Dave Kallmann

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

STRATFORD – The question, itself, sheds light into a dark corner of the racing world.

The fact it caught Derek Kraus’ mother off guard offers a glimpse of who he is.

A 17-year-old kid who drives fast, works hard and dreams big, Derek had just made his first start in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. Would he be going back to Wisconsin with his parents, a woman asked?

She assumed Derek lived in North Carolina like so many others trying to break into the cutthroat business at a young age, before their time runs out. Or their money. She assumed he was home-schooled.

“No, Monday morning he’ll get in the truck and go to school,” Kathy Kraus told her. “She goes, ‘Like a brick-and-mortar school? … In a classroom? Monday morning at 8 o’clock?’

“I said, ‘Well, they start at 7:50.’ She’s like, ‘That’s amazing. He lives at home though?’ ‘Yep. I make him put his underwear away.’

“She goes, ‘That’s good. That’s why he’s like the way he is.’ ”

It’s a crisp, quiet Tuesday night in an oversized shop near the Kraus home. Derek is slouching on a nearby couch, listening to his mother and father, Mark, tell stories. He waits patiently even as he misses out on two hours online with iRacing. The ultrarealistic simulation game serves as a training tool for drivers.

You can almost hear his eyes roll at the mention of his laundry.

But you also get a sense the woman last month at the racetrack was right.

Where it began

Mark caught the racing bug from his brother and an uncle and competed on asphalt and dirt. He grew up in Stratford, a crossroads in the midst of farmland and forests. For 81 years his family has owned a grocery store, the one he took over when his father retired.

Kathy grew up in Wausau, 30 miles away, and learned about racing while sitting in the stands with her future sister-in-law. She missed a few of Mark’s local races, before he started traveling regionally to compete.

“The first race I think I missed when we were married was when I was pregnant with (Derek) and Mark went to race in Michigan and it was August and the doctor said, ‘Uhhh … no,’ ” Kathy said. His parents went to the house to be with her as Mark and the crew pulled away.

“I was standing there like a lost puppy … I was so sad.”

Mark hung up his helmet in 2016 but is holding out the possibility of one more green flag if it means he can race against his son.

Family, you will see, is a recurring theme.

Wunderkind

Even as a preschooler, Derek paid attention to everything at his father’s races. He watched every division intently. He soaked up information from those around him in the stands or pits.

“In kindergarten, he went to school and explained the difference between loose and tight with Matchbox cars,” Mark said, using racers’ vernacular to describe whether a poor-handling car feels like it is going to spin out or it doesn’t want to turn.

“I think it was for show and tell or something,” Derek said, shrugging it off as nothing special.

“He’s got oodles of them, and that’s all he ever played with,” Kathy said. “We had a big blue table in the living room, and that’s what he would do. He would set the braided rug up there and race his cars. He’d take duct tape and whatever; that was the start/finish line.”

Derek started in go-karts at age 8 and was a champion at 12. That year he also raced a full-sized race car for the first time and – oops! – admitted over the public address system after winning he wasn’t actually old enough to compete.

Derek won a track title at State Park Speedway in Wausau in Bandoleros – a step above karts – and then went full bore into full-fledged, full-sized racing vehicles. He became the youngest feature winner in the American Ethanol SuperTruck Series at age 13. At 15 he did the same in the ARCA Midwest Tour, breaking a 25-year-old record set by Matt Kenseth, who would go on to win a NASCAR championship and two Daytona 500s.

Derek also drove in a handful of races around the country in his father’s super-late model. Those cars –the same ones as used on the Midwest Tour – are the premier form of stock-car racing on asphalt tracks.

“The first time I was in the super-late model, I feel like that was the one that took the longest to get comfortable in, just because there’s so much horsepower,” he said.

“One of my biggest fears always was a throttle sticking. ... The first time in super-late model I would just lift a little bit just to see if it stuck and then I’d get back in the gas. But I feel like I’ve gotten over that fear a lot, just to trust the race car.”

The steps – no, leaps – came quickly.

Each time he was ready to move ahead, Mark and Derek had the same conversation.

“(I told him,) ‘It ain’t a dream I have to live through you,’ ” Mark said. “There’s a lot of people, when you go down south, their dads are living through these kids. They’ve got a lot of money; they don’t care. I said, ‘I don’t need to do that, Derek.’ ”

And each time the conversation ended the same way: Let’s do it.

Fitting it all in

Racing is a huge commitment of time.

Mark has never missed one of Derek’s races; the grocery store affords him that flexibility. His typical weeknight routine is to get home from work, grab dinner, work in the shop until 10 or so.

Kathy used all but 2½ days of her vacation from work this year to go to the racetrack, she said, and one of those 2½ was banked for 2019.

Derek helps his dad, an uncle and one other volunteer crewman prepare his cars, “fixing my mistakes,” he says and keeps his grades up through frequent planned absences. He wrestles for Stratford High School but had to give up football after his freshman season because of scheduling conflicts.

“Wrestling helps me stay in shape,” Derek said, “and I feel like wrestling helps me a lot with my mindset in the race car and not giving up and just keep pushing at the end of a race.”

A six-week layoff through December and January is the longest break in Derek’s racing calendar. So the shop has been quieter than usual.

Derek is not the only ambitious child in the Kraus family, though. His 13-year-old sister, Lauren, plays softball and runs cross country for St. Joseph’s Catholic School. She’s on a traveling basketball team.

Sometimes Kathy finds herself at a basketball game with one eye on her phone, following Derek’s race weekend online, being careful to cheer for the right kid at the appropriate time.

“As long as we keep going and don’t stop …” Kathy said.

And then she paused.

It takes a village

While central Wisconsin isn’t the most common launching pad for a NASCAR career, the small-town lifestyle has its advantages.

Neighbors and the kids’ teammates’ parents help with ride-sharing or simply looking after Bailey, the Krauses’ yellow lab, while they’re out of town.

“He wouldn’t be where he was without all the little help in a small community,” Mark said. “There’s so many people that have a part of what he’s doing. That’s what people don’t understand. From the 75-year-old guy going to pick a motor up for us … there’s so much, so many people that have helped so far.”

Don Fanetti and his Structural Transport trucking company helped keep Mark’s racing dreams alive in the late 1990s. Now Fanetti’s widow, Marilyn, has continued with Derek, buying his first go-kart, Mark said, and providing financial support for later ventures. The shop near the Krauses’ home where their two super-late models are maintained is owned by Marilyn, built as an homage to Don.

Julie Giese from nearby Colby was a college student who helped Mark with sponsorship proposals. Later, as she worked her way up through the International Speedway Corp. marketing department, she kept tabs on Derek.

“Before Derek was part of the NASCAR Next program, I was a relentless cheerleader for him in Daytona and made sure the NASCAR team, whenever the opportunity presented itself, I made sure they were paying attention to what Derek was doing,” said Giese, now the president of ISM Raceway outside Phoenix.

Last season Derek became part of the NASCAR Next initiative, which finds talented young drivers and helps them develop such off-track skills as public speaking.

“My way of helping him is to make sure when I get an opportunity to talk to someone with NASCAR, the Toyota guys or whoever, ‘Hey, I think Derek is great’ … just keep him top of mind,” Giese said.

“It’s probably not a lot, but I’m trying to do what I can to help those guys. Because they are such good people.”

A pay-to-play game

As important as time is in racing, money is all that and more. Much, much, much more.

Derek’s trip this month to the Snowball Derby, the most prestigious super-late model race in the country, cost about $17,000. Some people pay triple that, Mark estimated, to spend the week in Pensacola, Florida, to test and to hire a professional crew to pit the car for a $25,000-to-win race.

Derek finished 16th, which recouped almost 10 percent of their investment from the purse.

With each step in racing, the price goes up.

You want to test a car at a higher level? Bring money. You want to race for a good team without actually owning it? A quarter-million dollars might buy a season in late models or two NASCAR truck races or a fraction of the year in the NASCAR K&N East or West steppingstone divisions.

That’s why Derek’s biggest break to date may have been linking up with Bill McAnally, a longtime California car owner and race promoter. They connected through a marketing representative after the 2016 Snowball Derby.

“I told him straight out, ‘We don’t have no money. I know how this works,’ ” Mark said. “Bill said, no, don’t worry about money. … ‘I’ll tell you what. Come out to Bakersfield, Kern (County Speedway), come to the shop in Sacramento.’

“Derek hopped in the car, ran some good laps right away and Bill was happy.”

McAnally gave Derek a ride with his highly successful K&N West team, competing in the full 2017 series in larger, heavier cars than he ever had driven. McAnally’s confidence was rewarded – as was his sponsor, NAPA – with Derek’s first victory in the finale and a third-place finish in the standings.

Then this past season, Derek won four times and finished fourth in points. Over two seasons, he also has one win in nine K&N East starts, including two East-West combined events.

A true realization of how far Derek had progressed came in the 2018 opener, when he found himself competing against NASCAR Cup champion Kevin Harvick at Kern County in Harvick’s hometown of Bakersfield, California.

“On the restart we were side-by-side and I looked to my right,” Derek said. “I looked over and I did a double-take, like ‘Holy … that’s Kevin Harvick I’m racing against.’ That was really neat.”

The two had contact, and Derek came out on top for what thus far has been his signature victory.

McAnally also gave Derek his NASCAR truck debut in November at IMS Raceway. He finished eighth.

Looking ahead ... but not too far

The start of Derek’s 2019 calendar will look similar to the past couple of seasons, with super-late model special events, the K&N West Series with McAnally and a handful of K&N East races. But he also needs to continue to advance.

He expects to make some more truck starts with McAnally, and Mark is working on sponsorship to support a few races in the ARCA Series, which would allow Derek to compete on larger, faster tracks, even before he turns 18 in September.

The goal is clear – NASCAR trucks, the Xfinity Series then the Cup Series – but it also goes without saying.

“I always try to catch myself looking ahead to a different race,” he said. “But I really got to look at one race at a time and keep motivated and stay confident at one racetrack and do the best I can at that racetrack and then go to the next race.”

The evolution

When Derek joined McAnally’s team on the West Coast, his career became a little less hands-on for his family.

Once in a while Mark serves as a spotter, a second set of eyes for Derek from above the track. He worries about a crash just as when Derek is in the family’s black No. 9 car. But at a K&N race or a truck race, he has to remind himself he’s not in charge.

Kathy had always kept the transporter clean and prepared food for the crew. She has hauled gas cans and has made umpteen runs to suppliers for parts. Even if there not always as much to do, she prefers to be close and available.

Lauren, when she was small, stayed with grandparents “until she found out it was fun at the racetrack,” Kathy said. Later she learned to get tires ready to go on Derek’s race car. Now she has to make tough choices when her activities clash with family trips to the track.

Spend even a short time talking about Derek’s racing with his parents, and a pattern becomes apparent. They always use the pronoun “we,” as in, “when we went to the Snowball …” or “when we go K&N racing. …” It’s subconscious until the habit was pointed out.

“Racing has always been a ‘we’ thing for us,” Kathy said.

That’s just the way they are.