Jimmy Horton to Take His Place in Dirt Mod Hall of Fame
By Buffy Swanson
On Wednesday, July 10, two-time Super DIRT Week winner Jimmy Horton from Neshanic Station, NJ, will join the upper echelon of regional racing greats enshrined in the Northeast Dirt Modified Hall of Fame. The 32nd annual induction ceremonies, which are free and open to the public, will be held in the Hall of Fame Museum on the grounds of Weedsport Speedway in New York.
There is no doubt that Horton was destined to drive. The family scrapbook features a faded photo of Jimmy at age three, wearing Ed Farley’s helmet and hoisting the trophy Farley won at Flemington in Horton’s father’s race car. The kid remembers running out of the house and down the driveway as his dad loaded up and left for Syracuse, crying his heart out because, at age six, he wasn’t allowed to go.
Young Horton counted down the days until he came of age. In the winter of 1972-3, his father gave him a ’40 Ford coupe that Mike Grbac had crashed. “If you can fix it, you can drive it,” Pop told him. At age 16, Jimmy raced it a handful of times—unsuccessfully.
“Dad took the car away from me after I took down a telephone pole on the backstretch at Nazareth,” recounted Horton. “His exact words were: ‘You’re not old enough and you’re not going to be good enough.’”
He was hell-bent to prove his father wrong. “In ’74 I came back and the first race I ran at Nazareth, I finished second,” Jimmy made his point. “And then—history after that.”
In his first full season, Horton scored seven Sportsman wins at Nazareth, three at Orange County, and took division titles at both tracks.
The following year—he went straight to Modified, replacing Hall of Famer Sammy Beavers as his dad’s driver.
Barely out of high school, Horton showed the old guard he was the real deal, finishing second in Orange County’s championship chase in 1975, and winning the title outright in ’76.
Young and cocky, the upstart wasn’t afraid to bang on doors, begging top car owners like Rich Marinelli and Tony Ferraiuolo to give him a shot. Ferraiuolo was almost convinced until Gary Balough became available. Balough, just exiting George Smith’s Statewide Hi-Way Safety No. 3, came over to Horton in the pits at Middletown. “Call Statewide,” he advised. “The ride just didn’t fit me. But it would fit you.”
Smith wasn’t initially interested in the youngster, but Horton kept on harping; and when he finally got the nod in late 1976, his father wasn’t at all sure it was an upward move.
Although the team had taken the big Syracuse race in ’74 with Billy Osmun in the seat, their finishing record on the short tracks wasn’t anything to brag about.
“I don’t know why you want to drive that car. It breaks down all the time!” the senior Horton said. “It’s not a good deal. Gary Balough couldn’t win in it. Osmun couldn’t win in it. What makes you think you can?”
But Jimmy was confident. “I can win in that car,” he vowed.
Horton took over maintenance and fabricating and, with Smith’s blessing and full backing, he built the team into one of the top operations in the region. In the 15 seasons they were together, the Statewide/S&H outfit won 258 times—not only in Modified competition, but in URC Sprints, full-blown Sprints and ARCA stock cars.
“There were a couple of things happening there,” Jimmy said about stepping out of the Mod arena. “I was getting kind of bored, wanted to do something different. And George had always had a goal to go NASCAR racing.”
Starting in 1985, Jimmy did stints down south, trying to break through to the next level on a national stage. Working with greats like Bobby Allison, Rick Hendrick and Ken Schrader, he got oh-so-close. Horton was tapped to sub for Darrell Waltrip in the Tide Cup car; was in consideration for the Woods brothers and Gibbs rides; won five ARCA races in 1990.
Even after the split with Smith in ’91, he posted ARCA wins for Ken Schrader and Joe Horner’s Active Disposal team. But ultimately the dream ran out of money. And—to be honest—half of Horton’s heart was always back home.
“I should have put all my eggs in one basket and stayed down there, proved to everyone down there that I really wanted to do it. But I’d run the ARCA races, jump in a plane and come home to run the dirt car,” said Jimmy, who admitted, “I couldn’t wait a month between races. I had to race.”
He was down south working at Schrader’s shop when New York Modified owner Dan Madsen called in August 1994, demanding Horton come back in two days’ time to drive his car. With Hall of Fame crew chief Charlie DeAngelis, they clicked immediately, winning at Rolling Wheels, Drummond and Granby in Canada, the Vermont 200 at Devil’s Bowl and a 50-lapper at Albany-Saratoga before ending the year on the highest of high notes, with victories at the NYS Fairgrounds mile and in Fonda’s 200.
“I needed to let everybody know that I still had it,” Jimmy reflected. “I was hungry, Charlie was hungry, and Dan gave us all the finances we needed. Charlie kept the cars the best they could be, bar none. It was like it was back in the ’70s and ’80s when we’d pull in and everyone would say, ‘Oh crap, here they are!’”
After the Madsen team disbanded at the end of 1996, Horton replaced Billy Pauch in Michele and Bob Faust’s mount, winning a pair of Super DIRT Series events in their final year together, 1999. He bounced around for a bit—driving for Bill Hewlett, Dieter Schmidt, the Michael brothers, Jay James, Ricky Grosso and Dick Biever—before landing in Chris Larsen’s high-profile Halmar car at the final Syracuse classic in 2015.
With Larsen recently paring down most of his racing involvement, Horton will be back where he began—partnered with his father in a number 43.
“Chris was good to me. His name will still be on the race car. He gave me the cars, all the equipment we had, and told us to go racing,” informed Jimmy, who will combine that arsenal with a car and motors his dad owns.
It will be a sporadic 2024 schedule, as he has taken on a new responsibility. For years, Horton worked alongside good friend Art Lentini at Art’s Radiator & Welding in Flemington, NJ. After Lentini succumbed to cancer in December, Horton and his family officially took over the business in March.
At age 67, Horton has nothing left to prove in the sport. The nickname he earned as a teenage phenom—“The Sensational One”—is fitting. The legacy is distinguished by Sportsman titles at Nazareth and Orange County; nine Modified championships at Bridgeport, where he tops the all-time win list; five titles at East Windsor, three at Orange County (in three different decades), a pair at New Egypt and two on the DIRT Florida tour. Horton won “the big one” at Syracuse in 1987 with the Smith team and again in 1994 with Madsen. He is a two-time winner of the Eastern States 200. The Horton record currently stands at 465 wins at 37 tracks in eight states and two Canadian provinces.
But Jimmy is not yet ready to call it a career.
“My dad still enjoys it,” he said of his 90-year-old father, “and he gives me the fire to continue.
“I’ve still got the desire—when I roll on the race track, I’m capable of winning.”
Horton concedes that it’s now a different game than when he was a precocious young hotshot, outsmarting the competition on the track and in the shop.
“I know how hard it is to run in the top five—now, every Joe Blow has the same stuff you’ve got! And if they don’t, tomorrow they will. It’s all store-bought, bolt-on, let’s-go-racing,” Jimmy noted. “What cracks me up is when these guys say how hard they work on these race cars. I say—what’re you talking about?”
He considered how he came up, during rough-and-tumble times when a guy would build what he won with and couldn’t look a camera in the eye.
“You look back—the kids nowadays are groomed for success! I didn’t know how to handle it. I just wanted to win races,” Horton figured. “That was it. Win a race, wake up every morning and worry about the next race—and not realize or really think about what I had accomplished.”
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