in the end, he thinks his young rival deserves a great deal of credit. “It was like every week he got better and better,” Jordan says, “You could just see it. He has a seasoned crew chief and has the best of the best stuff. That’s great, but he is also just a good driver. He makes good decisions. Sure, he made a couple of mistakes this year which cost him a little, but overall, night in and night out they finished races up front. I know when I was that age, I wasn’t that consistent. I tore up more stuff than that. The kid is talented and there are more like him.”
In 2024 the goal was as before, to capture the IRA championship. It didn’t happen. Recalling his experience at Bloomington he says, “After that it didn’t get any better. We got a win in September and leading up to that things were not really going well, That brought us up. Then a week or two later we tore up a car. You know how quickly things can change.”
Looking back, he knows what he should have done. “It does wear on you,” he says. “We ended up talking about this later. Because we don’t do this for a living sometimes you just need to take a couple of weeks off. You are trying to do your day job and fix the car in the evening, and you end up switching so many things because you tore up this and you tore up that. You get to where you don’t know what you have.”
It seems like a solid plan, but at the moment Goldesberry is in the second position in IRA points just 100 tallies behind fellow Illinois driver Blake Nimee. This is no time for a break. “Yes we’re all in right now,” he says, “but obviously if things start to unravel we will need to look at stepping back.” Jordan also knows what can improve his performance for the remainder of the 2025 season. “We can’t qualify to save our ass,” he says with a laugh, “in the IRA there is a ten car dash, and I think we have made two dashes in eight shows. That means we started outside the top ten the vast majority of the time, but we have also finished in the top 10 all nights but one. I have never been a quick time guy but there was a time when qualifying in the top five wasn’t an issue. The other night we qualified eighth and it felt like a win. I think it starts getting into your head.”
However, the record shows that Goldesberry knows how to race. That said, he realizes he can’t constantly put himself behind the eight ball. “We race well,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter where you race the competition is so stiff. You can’t start fifteenth and contend for a podium. I mean you can, but it doesn’t make your life easy.”
Taking the easy way out is not Goldesberry’s style. Nor is doing something halfway. Right now, he knows he can get to the top of the mountain in the Bumper to Bumper Interstate Racing Association and he’s been there before.
Action shot Hannah Weymier HW Designs
Stand up shot Dave Olson 360 studio
Article Credit: Patrick Sullivan
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