Mount Ayr Record-News
Mount Ayr, Ringgold County, Iowa
Thursday, May 17, 2006, Pages 1 and 16

The big semi parked near Dan BARBER'S shop southeast of Mount Ayr for a week or so was one tip off to what was going on at Dan's Auto Tech recently.

And when the job was done, the race car with itsnew black paint job was ready to make its way back aboard the semi and back to South Haven, MI.

Painting a car is nothing new for BARBER, but painting one that costs $160,000 for a crew chief and engineer for Pro One Motor Sports who used to hang around the shop when he was a youngster is.

Steve LOWMAN Jr. showed off the finished product before he headed back to his job for the racing team. A Mount Ayr Community high school graduate, LOWMAN is the son of Steve LOWMAN of Mount Ayr.

LOWMAN is working for a team which races cars in the Sports Car Club of America Pro Formula Atlantic central division, another of the ties Ringgold county has to auto racing on the bigger stage than the many who race on local tracks in the area.

The formula car racing is road racing done on tracks built for the races or on street circuits. And the cars are built for speed.

The cars have carbon fiber bodies that weight about 1,100 pounds of total weight and are powered by four cylinder Toyota engines which crew chiefs like LOWMAN "tweak a little" so the cars can whiz along at 175 miles per hour and excelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 3.4 seconds.

"They can pick up speed pretty quickly," LOWMAN said.

Sequential gear boxes are used for shifting so the shifting can be done a lot more quickly. And the cars are built to ride close to the ground to help them move so fast. "There is just three quarters of an inch of clearance between the car and the track so setting up the car for each different track is important.

"The track surfaces have to be pretty smooth for the road course tracks," he said. "The only oval we run on is at the Indianapolis track."

With cars that are so light, the weight of the driver can make a difference in how a car runs.

"We have a big driver who weighs more than 200 pounds alone," he said. "We figure that we have an advantage in the rain as we get more traction with him driving."

Races are held rain or shine unless there is lightning, so the team has to be ready for all kinds of road conditions.

The racing season is just underway and LOWMAN'S team placed third in its first race and then won the second race of the season.

"We are off to a pretty good start," LOWMAN said. "We began with a new car and a new engine and got it broken in the first week and then ran even better the second race."

He was headed for a race in Grattan, MI from his stopover in Ringgold county.

Races are held every two weeks or so at tracks in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin in the central division where the Pro One Motor Sports team races.

This year the national "run-off" where cars from divisions around the country come for the national title racing will be held in Topeka, KS, and LOWMAN hopes this will be close enough for Ringgold county fans to come and see what he does.

The national will be held at the Heartland Park Topeka, five miles south of Topeka, October 13-15 this fall.

As crew chief and engineer for the team, LOWMAN has a very responsible position making sure the cars run well and are safe.

LOWMAN has enjoyed being around cars since he was a youngster and hung around Dan BARBER soaking up what he could learn from him since he was 14 years old.

After high school, LOWMAN attended Wyotech, a Wyoming automotive school. He taught at the school for little over a yeqar.

He then joined a Pro Mazda racng team and worked his way up o being crew chief and engineer for the team he is working for now.

"It took a few years to learn all the different kinds of things that I need to know to develop cars for a race team like this and I credit Dan and my dad for helping me get a good start," LOWMAN said.

LOWMAN is a jack of all trades for his team, and drives the semi, which holds up to seven cars along with a parts sales warehouse to the races. "I'm the only one of the team with a commercial driver's license right now so I do the semi driving," he noted.

His team currently has four cars including the new one that he had in Mount Ayr for its new paint job.

While the painting process was being done there were a number of people who stopped by to ask questions and see the formula race car.

J. R. WALKER, a commercial real estate developer in the Chicago, IL area, owns the team that LOWMAN works for.

While his summers are spent with [Page 16] the racing team, LOWMAN plans to return to Ringgold county to spend his winters.

"I plan to come back to Mount Ayr and set up a shop where I can weld and tinker during the winters and then go back to racing each summer," LOWMAN said.

Photograph courtesy of Mount Ayr Record-News

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, December of 2012