Scott Bloomquist, Champion Dirt-Track Driver, Dies at 60

Scott Bloomquist, a superstar dirt-track racer who won more than 600 races and whose car bore the image of a skull and crossbones, died on Aug. 16 when the vintage single-engine plane that he was piloting crashed into a barn close to the airstrip on his family farm near Mooresburg, Tenn. He was 60.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that Bloomquist was the only person aboard the vintage Piper J-3 aircraft. In a statement confirming the death, Scott Bloomquist Racing posted a statement that described him as “one hell of a wheel man” and said, “Whether you cheered for him or booed for him, you still made noise, and Scott loved you all equally for that.”

Bloomquist was considered one of the greatest drivers on the circuits where he raced. He won nine championships, including four with the United Dirt Track Racing Association’s Hav-A-Tampa Series, three with the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series and one with the World of Outlaws.

Tony Stewart, the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, owns the Eldora Speedway dirt track in Rossburg, Ohio, where Bloomquist won four elite World 100 races. Bloomquist, Stewart said in a statement, was “probably the smartest guy I’ve ever been around when it come to dirt racing.”

Stewart, who has raced on dirt tracks, added, “What he could do behind the wheel of a racecar was matched by the ingenuity he put into building his racecars.”

Bloomquist was known for his long hair, his loquaciousness, his deep knowledge of racecar building and his love of dirt racing’s freewheeling atmosphere. A mostly rural sport with about 800 tracks around the country where drivers aggressively navigate tracks that are either dry or muddy, dirt racing attracts families with its state-fair-like ambience, and fans revel in the clay dust that wafts from the tracks into their beers and burgers.

The sport is “very insular,” Adam Cornell, the owner and publisher of Dirt Empire magazine, said in an interview. “If you didn’t grow up with any exposure to it, you’d have no idea it exists. It doesn’t do a lot of outreach.”

Bloomquist was often compared to Dale Earnhardt Sr., the tough, crusty NASCAR star. But Bloomquist told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 that he viewed himself an outlaw and was too rebellious to exist in the buttoned-up, corporate environment of the modern NASCAR Cup Series.