A little about where Tim Steele has been and where he hopes to go. This is the most recent story of any depth on him I know of.
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Don't ask three-time ARCA champion and Coopersville resident Tim Steele about his violent meeting with the wall in a Winston Cup test at Atlanta Motor Speedway almost five years ago and expect to get a clear answer.
While Steele can tell you all about the results of the November 1997 crash that derailed a promising career, there is a memory lapse that Steele figures will be with him the rest of his life. There is an even bigger gap in his racing career that he may never be able to fill.
Steele was on top of the world in 1997. He and Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre were ready to buy owner Bud Moore's Winston Cup team and go racing with the big boys.
But that world and those plans came crashing down.
"Myself and Brett Favre were going to own a Winston Cup team," Steele said. "We're at Atlanta on Nov. 5, 1997, to be exact. I guess I crashed there at the end of the day. I say I guess because I don't remember anything from Nov. 5 on. The next thing I remember, it was April 18, 1998."
Steele's life didn't completely come back into focus that April, either. He was just beginning a long recovery process from a serious head injury.
"Throughout that time, I guarantee you the world through my eyes and the world through your eyes didn't look the same," Steele said. "There was a time from Nov. 5 of 1997 until January of 1999 where I'd see two of everything. I'd be sitting here (among a few reporters) and seeing a whole bunch of you all. I finally figured out that the one on the right didn't exist and the one on the left was accurate where it was at."
The double vision was his dark secret. "The hardest thing about all that was that I couldn't tell nobody," Steele said. "I couldn't tell a soul. I couldn't tell my wife, my daughter, my parents, nobody. It got to the point where I even had to see a psychologist.
"Everybody knew that something was up, but nobody knew what that something was."
Steele did his best to race during that time in his life and even won an ARCA race at Talladega in October of 1998. His career, however, was starting to slip and he was battling to be the driver he was when he won an ACRA-record 12 races and his last title in 1997.
Before his Atlanta crash, Steele dominated ARCA races at Michigan International Speedway. He won here twice and had four top-3 finishes in a five-race stretch from 1995 through 1997.
He missed most of the 1998 racing season and gave the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series a whirl in 1999. It was all about getting the edge back one race at a time.
"It wasn't a scary time because I told myself that if I ever put anybody or anything in danger beside myself because I had done something stupid on the race track, that's when I'd say: 'OK, I don't need to be doing this,'" Steele said. "Fortunately, that never happened. Believe you me, in this racing business there's enough critics out there where you'd know if you done something stupid."
In 2000, Steele was back in ARCA and winning races. He won at MIS in June 2000. Last year at MIS, he finished ninth in June and third in July.
He's back this year as a driver/owner of the HS Die Ford for the Flagstar ARCA 200 race in the ARCA RE/MAX Series.
"Right now, we're in the process of building things back to where we can go and win 50 percent of the ARCA races that we run," said Steele, 34. "A year or so ago, I would have said that to win that fourth ARCA championship didn't mean that much to me or the team, but right now I can tell you how much that really does mean to me. It means we've gotten back to dominate fashion."
Steele, who tested at MIS in May, wants to show the doubters that he's all the way back.
"I know I can do it," Steele said. "I know that for a fact. The challenge is getting the team back to the point to where it was.
"There's no magic to this racing stuff. To win races, it goes to whoever pays the most attention to detail."