March 3, 2002.

It was a good day for late-winter drag racing in central Florida.

Seventy-eight-degree temps warmed the asphalt, the fans, and racers at Orlando Speed World Dragway. Cloudy skies, and a comfortable southerly breeze of 15 miles per hour.

It was a near-perfect setting for the kickoff of the Fun Ford Weekend season, especially for racers from cold climates who had toiled through the winter to get back to action.

So what could go wrong?

EVERYTHING.

To this day, 20 years later, there’s no ironclad answer for what caused Steve Grebeck’s Pro 5.0 Mustang to swerve hard to the left into the path of driver Bill Rimmer Jr. What followed was a breathtaking, violent crash that tore Grebeck’s ride to pieces and killed him instantly. One of the pioneers of that brand of racing was taken in the blink of an eye.

And the pain that resulted from that crash still brings tears to those who knew 36-year-old Grebeck the best.

“I still think about him a lot because I didn’t know how special he, and our friendship, was at that age,” said fellow racer Don Walsh Jr., who was 30 at the time, six years younger than Grebeck.

“It was a time in my life where you think you’re damn near invincible, and that the people around you are, too. I guess I was so busy with life that I wasn’t really evaluating what was going on. I think later on in life, you do that more and more. You think about the people that made a difference,” he added. “He was so far ahead of his time with his craftsmanship and all the stuff he did with turbochargers, and how hard he worked at it. He was that person who was going to be very special in the racing business – even more than he was.”

Even as a 15-year-old novice, Grebeck was a sponge when it came to building race cars. Show him something once – and then stand back and watch him take that information and improve the product. He possessed a work ethic second to none and would bend over backward to help other competitors, even if it was to the detriment of his own race-day performance. He was as fierce a racer as there ever was behind the wheel, but could accept defeat with grace – and use that as the impetus to work even harder to improve his car. He was the kind of man other racers – silently or admittedly – wanted to be.

* * * * * * * * *

Steve Grebeck began racing at age 15 at Milan (Mich.) Dragway. It was also the age at which his father, Grant, took him to Carl Holbrook’s shop to see the owner’s Super Comp car during its construction. Before long, the younger Grebeck was working at Holbrook’s and learning, he said, “how to build and maintain racing engines.”

It was there that Steve met Dave Lyall, who had been laid off as a supervisor at Ford’s Livonia, Michigan, transmission factory. “Excess baggage,” Lyall lamented. “Forty-five years old, a salaried employee and nobody wanted me.”

Because of the likelihood Ford would eventually recall Lyall, he was turned down by the first few places he tried to find work. That’s when Holbrook, who had recently moved into a larger shop to expand his Pro Stock and Super Stock business, made Lyall an offer.

“Carl said, ‘I’ve got a part of the shop I’m not using,’ ” Lyall said. “He said, ‘I know you’re a metal fabricator among your other talents, so if you want to, move your metal fab shop in here, move your equipment in here, buy your materials through me, and keep half the money.’ ”

With Lyall in-house at Holbrook’s, Steve Grebeck’s inquisitive nature about all things mechanical soon led to a conversation – and then some.

“You could see the glint in his eye that he was fascinated by what I was doing,” Lyall said, “so his dad asked me if I would hire him as a high school co-op student. I agreed to that and took him under my wing and taught him metal fabrication. He was a very bright kid. He learned instantly. You only had to show him one time, and he just took off.”

As expected, Lyall was eventually brought back to work by Ford, but by August 1984, Lyall left to become the 48th employee, and general manager, at Jack Roush Performance Engineering. Lyall and Roush were friends through drag racing, and Lyall’s hiring came during the years his friend’s passion had shifted to Trans-Am road racing. The business on Levan Road in Livonia, Michigan, took off, having expanded to almost 1,500 employees within a year “and looking for more,” Lyall said.

“I remembered Steve, so I called him up and said, ‘Do you want to come to work for us?’ We hired him,” Lyall said. “In no time at all, Jack had met him, took a liking to him and saw how bright and talented he was. Within a year, he was the manager of the Special Vehicles department.

“He took off on his own from there, doing car restorations and hot rods and stuff, which for Jack was kind of a side business. I was on the engineering side, trying to make each department its own business. Steve kinda took off on his own and didn’t need my help anymore. He had already caught up with my skills and passed me.”

Grebeck had plenty on his plate during those years. He oversaw the construction of the pace cars for PPG’s Indy-car series, Cobras for Auto Craft, supported the team’s Trans-Am program, and had input on Roush’s upstart NASCAR Cup Series program that launched in 1988 with driver Mark Martin.

 

 

 

 

Grebeck’s own racing career had taken off, too.

In 1990, he began driving a car owned by “Stormin” Norman Gray. The following year, he wheeled the Mustang to a 9.73-second, 143-mph quarter-mile pass on a nitrous-boosted 359 cubic-inch engine. He had previously been the first driver in a naturally aspirated Pro 5.0 car to crack the 10s, Don Walsh Jr. said.

By that point, Grebeck had left Roush to work at Watson Industries as a full-time fabricator – but not for long, as he soon opened Grebeck Racecraft in Walled Lake, Mich.

He was a masterful innovator. The wheels in his head were constantly spinning as he sought ways to force the competition to play catch-up.

For example, he conceived a unique way to sidestep a rule that didn’t allow hood scoops in his class. He took a supercharger “hat” and mounted it backward to ingest the air produced in the high-pressure area at the base of the windshield.

At 28, Grebeck won the 5.0 World Championship race with 8.80s, and was the runner-up at that event the following year.

In 1996, with Grebeck providing the tune-up, Mike Moran made an exhibition run at the NHRA U.S. Nationals that wowed the crowd. Moran torched the quarter-mile in his “Casper” Camaro in 6.96 seconds, and at 201 mph, the first driver in a Pro Street car to crack 200.

It was during that time that Grebeck met former IHRA and NHRA Pro Stock racer Pat Musi. Musi and Tony Christian were among the frontrunners in the Pro Street class, and Musi said that Grebeck immediately made a good impression on him.

“We just got to be friends and he started hanging around with us,” said Musi, whose race engine-building business is in Mooresville, North Carolina.

“I just saw that he was really dedicated to racing, and he was a great fabricator, even at that time. He did a great job on a ’69 Camaro he built for me. I still had the Firebird (the ‘Popeye’ Trans-Am), and I said, ‘Steve, why don’t you drive this?’ and he did. We just really got to be great friends, personal friends.”

In 1999, Grebeck was chosen to drive a supercharged Mustang for the father-son team of Charlie and Steve Halprin. That car would run the quarter-mile as quickly and as fast as 7.68 seconds, 185 mph on 10.5-inch-wide tires. Grebeck was runner-up at the biggest Outlaw 10.5 race of the year.

A year later, it was Grebeck who was on top when he captured the NSCA Outlaw Street championship in a car owned by Leo Utley. He was quickly becoming a household name among those who followed that style of non-NHRA racing.

In 2001, it was Moran’s engines that powered the Grebeck/Halprin operation. Harry Hruska of Precision Turbo was brought in to oversee a conversion to turbochargers as a power adder. On their first weekend, at a World Ford Challenge event, Grebeck unleashed a 7.02 at 202. Later in the year, at the Ford Motorsports Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway, he went 6.77 – breaking the record by two-tenths of a second – and later improved to 6.65, 211 in a race at the Texas Motorplex.

* * * * * * * * *

After the season, Hruska purchased the car from the Halprins, and Grebeck decided to make offseason changes to the front suspension.

Their first attempt at trying the combination came in late February 2002 at West Palm Beach, Florida.

“We were having a hard time getting it to go down the track,” crew chief Brett Templeton remembered.

It wasn’t the first time the Mustang had suffered handling problems. Prior to its jaw-dropping performances at Maple Grove and the Motorplex in 2001, it had shaken the tires so badly that he briefly blacked out at Bristol. And during a rough weekend in Canada that summer, its handling had been the reason the car was dubbed ‘Psycho Bitch.’

“That was at the beginning of turbos, nobody really knew a whole lot about them, and he just hated driving that thing,” Musi recalled. “He said it had the habit … well, the exhaust was on one side and lifted the car up, and they just hadn’t figured it out yet. What he hated the most was, when you got off the throttle it’s not like a nitrous car or a blown car … it had a lag time because the waste gates weren’t like they are now. It was hard to lift – never mind pedal, but lift, period.”

Even with the handling problems unresolved at West Palm, Grebeck and the team moved upstate to Orlando for the Fun Ford Weekend season opener the following weekend. The same handling gremlins again made the car a handful to handle, and Grebeck and his crew were frustrated, to say the least, after Saturday’s qualifying attempts.

That evening, Grebeck was in the pits when George Klass, the tech director for the Fun Ford Weekend series, strolled past. It was a case of a sharp young gun needing the counsel of a motorsports sage.

In 1955, at age 16, Klass first drove a car down a dragstrip in Santa Ana, California. He would later team with Nye Frank and driver Bob Muravez to field the twin-engine “Freight Train” Top Gas dragster, and he also worked on Indy cars.

On this night, he was eager to lend an ear while Grebeck did the talking during their stroll through the pits.

“He said, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you,’ so we went for a walk, just chatting,” Klass said. “He thought he was having trouble with the front suspension with the struts he had put on. He thought that might be the problem because the back end kept skating around.”

Grebeck also revealed to Klass that he had gotten a phone call “from somebody at Mopar” with an offer to drive a factory-backed NHRA Pro Stock ride.

“He had always wanted to sort of pull back from the chassis business and get into being a pro driver. He thought this might be a way to do it, but he had not talked to Harry (Hruska) about it and didn’t know what to do,” Klass said. “I said, ‘Look, he’s going to find out sooner or later from somebody, you might as well be the one to tell him.’ Then Steve told me he was planning on talking to him on Sunday, or Monday morning on the drive home.”

Of immediate importance was the need for Grebeck, Templeton, et al, to get the car from the starting line to the finish line in a straight shot. Klass said he convinced series officials to offer competitors in certain classes a Sunday morning time-trial pass. Grebeck was one of those who jumped at the offer.

“I did it really for Steve,” Klass said, “but at the same time I opened it up to the Pro 5.0 cars or any of the Outlaw cars that wanted to run, and a few did. Steve ran, too, it just didn’t work; again, he had to shut off.”

That’s not how Templeton, Grebeck’s crew chief, remembers it.

“We went right down the track,” Templeton said, “so we figured we had it dialed in good enough to get through the weekend.”

 

 

 

 

Grebeck was paired against Bill Rimmer Jr. in the opening round of eliminations. Rimmer got the jump out of the gate, but Grebeck’s turbo Mustang soon reeled him in and blew past.

And then, without warning, the car took a hard left, crossed into Rimmer’s lane, was struck by the oncoming car and catapulted over the guard rail. After a series of rolls in the dragway grass, Grebeck’s car landed right-side up.

By the time a few spectators, rescue personnel and Klass raced to the scene, Steve Grebeck was dead.

“I got down there pretty fast on my little scooter — about the same time that the ambulance and track crew got there,” Klass said. “The car was just destroyed. Most of the body was not even on it anymore.

“I was at the passenger-side door. He was just sitting in the seat, and his head was leaning forward as if he was looking at the floor. His right hand was on the Lenco shifter levers. He looked fine. … I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I knew he was unconscious. But when they removed the helmet … I knew it was going to be bad.”

Templeton was at the starting line watching the car go down the track – and couldn’t believe his eyes .

“The only time I saw a car he was driving get out of control was when he crashed,” Templeton said. “He never really had any issues with the cars. I’ve worked with some drivers since then — that’s what I do now because of him – that I’ve had to pull aside and say, ‘Dude, you need to lift way before that,’ or ‘You need to change the way you drive the car because it’s not going to end well.’ ”

Given Grebeck’s mastery behind the wheel, the fact that he couldn’t save the car and salvage the run surprised Templeton.

“With Steve, it didn’t matter what the car was, he would get in it – whether he fit in it or didn’t – and make it work,” he said. “No matter if he was comfortable in the car or not, he would drive it like it was made for him. He was that good.”

One theory as to the crash cause, Templeton said, is that having the exhaust directed out one side of the car may have been a factor. He recalls a conversation with another team member about that subject.

“When the car got down track it was getting light, and with the front end being light, he was trying to steer the car off the wall,” he said. “With the front end being light, there was no steering input, and when he let off the gas, without the steering wheel being straight, it took off. That was the conclusion we came to when we talked about it.”

* * * * * * * * *

Back home in Michigan, Don Walsh Jr. was getting his car ready for an NMRA race at Bradenton, Florida, the following week, and he expected to see Grebeck there. Grebeck was close to the Walsh family, having worked on Don Walsh Sr.’s race car. He had also dated Cheryl “Cher” Walsh – Don’s daughter and Don Jr.’s sister – for nearly a decade.

Walsh Jr. was working on his vehicle at Skinny Kid Race Cars when he received a call from a good friend, Keith Szabo.

“Keith was always a real straight shooter, good news or bad,” Walsh said. “He said, ‘Walsh, Grebeck just piled his car up, and it doesn’t look good.’ ‘What do you mean it doesn’t look good?’ ‘It just looks really bad. It was a really bad accident.’ I just kept asking him, ‘What do you mean?’ Then I could hear him get choked up, and he said, ‘I don’t think he’s alive, Walsh, I just don’t think he’s alive.’

“I literally dropped to the ground. I didn’t know what to do. It was one of those things … I was young and I just hadn’t gone through anything like that, and it was such a shock to me.”

Walsh was so badly shaken that he needed someone to drive him home. He simply couldn’t fathom that Grebeck, who seemed invincible and invulnerable, was gone.

“Steve was a guy you were with that always had it under control. It didn’t matter how messed up the situation was, he’s got it — and he showed that to you time and time again. Especially when it was a driving situation, a snowmobiling situation — anything you could think of, he just had it,” Walsh said.

“He could be driving a truck and trailer on ice, have somebody spin out in front of him and him be halfway sideways – and he’d just never panic and just drive around the car with a 30-foot trailer behind him. You’d think, ‘How did he do that?’ It was really hard for me when he got killed because it was my first dose of no matter how good we are, no matter how good we think we are, we don’t always have it under control. There wasn’t anything he could do. That was one of the toughest things for me about his death.”

Walsh, for a time that day, simply couldn’t function. He worried about how his sister would react, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he learned his father was with Cheryl. He sat dumbfounded at the table, unable to eat for what he said seemed like two hours. And only then did it cross his mind that he still had to finish prepping his car for Bradenton – if he could pull himself together to get the job done.

“I thought, ‘Man, I don’t know if I can get in the car,’ ” said Walsh. “My mom had asked me where I was when I got the call, and I told her I was working on the car. She said, ‘At least you don’t have to stress about getting that done.’

“I said, ‘Mom, if I don’t go down there and get in that car, I don’t know if I ever will. A lot of people have worked hard for that, and I’m planning on doing it unless the funeral makes it so that can’t happen.’ ”

Walsh pushed forward in part out of loyalty to his friend’s memory. He got the car delivered to the track in Florida, flew home to Michigan for the funeral, and flew back to Florida early Sunday morning to race. It was soon after that that the “Co-Pilot Steve Grebeck” window became a necessity on Walsh’s cars.

 

 

 

 

Dave Lyall, the man who helped mentor a teenaged Grebeck in metal fabrication, described his understudy as a mechanical genius.

“He was a sponge. He absorbed everything,” Lyall said.

During that time period, Lyall was building a Top Sportsman car, and when he arrived at work on Monday morning, someone asked, ‘Did you hear about Steve Grebeck?’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ They said he was killed over the weekend. I was speechless. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

“I hated to see such a bright young man at that stage of his career, with so much yet to do, die. He had that kind of spirit that the best racers have in that there’s nothing they think they can’t do or figure out, given enough time.”

Pat Musi called Grebeck’s death a grim reminder of the dangers inherent to racing. He was out of action for 10 months after breaking his back in 2010 in a Pro Mod car – then got back behind the wheel.

“Look, these cars can hurt you,” he said. “But this is what we do, and you can’t take stuff back. It’s a shame because Steve was ahead of his time – a helluva fabricator, but the main thing was he was just such a good person. He’d go over and weld on anybody’s car at the track. That’s how Steve was, he was just a genuine person. He would do anything for anybody.”

Brett Templeton said their minds were in sync when it came to their reason for pursuing drag racing with a fervor.

“It was always about winning,” he said. “We didn’t go to the track to have fun, we didn’t go to the track to do anything but hurt feelings. We were going there to be the No. 1 qualifier and win the race.”

By the same token, Grebeck could also be the savior of a racer in need, said Templeton.

“He was like, ‘If you need some help along the way, I’ll gladly help you’ – to the point where he’d stay up all night long helping somebody out, even if it meant he was going to struggle the next day because he didn’t have no sleep,” he said. “But it never seemed to bother him. Even when he was going on no sleep, he was still the same guy.”

Walsh remembers Grebeck coming to the rescue in a Pro 5.0 race at Bowling Green, Kentucky. They were to meet in the finals, but Walsh’s car had been damaged by severe tire shake in the semifinals; shake so violent that it broke the wheelie bars and the ring and pinion, and it creased the roof.

After assessing the damage, Walsh started the process of changing the broken rear end. He looked up to see Grebeck running to his pit area.

“‘I heard you broke your wheelie bars. What else is going on? What else is stopping you going from the finals?,’ ” Walsh said Grebeck asked. I said, ‘Just the wheelie bars. Do you have any tubing? What do you have?’ He said, ‘Go in your toolbox, grab a coupla sockets that’re the right size, grind on them and get ’em so they fit the wheelie bars. I’ll be back down here in half an hour with a welder, and we’ll get it done. Get the ring and pinion in it so we can race.’

“What I didn’t know was that on his run the window had gotten ripped out and had flown out of the car. All the tubing that was holding the window was all bent up, broke. He came down and fixed my wheelie bars before he even fixed the door on his own car. He didn’t want it given to him, he wanted to race you.”

When the cars came to the line for the final round, Walsh knew he was at a performance disadvantage. He “tried to kill the tree” and left 2/1,000ths of a second too soon, which handed the victory to Grebeck.

“He would’ve beaten me even if I’d cut a perfect light, but down on the other end, he was always the same whether he won or you won. When you race somebody like that, it teaches you something; how you want to be, how you want to race people.

“If you knew him and you spent any time with him, you truly thought he couldn’t be that way with everybody. But after he died, there were all these stories like that, and all the things people had to say about him and how similar those stories were – how he had affected their lives the same way. You’ve got good friends, you’ve got decent friends, you’ve got not-so-good friends, and you know kinda where you are with them, but he was really that good to that many people.”

Walsh would go on to become NMRA’s Pro 5.0 champion from 2003-05 and runner-up in ’06, and he finished third in 2012 in NHRA’s Pro Mod standings in a car owned by Hruska. He said that Grebeck’s No. 1 strength as a fierce racer was his relentless drive. Whatever it took, however much time was needed, Steve Grebeck was up to the task. And when you were able to take him down, he took it like a man – a man on a mission.

“He was the guy that when you beat him, he recognized that and went back to the shop and just worked harder. He wasn’t the guy who cried and moaned,” Walsh said. “And when he came back, you’d better watch out because he was gonna bust your ass.

“I truly felt that when I got in the car in Bradenton that next weekend to go racing, and then later win championships, a lot of it was due to Steve. There were a lot of times when I wasn’t sure if I could do what I had to do – whether it be getting in the car, getting the car done and getting it to the track when you had 24 hours of work and 18 hours to do it – there were times I always questioned stuff. When Steve was around, though, you knew whatever the problem was, he could solve it. He was MacGyver. Steve was that safety net for you when he was around. You knew you were OK.”

And then, in a flash, he was gone. All the potential for future greatness was lost. The go-to guy in any situation for so many others became a memory.

* * * * * * * * *

Today is March 25, 2022.

It would have been Steve Grebeck’s 57th birthday.