'What do I got to prove?': Once the best and still a winner, Wisconsin stock car legend Rich Bickle is ready to park it after 45 years

What kid growing up at a Wisconsin racetrack in the 1970s didn’t want to be Dick Trickle?

Trickle could warm his car up while it was still on the trailer and break the track record without a lap of practice. He was fast, smooth, engaging and popular. And he won races. Lots of them. Everywhere.

To a pre-teen Rich Bickle, Trickle was as close to a deity as he could hope to meet.

Then in the ’90s they became contemporaries, and along the way Bickle emerged as his generation’s version of the Badger State barnstormer no one could catch on any asphalt short track around the country.

“He was my teacher, my mentor, my friend,” Bickle said, repeating a decades-old refrain.

To be sure, the two were similar. Not only did they win a lot of races, they didn’t lose many parties and they never missed a chance to tell a story. But the one way Bickle absolutely, positively did not want to follow Trickle’s lead was his slow, lonely departure from the sport.

It saddened Bickle to watch. Maybe frightened him a bit, too.

“Just riding around, getting lapped and just trying to hang onto your dream,” Bickle said. “I look back at that, and damn, why would you even want to put yourself through that?”

Yet from a statistical standpoint it seemed Bickle’s off ramp might look similar.

Then 2021 happened.

Barring a lottery win or billionaire benefactor affecting his retirement plans, Bickle’s farewell tour has two races remaining. And it’s possible – at age 60 going out on his terms – he is not done winning yet.

A meteoric rise

An Edgerton native named for his racer father, Bickle was an infant when he went to the track for the first time, and he raced for the first time in a hobby stock at 15. Bickle won his first feature in the premier late model division at the since-closed Lake Geneva Raceway in 1981, when he was 20, and he was Slinger Speedway champion two years later.

Emboldened by advice from veteran Johnny Ziegler that Bickle could make a living in racing and with help from engine builder Carl Wegner and a few other backers, he was on his way. By the second half of the ’80s, Bickle was traveling around the country and to Canada for big-money shows. And he was beating guys like Trickle to win them.

“I’ll say it to the day I die, out of the 50 greatest short-track asphalt racers in the world, 40 of them come from Wisconsin, northern Illinois and Michigan,” Bickle said, quickly citing the likes of Trickle, Joe Shear, Tom Reffner and Jim Sauter who came before him.

“You throw (Gary) Ballough and (Jody) Ridley and (Dave) Mader and some guys from down south, throw some other guys in, this is it.”

In 1989, Bickle and his crew raced in the Big 10 series in Concord, North Carolina, on Saturday nights and at Slinger on Sundays. They won both championships.

Then in ’90, he competed in 136 races. Although that included his first Daytona 500, big-money short track events were Bickle’s bread and butter.

“I never kept track, but I know we had to win at least 80 features,” Bickle said. “I never counted. You don’t think of it.

“I’m not trying to take away from Dick and Tom (Reffner)’s 67 (feature victories in 1972 and 1975, respectively), but we won 13 of the 15 biggest races at the end of the year, and the other two I broke. ... We didn’t lose.

“… And then I had glory in my eyes with that Cup deal and that was a disaster.”

The move down South

Bickle connected with Derick Close, a South Carolina businessman and low-level team owner, for 1991 and moved to North Carolina. That would be the first of many ill-fated NASCAR deals the driver would make.

In all Bickle started 218 races across NASCAR’s top divisions from 1989-2005.

The roster of tangible successes is short, with three Truck Series victories and a runner-up finish in the 1997 championship, as well as an emotional fourth-place finish for Cale Yarborough’s Cup team in Martinsville, Virginia, in 1998.

The list of frustrations fills many a page of Bickle’s 2019 biography “Barnyard to Brickyard,” which includes cautionary tales about reading contracts, knowing who your friends truly are and keeping alcohol-fueled simulated sex acts with a banana out of the view of sponsors. His disdain for NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip is the stuff of legend.

“I knew I could do the deal down there,” Bickle said. “Just between politics and me not putting up with their bullshit it didn’t work. But I’ll never change it.”

One of the best things that came out of Bickle’s time in the South was working with Gene Isenhour, a trucking company owner with a passion for racing who kept Bickle active on the short tracks and backed some of his NASCAR efforts.

... And the return home

Although Bickle resumed short-track racing around Wisconsin when he returned after 16 years, he would never find the magic he enjoyed before he headed South, or even that he shared with Isenhour.

Bickle did win the 2013 Slinger Nationals – his fourth title in the marquee event at one of his favorite tracks – but no longer raced with the same vigor, having developed other business interests.

In fact he retired for more than a year, unhappy with the way costs had risen so much faster than purses, the way expensive technology was filtering down to the local/regional level and an increase in rent-a-ride teenagers who didn’t work on their own race cars or race others with respect.

Then Bickle met Tony D’Ambrose. Partnering with his T1 Racing five years ago meant, ironically, that Bickle no longer would have to be hands on or understand tech trends.

D’Ambrose’s history included more than 70 Chicago-area feature wins with Eddie Hoffman over a five-year span. Certainly he and Bickle could do the same.

Only they didn’t.

“I just couldn’t give him what he needed,” D’Ambrose said. “It was four years.

“The bad luck thing, there was 30 freakin’ things that went wrong and two of them were legitimately the team’s fault. We missed it … we were traveling too much and not doing our homework. The other ones were just stuff like, you can’t even make it up.”

Bickle had his share of strong runs and his share of top fives, but his most recent victory before the 2021 season was on July 7, 2017.

The way Bickle tells it, he was frustrated but never lost confidence, never lost faith. The performance was there and therefore so was the potential.

But the memories of his crew chief and car owner differ.

“He spent the first two years going, ‘Do we need to keep doing this? Am I capable?’ ” D’Ambrose said. “I kept telling him, ‘Are you (expletive) kidding me?’ ”

Frustration vs. hopelessness

Much the same as Bickle’s NASCAR career was star-crossed, so was Trickle’s, albeit for much longer. From his first race in 1970 to his last in 2002, Trickle made 461 starts in the top two divisions in a mix of full seasons, part-time runs and one- or two-race fill-in rides. Trickle was Cup Series rookie of the year in 1989 at age 48 but in all his time won just twice in what is now the Xfinity Series as well as the non-points 1990 Winston Open.

As Trickle’s NASCAR opportunities dried up, he raced a few more short-track events. But the last record of him winning a full-field feature race of any kind was in the then-Busch Series in 1998, shortly before his 57th birthday. He raced for another nine years on and off until heart trouble prevented him. Trickle, who had suffered unmanageable pain for years, killed himself in 2013.

“Trickle went in with the mentality that he has to do it and he has to control everything, and that’s what made him fade away because he lost the technology aspect of it,” D’Ambrose said. “He was ahead of his time and got behind.

“Richie just gets out and says, I don’t want to think about it anymore. You’re in this every day. You do what you do, I’ll do what I do.”

Bickle did not want to be the racer he’d seen his hero become in his final summers. At least Bickle was fast in D’Ambrose’s cars as his 60th birthday approached, even if he was dropping out of an inordinate percentage of races.

“Like two years ago at the (Slinger) Nationals, greatest car I’ve ever had there in the history of my life,” said Bickle, a four-time winner of the event. “The solenoid shorted out, it ran the starter and ran the battery dead. I started 20th and was up to fourth by lap 50, lap 40.

“The damn thing was a half-second faster than the field. I’d have lapped the field if I wanted to. They break when they’re fast, never when they’re junk.”

That’s the difference between frustration and hopelessness.

Making enemies and friends

It’s easy to paint a rosy picture of an athlete as their career nears its end. Bad days tend to fade away, and the victories, the celebrations and the adulation remain as gloss on a person’s legacy.

That’s tougher, though, when the athlete is someone as outspoken and polarizing as Bickle can be and he puts out a book in which he savages so many people – including some of the sport’s most beloved figures – for the way he was mistreated.

Most notable among them is Waltrip, for whom Bickle drove in the truck series and who Bickle blames for costing him the championship and a Cup ride, as well as blackballing him in NASCAR.

“I will go to my grave remembering having him by the throat and his eyes bulging out of his head,” Bickle said in an interview last month. “I don’t know why I stopped.”

Bickle has had run-ins and made enemies with racers on every level, from on-track altercations to in-your-face confrontations to throwing tools, punches and even a 2x4.

Drivers who make enemies on the track also make enemies in the stands. The most indelible image of Bickle’s cool-down lap after winning the Jim Sauter Classic at Dells Raceway Park on Labor Day weekend will not be of those cheering. Sure, he’ll remember them, but he'll always chuckle about the one fan in the Turn 4 bleachers on his feet, middle finger pointed toward the night sky.

“I love Bickle,” said Johnny Sauter, the youngest of the late Jim Sauter’s sons to have raced in NASCAR and a target of Bickle’s wrath at least once.

“You never have to question where you stand when you’re around a guy like Bickle. He’ll just tell you. To me that’s refreshing. Because in a world where everybody’s so full of shit, it’s nice to just be able to be yourself and cut up and talk and nobody judges you.

“I’ll miss him a lot when he’s done with this. I really will.”

The timing for retirement adds up

For much of Bickle’s career he has driven cars numbered 45, even through two stretches of his time in the NASCAR Cup Series. That’s part of what put 2021 on his radar as a good final season.

He started at 15. His car is No. 45. Those add to 60, and he would turn 60 years old 45 years after he started. The numerology made such perfect sense.

So D’Ambrose and Bickle began to put together a schedule of short track races that while well short of his triple-digit peak would be more than Bickle had run in a long time. He also bid Daytona adieu with one more run in the ARCA season opener and planned to finish at the Snowball Derby, the prestigious super late model event in Pensacola, Florida, that Bickle has won a record five times.

He even added a trip to the World Championship Snowmobile Derby on a lark and won the Outlaw 600 class race.

“The kid I passed for the lead, he walks up to me and goes, ‘How old are you?’ I said 59,” Bickle said. “He goes, ‘I went into Turn 3 until I saw God and you went by on the outside and I thought your throttle stuck.’ He goes, ‘I hope to God I have (bravery like that) at 59.’

“I said, nah, I’m just an old, dumb race-car driver; we kind of giggled and off he walked.”

Maybe that’s what it took for Bickle to break the ice.

He opened the Wisconsin season with a victory in the Joe Shear Classic at Madison International Speedway, driving a car that paid tribute to Shear with a paint scheme and No. 36 like the one Bickle had chased so many times early in his career. This time he was fending off a promising up-and-comer trying to catch him, 17-year-old Luke Fenhaus.

The mix of elation and relief was palpable when Bickle collected his first stock-car feature victory in nearly four years: D’Ambrose gave the 6-foot-5 Bickle the biggest bearhug he could, and Bickle, near tears, kneeled on the track to kiss the start/finish line.

“A long time coming,” D’Ambrose said. “I had never won a Midwest Tour race, and that was his first Midwest Tour race (victory) so it all just kind of came together.”

Since then Bickle has won six more times and finished a close second to Fenhaus for the Slinger title without initially planning to pursue it.

“He’s one of the staples in short-track racing in the Midwest for sure. He’s one of the greatest,” said Ty Majeski, Wisconsin’s current top barnstormer.

“He’s an old-school racer, and he’ll race you really, really hard and that’s just expected when you get around him. … You see a lot of new faces come into this sport and it’s just different from the era Rich grew up in. It’s cool to see a guy with that old-school mentality run well.”

Two races that matter most

The biggest among those victories were the ARCA Midwest Tour races named after Shear and Sauter, two of the competitors who made Bickle a better racer when he was on his way up. Bickle was the only driver in either field who had to compete with both.

“The night of my dad’s race, I told him, I can’t think of anybody that I would rather see win,” Johnny Sauter said. “If I couldn’t do it, or Travis or somebody in my family, Bickle’s the top of my list. He was pretty emotional. Obviously he won the Joe Shear (race). And those are guys he raced against.

“It’s pretty cool to see that. Still getting it done; that’s the cool part.”

The irony of Bickle’s most important victories this season is that in both cases he and his team overcame problems rather than succumbing to them as they so often had.

At Madison for the Shear race in May, he struggled in practice and didn’t discover a broken shock absorber until just before qualifying. Then the engine temperature spiked before the team was able to remove some tape from the grille. Then at the Dells in September, Bickle got to the front as other drivers stopped for fresh tires, but he waited too long to get his and ended up running the whole race on one set.

“It’s funny to hear people say, ‘You’re winning!’” Bickle said. “Yeah, we’re winning because we’re finishing. We’ve been good. We’ve been good for a long time. Just finally started to show.”

Down to the final laps

Bickle intends to wrap up his days as a driver over the next two weekends in Florida with the Bill Bigley Sr. Memorial at 4-17 Southern Speedway in Punta Gorda on Sunday followed by the Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola.

“I still feel like I can win every race I’m in,” said Bickle, who guesses he has won in the neighborhood of 500.

“My body’s 60, sometimes in my head I still feel like I’m 30.”

But what Bickle has though, unlike his mentor Trickle, is other interests in life.

He own two bars, a distribution company, a rental property in northern Wisconsin and has been involved in some land development. Worn out by Wisconsin’s winter gloom, he has fallen in love with the beauty of Central America, has spent an increasing amount of time in Costa Rica and has had business opportunities there and in Panama.

Racing is still fun, and winning again made 2021 more enjoyable. But after 4½ decades, it’s just time.

Time to get off the go-go-go treadmill of a summer schedule. Time to simplify.

“I look at it like my mom made it to 72; that’s 12 years,” Bickle said. “And there’s other things I want to do.

“I grew up at the racetrack since I was a month old and it’s got to the point, what do I got to prove? I’ve got nothing to prove anymore.”

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin stock car racing legend Rich Bickle retiring after 45 years