By Ben Deatherage
FERTILE, Iowa (Aug. 14, 2026) — Long before the trophies, championships and hundreds of nights spent beneath the lights of dirt tracks across America, Kelly Shryock was a 12-year-old kid waiting for his father to come home.
During the summer, Bob Shryock worked construction four 10-hour days each week, leaving precious little time to prepare his race car before Friday night. So Kelly learned to set valves. He worked alongside the crew. Whatever needed to be done, they tried to have the car ready when Bob walked through the door.
Racing became more than something father and son did together.
It became the only life Kelly ever really knew.
More than four decades later, that kid has become one of the most accomplished drivers and builders in dirt track racing, and on Aug. 10 at Clay County Fair Speedway, Shryock added another milestone when he earned the 100th Sunoco IMCA Stock Car victory of his career.
It didn’t come easily.
Austin Brands controlled much of the 25-lap feature while Shryock patiently worked behind him. As the outside groove changed and Shryock’s car came to life, he began applying pressure before taking advantage when Brands jumped the cushion. Shryock moved ahead with five laps remaining and finally secured a number he had quietly been chasing.
“I really didn’t fill anyone in on where we were sitting because I didn’t want to have the pressure,” Shryock said. “Our goal was to get that, but in today’s world you never know when you’re going to win again.”
The victory made Shryock the 33rd member of the IMCA Stock Car Century Club and the 13th Iowa driver to reach the milestone.
It also put Shryock into an even more exclusive group. He had already joined the Karl Kustoms IMCA Modified Century Club when he earned his 100th career feature victory in the division on July 14, 2019, at Sports Park Raceway in Fort Dodge. By reaching 100 wins in Stock Cars, Shryock joined Keith White and Curt Lund among the select drivers to earn Century Club status in two different IMCA divisions.
It’s also a feat that hadn’t been accomplished in quite some time. Lund was the most recent to earn his second Century Club distinction in 2013, making Shryock the first driver in 13 years to reach 100 career victories in a second IMCA division.
Remarkably, 98 of those victories have come since 2019.
The other two came nearly two decades earlier.
But the road to 100 really began long before any of them.
Kelly Shryock celebrates with family and supporters after earning his 100th career Sunoco IMCA Stock Car feature victory Aug. 10 at Clay County Fair Speedway. (Photo by NW Iowa Pics)
Learning From His Hero
Bob Shryock’s racing story began in about as grassroots a fashion as possible.
Kelly remembers hearing how his father’s friends took the family’s 1957 Ford, knocked the windows out, installed a roll cage, and went racing during the late 1960s.
Bob developed into one of the Midwest’s premier drivers. During 17 years of competition, he raced at more than 35 tracks in at least 10 states and Canada, won at least 15 track championships and collected numerous major victories.
His son wanted nothing more than to follow him.
Kelly began working for legendary chassis builder Bob Harris through a high school work program in 1982. By 1984, he was racing Hobby Stocks, and a year later he climbed into an IMCA Modified.
Driving, however, didn’t come nearly as naturally as he hoped.
“It’s kind of weird how things work out,” Shryock said. “I really struggled with my driving, and I still critique my driving even to this day. Bless my mom’s heart, she asked me a question when I first started racing, ‘Are you sure you want to be a race car driver?’
“I was like, ‘Yes,’ but she was telling me the best she could that I really sucked.”
There wasn’t much room for a young driver to learn quietly.
Shryock came up racing against veterans such as Mark Noble, Ron Jones, Bill Davis, and Wayne Larson — many of the same drivers who had competed against his father.
“You had to figure out not just driving, but setup, equipment and all of the above to outrun someone like Noble that had true talent,” Shryock said.
Then came August of 1985.
Kelly earned his first feature victory on championship night. The following evening, Bob climbed behind the wheel of Kelly’s car and won with it.
On Monday, Aug. 19, Bob Shryock was fatally injured in a construction accident in Minnesota.
He was only 41.
Kelly had barely begun his own career when the person he most wanted to learn from was gone.
“It didn’t give me a lot of time to learn from my dad, who is still my hero,” Shryock said. “I don’t know where I would have went if he was around, and I think his car owners would have put my dad on the road with the Late Model. I would have parked my car in a heartbeat to help him out racing and travel with him.”
Kelly didn’t win again for two years.
Then, in 1988, everything began to click. He won over a dozen races that season and started becoming the driver he had spent years trying to become.
More than 40 years after he first climbed behind the wheel, Shryock still carries Bob with him every time he races.
Even the No. 3 on the side of his car belonged to his father.
Kelly originally raced as No. 5, a nod to Rodney Combs, one of Kelly’s other favorites growing up. After Bob’s death, he took over his father’s No. 3 the following season and never really let it go.
Bob had his own connections to the number: He and wife Dawn were married on Dec. 3, and together they had three children — Kelly and daughters Lori and Misty.
For Kelly, No. 3 became something more.
It became a way of carrying his father’s number forward.
The Road That Almost Led Somewhere Else
Racing became Shryock’s profession long before it made him one of the sport’s most recognizable names.
“The only thing I’ve ever known is working on race cars,” he said.
His time with Harris exposed him to the technical side of the sport. When Harris began building Modifieds in the mid-1980s, Shryock was able to watch talented drivers win in the same equipment he worked on every day.
That removed one potential excuse.
“We knew the car was good,” he said. “In my case, the driver just needed to learn how to drive.”
Eventually, he did.
But there was a time when Shryock nearly walked away from driving altogether.
After racing Sunoco IMCA Late Models and earning National Rookie honors in 1992, finances had pushed him toward stepping away. Through his friendship with Kenny Schrader, Shryock traveled to Charlotte during Coca-Cola 600 week.
Schrader was then driving for Rick Hendrick, but Kelly had gotten to know him through Schrader’s time driving one of the Harris house car Modifieds.
Shryock visited Hendrick Motorsports and found another path waiting for him.
He had a fabrication job lined up.
He had even picked out a house.
Inside a makeshift office while Hendrick’s new facility was being built, Shryock found himself talking with a crew chief there named Ray Evernham. Evernham had recently been paired with a young driver named Jeff Gordon.
Nobody in the room could have known what was coming next.
Shryock could have become one of the crew members, but instead racing pulled him back to the Midwest.
“I would have been just a crew guy, nothing to do with driving, and might have been a Rainbow Warrior,” Shryock said with a laugh. “I don’t regret anything we’ve done. It’s been pretty cool.”
After leaving Harris in 2001, Shryock founded Skyrocket Chassis the following year. The company went on to build more than 600 Modifieds. Shryock also sold between 20 and 25 B&B Racing Chassis Stock Cars and built five Skyrocket Stock Cars.
All the while, he kept racing.
And winning.
Some victories came in major events such as the Harris Clash twice and races at Batesville. Others meant more for reasons that had little to do with purse money.
Winning memorial races honoring his father remain among his favorites.
So does a Salute to Veterans victory at Spencer earlier this year. Shryock drew near the back, raced his way into the redraw and then drew 11th. His brother-in-law, John Rogers, a veteran, received the corresponding rifle presented as part of the event and later gave it to Kelly.
A Second Career in Stock Cars
For everything Shryock accomplished in Modifieds and Late Models, one of the most successful chapters of his career didn’t really begin until 2019.
He had always watched IMCA Stock Cars.
“You watch the Stock Cars and they always put on a great race,” he said.
Friend Pete Alexander finally gave him an opportunity.
Alexander owned two Stock Cars and offered Shryock the older one.
“You need to drive this,” Alexander told him.
Shryock didn’t require much convincing.
“Heck yeah.”
His wife, Dawn, understood the division well enough to recognize what happened next. Kelly began passing established Stock Car competitors in Alexander’s backup car.
“She said, ‘You know you passed this guy and this guy,'” Shryock recalled. “I was like, ‘OK, so?’ And she said, ‘They’re fast.'”
Soon, Mike Hauan and Lake Mills Motorsports offered Shryock another opportunity. Hauan maintained and hauled the Stock Car while Kelly continued racing his Modified, creating a relationship that lasted several seasons.
What initially amounted to another racing opportunity eventually became an entirely new career.
Shryock captured the Stock Car championship at the Speedway Motors IMCA Super Nationals fueled by Casey’s in 2024.
A year later, he became the 2025 IMCA Stock Car National champion.
Then came No. 100 at Clay County.
“Never take anything for granted,” he said. “We go out and race and try to do the best we can.
His first two Stock Car victories had come all the way back in 2000, when Shryock drove for the Pro Environmental team that also fielded cars for Mark Elliott. From 2019 through his century-clinching victory in 2026, Shryock added the other 98.
And at 61, he doesn’t view 100 as an ending.
Quite the opposite.
After selling the Modified side of his business, Shryock intends to devote the next chapter of his life almost entirely to Stock Cars.
“I’m going to try and finish my career with the Stock Cars until I can’t do it anymore. I’m only 61, so that’s what I plan on doing the next 10 or 15 years.”
Eventually, Shryock envisions putting younger and older drivers alike into his cars, helping them find speed and perhaps spending more time assisting in the pits than sitting behind the wheel himself.
But he’s not ready for that quite yet.
“I could run fifth place and still have a blast and a good time,” he said. “It’s just racing so hard, but it’s always exciting, and there’s times you have no idea who’s going to win.”
Still Learning
For all the places racing has taken Shryock, home today is Fertile, a tiny Worth County community along the Winnebago River in northern Iowa.
The town’s beginnings date to William Rhodes, who settled in the area during the 1850s and constructed a mill along what was then called Lime Creek. The settlement was originally known as Rhodes Mill before Fertile was established in 1877, its name inspired by the rich soil of the surrounding valley. The mill operated into the 1930s, was later restored, and remains listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, Fertile has only a few hundred residents — 305 at the 2020 census — and Shryock points visitors toward the historic dam across the street and the local café when asked what there is to see around town.
His race shop is nearby in Joice.
According to Kelly, he’s the main excitement there.
That sense of humor is fitting for someone who has spent his entire life inside race shops.
“I don’t know anything but racing,” Shryock said. “Thrash all winter and build race cars, thrash all summer and race, and wake up and look in the mirror and see this old guy looking at you.”
The historic Rhodes Mill and dam sit along the Winnebago River in Fertile, Iowa. The mill played an important role in the early development of the small northern Iowa community that Kelly Shryock calls home. (Photo by Flickriver.com)
Behind the humor is a group of people Shryock says made his career possible.
He credits Mike Hauan at Lake Mills Motorsports for the opportunity and support he provided in the years he drove for him, crew member Ryan Kohlhaas for everything he does maintaining the race cars and allowing Kelly to concentrate on the business side of the operation, and his wife, Dawn.
“My lovely wife Dawn, without her I wouldn’t be able to do this,” Shryock said.
His mother, also named Dawn, remains another important part of a family whose racing history now stretches across generations.
Shryock is equally appreciative of the long list of businesses and individuals who have supported his racing.
“I struggle listing my sponsors because I have so many good people, and I don’t want to leave any of them out,” he said.
Those supporters include Shryock Stock Cars, Schluetter Body Shop, HSPC, Buck Built Racing Engines, Balanced Speed, Albertsen Family Farms, Theodore Construction, Dynamic Drivelines, AERO Race Wheels, D&E Services, Speedway Motors, Swift Springs, J&P Repair, Marks Auto Mart, Paul and Laura Ogden, Sonny McClain Auctions, Brugman Fabrication, Integra Shocks, Pete Alexander, Tire Demon, Fuel Graphics, DK Arndt, Wehrs Machine & Racing Products, Landscaping Plus of Fairmont, Highside Trends, Jergens Trucking in memory of Adam, Toby K’s Hideaway, PEM, Total Power, Dirt Defender, Velocita, Hundley & Son Trucking, Keyser Manufacturing, Argo Manufacturing, Arnold Motor Supply, Schoenfeld Headers, Linn Racing Tires, Gearhead, Kevko Racing Oil Pans, JSJ Trucking, Zippy’s Coustom Rolling, Ryan Simpson Racing, Bob Sikes, and Wilwood.
One hundred Stock Car victories would be enough to define many racing careers.
For Shryock, they’re another chapter in one that started with a kid setting valves on his father’s race car, wondering whether he would ever learn to drive one as well as the man he idolized.
His mother once gently asked whether he was sure he wanted to be a race car driver.
More than 40 years later, Shryock is still answering the question.
And, as he would be the first to tell you, he’s still learning how to drive.
