By: Kevin Ramsell
West Salem, WI – Former NASCAR Advance Auto Parts Weekly Series National Champion Jacob Goede made the decision to compete the full season at La Crosse Fairgrounds Speedway in West Salem, Wisconsin. The ten-time Elko Speedway track champion is looking at his first La Crosse Kwik Trip Late Model title during the 55th Annual Oktoberfest Race Weekend on October 3rd-6th.
The veteran driver, who now resides in Carver, Minnesota, made the trek down to the 5/8-mile oval on Saturday night’s and picked up four feature wins competing against a tough field of veteran drivers.
Goede will come into Oktoberfest with a five point lead over defending champion Skylar Holzhausen.
In order for Goede to win the title, he will have to run the gauntlet of four 20-lap features over the first two nights of Fest to take home the title.
“Honestly, we had a really good year up until about the last four or five races. I made some mistakes on the track that hurt me and we got a little bit off on the car for a couple of weeks, but feel like we got back pretty good on the last regular night there,” Goede explained about his season so far at La Crosse. “The results maybe didn’t show up, but I felt pretty good about it and so going into Oktoberfest.”
Goede is ready to go head-to-head with Holzhausen for the title.
“It’s real tight between me and Skyler. It’s gonna be a challenge as he’s really fast, especially in qualifying and he’s got his car working really good now. So it’s gonna be a challenge, but four tires for four features, the same four tires I should say, hopefully that bodes well for for our package come feature three and four on Friday night,” Goede said. “So that’s what we’re kind of banking on is try and hang with them and and and then try and beat them on day two if we can.”
But…that won’t be the only thing Goede will be focused on during the four days of racing as he will also bring his Super Late Model to compete in the Knights of Oktoberfest on Thursday, the Dick Trickle “99” on Friday, the Big 8 Series on Saturday and the ASA Midwest Tour’s Oktoberfest 200 on Saturday & Sunday.
“Which, you know, that’s a hard part,” Goede said with a smile when asked about running a busy schedule over four days. “Like last year we kind of used a limited just for fun and go out there and do it, and we had really good success and we really focused on the super.”
“Now, this year, we kind of got reverse that, really focused on the limited but we had such good results in the last few years not worrying about the limited, just going out and driving it that maybe we should just do that again, but the super’s hard.” Goede said. “We just were not in it enough and don’t have a good baseline, but uh I don’t know, we we ran okay in July here at La Crosse. It seems like we’re maybe kind of all right tonight here at the Midwest Tour race at Elko Speedway, so we’ll see, you know, hopefully for the best of our at best.”
Some may be reading this going…is he really going to do this? Well, it’s not the first time for him.
Last year, Goede won the Knights of Oktoberfest Super Late Model race along with the first NASCAR Kwik Trip Late Model feature on Thursday night. On Friday night, he won both NASCAR Kwik Trip Late Model features and competed in the Dick Trickle “99” Super Late Model event. On Saturday, he finished second in the Big 8 Series feature event. He concluded his weekend with a ninth place finish in the Midwest Tour’s Oktoberfest 200.
Is Goede ready to repeat in 2024?
“If if we still got race cars left, yep, that’s the plan,” Goede exclaimed.”That is run everything, so that’s an Iron Man Award or something right?”
Oktoberfest Race Weekend is a tradition in the Midwest since 1970! Four Days of Stock Car Racing, Legendary After Race Parties, Special Challenge Races, Super Late Models, The FAMOUS Camper Village, and over 700 laps of feature racing action! Make you plans now to attend!
The Oktoberfest Race Weekend Camper Village officially opens at noon on Monday, September 30th.
The track will be open for practice on Wednesday, October 2nd from 2pm to 6:20pm.
For more information, please visit oktoberfestraceweekend.com.