The Vault
SHAWANO LEGEND M.J. MCBRIDE
Posted on: Saturday October 31, 2020
FROM JOE VERDEGAN’S 2015 RELEASE “LIFE IN THE PAST LANE – A HISTORY OF STOCK CAR RACING IN NORTHEAST WISCONSIN FROM 1950-1980”
M.J. McBride
Luck of the Irish
Before he began making left-hand turns on dirt ovals, M.J. McBride played guitar in a rock band when he was in high school. The band was called The Ravens, and they played mid-level venues all over Wisconsin.
“I had a lot of fun with it, but once we started racing full time, I had to give it up,” said McBride, who has lived in Shawano his whole life.
McBride’s first taste of racing came while he was in high school. His dad, Charlie McBride, and Willy Lamberies had been attending races at the Shawano County Fairgrounds and decided they wanted a piece of the action. The pair went ahead and purchased a ’55 Ford.
The driver was Cubby Lamberies, Willy’s nephew. McBride began wrenching on that car in 1964. In the fall of 1965, Charlie bought another ’55 Ford. “I ran two or three races that year,” recalled McBride. “Cubby was number 98, so I ran A 98.”
In McBride’s first race, he recalls climbing the front stretch fence after the leader in front of him spun. His first year of full-time racing was in 1966, and he ran exclusively at Shawano.
“In the early days, we primarily ran the semi-feature, because there would be 80 to 100 cars some nights,” said McBride. “They’d only run the twelve fastest qualifiers in the feature. Then the next twelve fastest would run the semi-feature. After that, they would run consolation races and bonus races.
“Dad built the motors and we would work on the cars themselves. There wasn’t a lot of technology. It was more seat-of-the-pants type stuff. We learned things on the fly.”
The big names were John Schultz, Red BeDell and Johnny Beyers.
“They were running the feature when I was running the semi-features,” McBride added. “My second year in 1967, I started qualifying for the features on occasion. It was really hard to qualify. We had to work hard just to qualify into the semi-feature.”
While McBride’s dad was a board member of the Wolf River Racing Association, M.J. stayed out of the political part of the sport. “That was Dad’s deal, and at the time, I was really more interested in working on the race cars,” he said.
McBride was well aware of the rivalries cultivated in the late 1960s and early 1970s between the WRRA drivers who were based in Shawano County versus the Fox Valley drivers like JJ Smith, Jerry “Medina” Smith, and Roger Regeth.
“I was actually running right behind John Schultz and Jerry Smith when the ‘incident’ happened,” said McBride. “It really surprised me actually, but I did not know that those two had gotten together earlier in that race.”
It apparently caused some concern. “JJ and Jerry they were the nicest guys and good racers, too,” McBride noted. “I think a big part of that rivalry was the locals around Shawano probably felt a little offended at those Fox Valley guys being allowed to come in and run those bigger motors. We were all running our smaller 360 cubic-inch engines, and they were coming in with their 427 cubic-inch engines. That was a big part of what caused those rivalries, in my opinion.
“JJ had the yellow Tweety Bird and was the man to beat when we were running the half-mile at Seymour. That car Gene Wheeler owned was the big topic of conversation locally. Paul (Kaczrowski) was running Seymour at the time and was quite the promoter.”
McBride ran at De Pere in 1975, the year of the “feud” between Kaczrowski and Peters, when De Pere and Seymour ran head-to-head on Sunday night.
“I was racing for Crooks Schultz at that time,” recalled McBride. “We ran De Pere, and we liked Seymour, too. But for us, I suspect it was whatever promoter was giving us the best deal at the time. Overall, it wasn’t a good deal when it split the fans and the drivers. Nobody really won.”
Many Sunday nights at De Pere, McBride driving Schultz’s 66 car were the only viable threat to beat “The Bear” Regeth at the Brown County Fairgrounds. The aggressive style of Regeth has been well chronicled. While McBride never got into an altercation with “The Bear,” he had a front row seat to a scrap Regeth got into with a Milwaukee-area driver.
“We were racing at the Fair race in Wausau at the half-mile one year, sometime in the mid-seventies,” McBride recalled. “We were pitted by Regeth. A Milwaukee-area driver by the name of Jack Brewer came over, ranting and raving. He said, ‘That sonofabitch Regeth took me out five years ago down at Hales (Corners). I punched him in the mouth back then. He just did it to me again, so I’m gonna punch him again!’ So when Regeth gets out of his car, Brewer punches him smack dab right in the mouth. We just kept on working on our race car.”
Around 1971, McBride got involved in USAC stock car racing through the help of one of the team’s parts suppliers – Bill Behling out of Milwaukee.
“Bill called my dad and Carl Dey (local concrete businessman in Shawano), and said he had a ’69 Ford Torino for sale that was a USAC stock car,” said McBride. “Back then, John (Schultz) was already running USAC. I was working for Carl, and we wound up buying the car from Bill. John Schlieper out of Milwaukee had built a 427 cubic-inch motor for it.
“The rule in USAC was you couldn’t have a motor over 429.99 cubic inches. They would pump our motor and say, ‘You guys got a real small motor here.’ On a mile track, these guys were killing us. We talked to Holman Moody later because we later bought a 1972 Ford Torino from Behling. That was a fully tricked-out Holman Moody car back then. We told them how we were getting killed on the big tracks and they said to us, ‘Why are you running such a small motor?’ We told what the rule was, and they told us they had built 460 cubic-inch motors that would pass tech!”
McBride and the rest of the team decided to forego buying an expensive powerplant from Holman Moody and return to race the local tracks in 1974. USAC did allow McBride to travel to many different states and race on both dirt and paved tracks of all shapes and sizes.
“We would go down to run a mile dirt track at Du Quion, Illinois, and come up here, change the setup and run Shawano with the same car,” said McBride. “We had a dually truck with an open trailer. We always got a hotel for the night. We’d have somebody else drive another car with other pit crew members.”
It was racing USAC that allowed McBride to rub fenders with the likes of A.J. Foyt, the Unsers and Roger McCluskey, all big names in USAC IndyCar racing at the time.
“Those guys would cross over a lot,” McBride said. “I remember A.J. being at the Milwaukee Mile all the time. That was really his heyday back then.”
After McBride got rid of the Torino, Bill Behling had a Chevy Laguna USAC stock car that needed a driver.
“He needed a driver for a show down in Terre Haute, Indiana,” McBride said. “It had a brand new Nickerson motor under the hood. We went down there and were the fastest car in practice. Come to lineup for qualifying and I started it up after we had her cooled down, and it starting smoking. The rings went out of it, so that was the end of our day.”
That weekend wasn’t all that bad for McBride, though.
“That was Labor Day weekend in 1974, and Crooks (Schultz) had put Pete Parker in the car for the Saturday night races at Shawano,” he said. “He broke the track record. That was the fair weekend at Shawano, and they always
raced Saturdays and Mondays. So I got back on Monday, climbed in the car and broke the track record Pete had set with the same car two nights earlier.”
McBride had a good run driving for Schultz. The highlight of his career driving that machine was a fifth-place finish at the World 100 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, in 1975. He also achieved perfect attendance on Saturday nights at Shawano from 1966 through his final year racing in 2010.
What lengths did McBride go to in order to not miss a Saturday night race at Shawano? Nearly cutting the fingers off of his hand with a handsaw wasn’t enough to slow him down.
“We went to the emergency room on a Friday night, got it stitched together, and got it bandaged up and still raced on Saturday night,” said McBride. “After I got done racing the feature that night, that bandage was pretty bloodied up. I wasn’t going to miss a race. I told any family members over the years that if they scheduled a wedding reception on a Saturday night, I guess they didn’t want (his wife) Marilyn or me to attend.”
The half-mile circuit in Northeastern Wisconsin began hosting big- paying invitational races in the mid-1970s that drew the big guns from Iowa and Western Wisconsin.
“Those guys did raise the bar around here,” said McBride. “They drove differently. They set their cars up differently. So for us, it was sort of exciting to see drivers come from a different part of the state. A lot of stuff was backyard-built.”
While Shawano Speedway was McBride’s home track, he also enjoyed success at the other half-mile ovals in the area.
“Seymour was one of my favorite tracks in the half-mile days,” said McBride. “It had more banking than Shawano did, and it was one of the best-lit tracks around. I always enjoyed racing there. I enjoyed De Pere, too.”
McBride was also a frequent competitor at Leo’s Speedway at the Winnebago County Fairgrounds on Tuesday nights. The third-mile was a melting pot of sorts. Because of the mid-week venue, all the “hitters” from the Milwaukee area would come up and spar with Northeastern Wisconsin’s finest. “Dave Conger was always real tough there, as he was at Shawano, too,” McBride pointed out. “The promoter, Leo (Galicia), was a real good promoter.”
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The flat third-mile posed some challenges, and some advantages, compared to running the half-mile, according to McBride.
“We weren’t running as high of speeds at Leo’s as we were on the half-miles, so it seemed like you could make the car handle better there,” he said. “On the half-miles, we were going so much faster through the corners and you had that tremendous centrifugal force. We had to do so many more things to the cars to make them handle on the big tracks. When we went to Oshkosh, and even specials down at Hales Corners Speedway in Milwaukee, we’d actually run better than we did on the half-mile. Things happen quicker on the smaller tracks, but if you got into an accident, you could save your car, it wasn’t too bad. You hit that concrete like they have now at Shawano you’re replacing a front stub or a tail section. It’s pretty rough now.”
After McBride raced for Crooks Schultz, he was a hired gun for Terry Besaw out the Fox Valley.
“Carl (Dey) and my dad owned a Stock Car Products chassis built out of Chicago,” said McBride. “It had a stock stub front end, but everything on the tail of the car was pretty much maintained for us for about three or four years in the mid- to late ’70s.
“They decided they were going to get out of racing. The car was pretty used up, so they basically gave it to me. At that time, I hooked up with Donny Paiser. Donny had a paint shop by his place and we got the car at his shop. Donny and I were really starting to study dirt track setup technology, stuff like bump steer. We decided to stick exclusively to the dirt tracks after that.”
Up until this point, McBride still competed semi-frequently with the same car on Thursday nights at Wisconsin International Raceway in Kaukauna.
“I did enjoy racing the tar,” admitted McBride. “But it got to the point our car was so light on the dirt, we’d have to add 400 pounds to make minimum weight on Thursday nights. That, and the dirt chassis were really getting to become sophisticated with their setups. So we opted to go full time with the dirt. Those guys had newer stuff, with fabricated front ends and stuff. We had this older car, we were drilling holes in the chassis to make it lighter, cutting bars and stuff.”
The hard work for McBride paid off as he won his first track championship at his home track in 1980 despite never winning a feature that year. He would go onto win five straight titles at his home track and dominated
the local racing scene throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s. A chorus of loud boos would often emit from the race fans.
“That booing never really bothered me,” he said, “because that kept them coming every week.”
Staunch rivalries developed between Navarino’s Terry Anvelink and Kaukauna’s Pete Parker.
“I got along good with those guys, but when we strapped those helmets on, we all got pretty aggressive at times,” McBride admitted.
McBride is enjoying his retirement years today living on Shawano Lake. He and Marilyn spend the winter months in Florida.