Tim Steele (racing driver)
Timothy Steele was an American stock car racing driver. He won three ARCA Re/Max Series national championships and raced in NASCAR's highest three series. He was inducted in the Michigan Motor Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.
Early career
Steele was born in Coopersville, Michigan on March 1, 1968, and began racing as a five-year-old in motorcycle ice racing. He finished second in Michigan's 125cc AMA motocross division. In 1984, the 16-year-old won the NAMRA Champ Cars division championship and was the division's Rookie of the Year; he also raced in International Jet Ski Racing events that season. He continued to move up the ladder and began racing late models at Berlin Raceway. He began racing on regional touring series, winning in the American Speed Association in 1990 and the NASCAR All Pro Series in 1992.ARCA career
Steele started out in the 1993 season driving for Harold Steele's HS Die Team. It was a very successful year. He went on to win the Championship that year and earned the Rookie of the Year award. He went on to continue winning races, also winning the championship in 1996 and 1997. Steele won twelve times in 1997, the most wins in the series since 1973.In November 1997, Steele was involved in a serious accident while testing at Atlanta Motor Speedway. At the time he was planning on moving up to the Winston Cup Series to try and contend for rookie of the year. He was ten days away from signing up with a team to be owned by his father Harold and Green Bay Packers Quarterback Brett Favre, who were planning to purchase Bud Moore Engineering. At the time, he was diagnosed with a broken left ankle and cracked ribs. However, the accident also caused brain injuries, and doctors told him he could not handle another trauma. Much of 1998 he spent going from doctor to doctor to see if a comeback was possible. He battled a dependency on the prescription drug Oxycontin which he was taking for headaches. Finally in June 1998, Steele made his comeback to the ARCA series at Pocono; he won the race and went on to race in five more races that year winning three of them. In 1999, Steele only competed in one race at Talladega finishing 34th after a crash.
In 2000, Steele made a full-time comeback to the series. He won three races and accumulated fourteen top-ten finishes and finished third in the final points standings. In 2001, Steele won four races and finished ninth in the final points standings.
The next five years were not as successful as Steele only competed in sixteen races and earned only three top-five finishes. In 2007, after a late model crash at Toledo Speedway, Steele decided it was time to stop racing.
Between 1993 and 2006, Steele had attempted 146 races, winning 41, which equates to victories in 28% of all the races he entered. Steele's 24 victories is ARCA's all-time Superspeedway winner, including nine at Pocono Raceway. He recorded 86 top-five finishes, 101 top-tens and led 5,423 laps. That means that Steele led laps in 64% of every race he entered. He also won 31 career pole awards. He was the first ARCA driver to make over 1,000,000 in his career, surpassing Bobby Bowsher's previous record of 952,535 in 1998.