Clay Doemelt is the owner of Runaway Chassis. I'm a 3rd generation mini sprint racer and a 2nd generation car builder.
My Grandpa "Big" Al Doemelt raced micros in the early 1960's until the early 1980's. He was in his late sixty's when he finally hung up his helmet.
My Dad is G.L. Doemelt he raced micros in the late 1960's to the middle 1970's before going to sprint cars.
From 1970 to 2019 a Doemelt boy has built some kind of open wheel dirt race car every year for the last 49 years. The only family to build micro/mini sprints longer (as far as I know) are the Sawyer family from Oklahoma
My Dad built his first micro sprint car in 1970 when he was 19 years old. The car had a couple of unique features. The car had the engine mounted beside the driver instead of above or behind the rear axle and also featured a roll cage. To our knowledge this was the first micro to ever be built this way. (If any of you "old" guys know that it was someone else email me and let me know)
My old man came up with a lot of cool stuff back in the day that now seems like standard stuff today. He was the first in the industry to have a nationally mailed catalog, one of the first to offer c.n.c machined billet aluminum parts (every one used cast stuff before then on micros) he had in house c.n.c. equipment, in 1993 had his own in house powder coat oven and was the first in the industry to do so, played around with titanium components and even had his own line of aluminum wheels at one point. He was also featured in the original 1st addition of the Steve Smith micro/mini sprint technology book that everyone new to the sport always buys today. His spindles and knock off hubs were so popular at one point in the 1980's almost every car builder in the country used them on their cars!
In the 1980's when i was a kid the old man had a guy from New Zealand wanting to work for him as a welder and learn what this race car thing was all about. I just knew him to be a guy named Kiwi. After a couple years at the shop he quit and went on to start a midget and sprint car company called Stealth. John Godfrey now owns Spike Chassis and may wind up building more full size midgets than anyone in history before he hangs up his welding torch.
In 2000 my old man built his last car. All in all he wound up building over 500 micro/mini sprints and sprint cars in his car building days.
And in my opinion made everyone else have to raise the bar when it comes to the craftsmanship and quality of this type of chassis and component building.
