ALGER – At 19, Seth Bergman already has crammed much into his resume as a race car driver.
Before he even graduated from Cascade High School, he won Rookie of the Year awards in the 250 junior and 250 senior classes, the Most Improved Driver award at Deming Speedway and won the coveted Northwest Clay Cup Championship there. He was Rookie of the Year in the Sportsmen Sprint class at Skagit Speedway in 2005, when he won three main events.
Last year, Bergman captured Rookie of the Year honors in the Northern Sprint Tour, with one main event victory and a win in a trophy dash.
Son of a stock car driver, Bergman decided to put baseball aside to concentrate fully on racing. It was a necessary sacrifice to reach the dream he has.
“I want to make this a profession,” said Bergman, now an apprentice electrician who works for his father, Steve. “I know it sounds like a long shot, but I’d like to go to NASCAR. That’s every race car driver’s dream, to make it and to make a living out of it. With what happened to my sister, I’d like to make it for her and me. It was her dream, too.”
Ashley Bergman is never far from his brother’s heart. She loved soccer, tennis and shopping malls. She loved to sing, especially jazz. Her first love, however, was racing.
On May 3, 2001, Ashley was at the tail end of her senior year at Cascade and excited to graduate. She was in her second day of a two-day racing class at Yakima Speedway when her car crashed into a wall. Ashley died in Providence Yakima Medical Center. She was 17.
In a very real way, Ashley is with her brother in every race. It will be no different this weekend during the Jim Raper Memorial Dirt Cup, Skagit Speedway’s premier event.
“I say prayers before I go out,” Bergman said. “I ask her to be there with me. I try not to think about it too much. I try to keep my mind focused on racing, but I definitely feel her presence there with me.”
Ashley’s spirit is anything but a distraction to her brother. He says he uses it to move forward, to go faster on the racetrack. He adds that, while Ashley’s death has affected him in many ways, it never has gripped him with even a trace of fear while in a race car.
To a racer, fear is the stop sign, the red flag. Fears means he should climb out of the car and never look back, for his safety and that of other racers.
“You can get hurt walking across the street or get killed doing anything,” Bergman said. “I’m not scared of having a bad accident. You can’t get into the race car with your mind elsewhere. If I go out there thinking that I could get hurt or die, it’ll really throw me off.
“I’ve never been scared of it and I don’t think I ever will be.”
Not surprisingly, parents Steve and Terri Bergman had many long discussions with their son about the sport. They were understandably torn between their daughter’s accident, their instinctual sense of protecting their son, then 13, and his love for racing. Many outside the family urged the Bergmans to put an end to Seth’s racing career and encourage him to find another hobby.
“I told him many times that I’d buy him the best bass boat around if he’d take up fishing,” said Steve Bergman, who owns his son’s car. “But he had already been racing for a while and it was kind of a family deal up until the accident. I had my hope that he wanted to do something else, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do.”
Besides, Steve Bergman said, even if they’d forbidden Seth from driving, he and Terri could clearly sense the probability that Seth would resume racing when he was 18 and on his own.
They decided to leave the decision up to their son.
“I can’t even describe how thankful I am for that,” Seth Bergman said.
For now, Bergman’s plans include a trip to Knoxville, Iowa, the Mecca of sprint-car racing, for the Brodix Tournament of Champions winged 360 sprint-car race on Aug. 5. He will represent the first-year Northwest Sprint Challenge Series, launched by former area driver Shawna Wilskey.
Bergman said he may stay in Knoxville for a couple of weeks and possibly compete in a non-wing show.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” he said of Knoxville. “It’s like Daytona for us.”
With some luck, Seth Bergman will realize Daytona firsthand. And Ashley’s presence will be with him, as always.
Sports columnist John Sleeper: sleeper@heraldnet.com
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
