OAKLEY, Kan. (Aug. 9, 2024) – Brady Bencken raced his way into the IMCA history book Friday night but probably wasn’t the proudest person standing in victory lane.
Bencken won for the 100th time in his IMCA Sunoco Hobby Stock career at home track Thomas County Speedway and was joined after the checkers flew by father Rod and grandfather Wes in displaying the congratulatory banner.
“It’s pretty big. When I got my first track championship, it was unbelievable. Now we’re 10 years down the road and 100 wins. It’s pretty neat,” the Oakley, Kan., driver said. “I didn’t even realize until last year that we were even that close. I was just racing, not paying attention to the wins, and then IMCA contacted me.”
“It’s a pretty big accomplishment.”
Bencken has racked up a lot of pretty big accomplishments since recording his first Hobby Stock win, also at Thomas County, in 2014.
The 2016 Kansas state and an 11-time track champion, he won at least 10 features every season from 2016 to 2021. Bencken had a single-season best 19 checkers and finished fourth in the national points race in 2017.
Both his father, who started racing in 1983 and ran through the 1990s before starting his promotional career, and grandfather, who continues to do much of the work on Bencken’s car, have been keys to his success from day one.
“I’ve been going to the track since I was in a baby stroller. I grow up around dad – he was running a race track (WaKeeney, RPM and fair races at Rooks County) the first 21 years of my life – so all I’ve ever known has been being at a race track.,” he said. “The car that I’ve been running is nothing special, it’s a 2007 Big Daddy that I’ve won maybe 70 features in, and we build most of our own stuff.”
“Every weld on that car is out of my grandpa’s shop. We take other people’s old junk parts, straighten ‘em and make ‘em work. It’s kind of a family tradition and neat that we can do it together,” he continued. “We don’t have new stuff, we don’t have name brand stuff, it’s kind of our own deal. When you can’t but it you’ve got to figure out how to build it. That’s what my dad and grandpa always taught me and it’s worked.“
Career win number 100 was Bencken’s third of the season, all of them coming at Colby. With continued help from the Plummer family, he’ll run both the Hobby Stock and Friesen Performance IMCA Northern SportMod this year before focusing more on the open wheel class next season.
“We had a lot of motor trouble last year. We’re budget racers so when we blew up four of them it pretty much knocked the wind out of our pockets,” he explained. “We’re slowly getting rebuilt and have a couple good motors under us now. The funds weren’t there and we had to back off a little bit but now that we’ve got some luck kind of rolling we’ll probably pick up a few more starts here at the fall shows.”
Bencken becomes the 14th driver with 100 career IMCA Sunoco Hobby Stock wins and the second to reach that milestone in just six days, Mike Smith having done so on Aug. 3.
“Still kind of unbelievable, for where we started and from what we’ve been through over the years,” he said. “It’s pretty neat.”
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