Paul Nienhiser Racing runs on family, friendship, sponsors and perseverance
By Ben Cox
Photos submitted to The Source
Paul Nienhiser earned a hard fought victory with the Morrow Brothers Ford MOWA Sprint Car Series on Friday, June 27 at the Jacksonville Speedway.
The Chapin native took career win 31 after starting in the fifth spot in the feature. It was his sixth win of the 2025 season, and his second win at his home track in the last two months. The three-time series champion came by the victory in a hard way, spending the better part of the day waiting in the emergency room for his wife to have surgery. That’s Nienhiser’s life though — family, work and racing. It never stops.
Nienhiser says his love for racing started way back in the early 2000s when he was approximately 5 years old watching a race in Taylorville. “Blake Richardson was a friend of mine. He was about a year or two older than me and he was racing quarter midgets in Taylorville at the Quarter Midget Track,” Nienhiser says, “I was getting interested in NASCAR and it was pretty popular at the time. Long story short, they had a big quarter midgets regional race there at Taylorville. There were a lot of race cars, a lot of people and a lot of kids. My parents and I went to the race and we won the 50/50 drawing, believe it or not. From that day on, I was hooked. I think I had a race car within a couple weeks or a month, and the rest is, what you would call history.”
Nienhiser went on to race in several different classes in the quarter midget series for the next four years in hand-me-down race cars from Mario Clouser, a well-known veteran driver from Auburn. Nienhiser credits Clouser and his brothers for their nice equipment and passing it on, “I didn’t come from any racing background. My dad didn’t race or anything like that. So, we learned everything out of basically someone else’s notebook.”
Nienhiser says the small-time politics of quarter midgets grew tiring and he decided to transfer up to winged micros. At the time, the Pike County Raceway in Pittsfield was still in operation. Nienhiser says he and several other drivers decided to graduate up together, “I would’ve been 9 years old, or I had just turned 9 myself, just like Jake Newman from New Berlin, Steven Russell who was from Rochester, and a handful of other kids. We all grew up through the quarter midget ranks and all actually transitioned the same year and started racing in Pike County. Again, they had two or three classes there based on the age of the driver and the size of the engine. I went through the ranks there I think honestly in about three years right about the time they closed.”
The POWRi Micros and Midget classes were then growing in prominence with race fans. Nienhiser said it was time to move on to the bigger stage when he turned 12. He said the jump really elevated his driving by putting him up against the “best of the best” in the Midwest region. “Jake Newman and I basically raced all the way until I got in a sprint car. We did everything lockstep together. We actually got special permission to start racing in POWRi because I think the age requirement was 13,” Nienhiser said.
Nienhiser says he was lucky to be surrounded by really great drivers, crew chiefs and other race families at the time to absorb skills and knowledge. At age 13, Nienhiser became the youngest driver to win a POWRi feature race at a race in Belleville, and then did it again two weeks later in 2010. Nienhiser credits his mechanic team for being ahead of the game at the time for using a new fuel injection system at the time, which he says raised the bar for everyone on the circuit.
Two years later, Nienhiser was in a full-blown sprint car, taking his skills to the World of Outlaws where he was runner-up for MOWA Rookie of the Year. Nienhiser says that fellow racer Tim Engler, who had helped create the state-of-the-art fuel injection system for him a few years earlier, had a spare sprint car for him to start out on, “He had a sprint car sitting out in his daughter’s horse barn that was his last car just collecting dust. We drug that thing out of there, got it all washed up, got into it. I’ll be honest, when I actually started driving it, I was 15, so this would’ve been like 2012. I mean, I was just not any good. I was bad. I was down in the dumps to be honest. I really questioned if it was what I wanted to do because you kind of go from having some moderate success and enjoyment to feeling like a fish out of water.”
Nienhiser says despite the early failures, his sponsors, whom he had been with since his early days of racing, stuck by him as he pushed through the learning phase in the newer, bigger car. He stopped dabbling in other series and started to focus full-time in the sprint car, doubling down on efforts to get better. After partnering with Dan Musselman and Maxim Racing in Springfield and building a new car in 2013, Nienhiser says things began to turn around and he was reenergized. Over the last decade, Nienhiser says racing has taken him as far north as South Dakota, down to Houston, and then east to North Carolina.
When things weren’t going well, Nienhiser credits some local racing legends for advice and help, “Bob Hawks, who was a real legendary guy of his time in this area, helped me out. We’re actually business partners nowadays. When I got into a sprint car and was struggling, I don’t know if Bob just saw this poor kid that was local that he felt like he ought to offer a little bit of advice to but started helping me, I think this was around the middle or end of 2012. Then, Bob had his group of guys that used to go race with him. Ralph Willhite was one of them who we tragically lost last summer. Another one of the helpers was my dad’s college classmate, Roger Staake, who also just recently passed away. They just started coming out to the shop and started piddling on the car.”
Nienhiser says they all did what they had to do to make the car go and learned a lot of things on the fly. He says they all would come out to help wrench on the car anytime they were called, or they would be on the ready to head to a race out of town. Nienhiser says his current crew all remains local and they still keep the same mentality with friends Caleb Wankel, Weston Crews, Drake Willhite, Tom Griffin, Eldon Stocker, Greg Ford and crew chief Scott Bonar.
Nienhiser says his father John remains a large part of his team but now carries less of the burden of preparing for each race with the great group of team members currently helping. Nienhiser doesn’t deny that he already has a busy life farming over 2,000 acres, running a powder coating business, being a husband and being a father to young children — but he makes time for racing.
Nienhiser says his oldest daughter is a fiend for racing, but wants nothing to do with driving a car, “She really loves it. She wants nothing to do with driving, which is totally fine with me. I know what it can turn into.” Nienhiser says he’s glad he’s able to do what he loves with his family. Similarly, he credits much of his success to the large amount of time his parents got to spend with him at the races during his career, “My parents put just as much or more into it than I ever did as far as just effort and financially in the early stages.”
On top of that, Nienhiser thanks his sponsors, again some of whom have stuck with him since he began racing all those years ago in Pittsfield. Nienhiser smiles saying he can talk about the many years of friendships and partnerships that have stuck by him through sponsoring his cars, but says the stories could likely take up several pages of this publication.
One unique sponsor is Jacksonville’s First Christian Church. Nienhiser says he connected with the church’s message a few years ago about “connecting the unconnected” to church and Jesus Christ. He hopes the use of that logo piques someone’s curiosity who comes to a race to at least give church a try.
Nienhiser says when he wins, it’s as much due to his team of people behind him rather than just him spinning the steering wheel the right way, “It takes all of them to make this work. Like I said, I got so many things going on, I would feel guilty, I wouldn’t be able to support it financially myself. I know there’s a lot of people that do, but to maintain our equipment at the top level, to compete with budgets that are just completely going to blow any of us out of the water, this is what it takes. We may not have five of everything, but I feel like I have one really good race car sitting there. When the World of Outlaws comes to town or we go traveling on the road, I think we’re somebody you have to beat every night if you want to win a race. I take pride in that and I want to represent all our partners well. We’ve got six or eight people out here [working on the car]. I might be the guy driving it, but it’s not for lack of any of their effort.”
Judging by the June 27 results, Nienhiser’s efforts are doing just fine as he looks for another victory in Iowa this coming week.
