Growing up going to the race track to watch his dad compete every week of the summer, Mike Lichtfeld admits he “wanted absolutely nothing to do with driving a race car.”
During the week, when it was time to be in the shop, he would rather be with his friends or preparing for his own sports: basketball, football and track.
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“That was just always kind of my thing was being an athlete,” Lichtfeld said.
But once he graduated high school in 2005, the opportunities to continue playing sports ended, and Lichtfeld was looking for other ways to keep his competitive juices flowing.
So he decided to give racing a try.
Now, 20 years after his first full-time season racing at Dells Raceway Park in Juneau County, Wisconsin, Lichtfeld has put together one of the track’s most successful careers. He won his first championship in the Pure Stock division in 2007. Two years later, he was the Super Stock champion, and now he’s the four-time defending champion in the track’s Late Model division.
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MyRacePass: All of Lichtfeld’s race results
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA – NOVEMBER 21: During the NASCAR Regional Champions Banquet at Charlotte Convention Center on November 21, 2025 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Jacob Kupferman/Getty Images)
Lichtfeld won Dells’ late model title last year by 82 points. It was also the track’s first year sanctioned in the NASCAR Local Racing Series, and his combined points between Dells and Wisconsin’s LaCrosse Fairgrounds Speedway helped him win the Midwest Regional Rookie of the Year award.
“We had a really good year last year at Dells Raceway Park,” Lichtfeld said. “It was our first year being NASCAR sanctioned, and that just added a whole other level of excitement, because in addition to racing against the guys at your track, once the season rolled on, we were acquiring the weekly points. You’re paying attention to what was happening in your region and in the country, and it just was a really neat thing. We had a lot of fun with it.”
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Lichtfeld’s racing beginnings were with his dad Tom in the shop and pits. Now the roles are reversed.
Lichtfeld and his brother Steve both race at Dells, and the brothers and their dad work alongside each other to prepare their cars. The three also work together for their real jobs, meaning they spend a lot of hours with each other throughout the week.
Lichtfeld said the time is worth it, because going to the track Saturday night is what he calls their weekly vacation.
“We own a plumbing and septic installation business up here in Wisconsin, and we all work there,” he said. “My brother does the indoor plumbing. I do the outdoor stuff with septic installation, selling the jobs, the excavating, and then my dad’s the owner and boss of the company. So we all work together 50, 60 hours a week, and then we’re all in the race shop together another 20 or 30 hours a week, plus Saturdays at the race track. So we all get a pretty good fill of each other, but that really, really makes a team bond and, we’re pretty tight knit in that sense.
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“It’s our weekly vacation that we all get to spend Saturday at the race track together, because we don’t hunt, golf, fish, anything like that. It’s all about racing in the summer months.”
They’ve even added more races to the schedule since Dells went NASCAR-sanctioned last year. As a way to gain more points in the regional and national standings, Lichtfeld began travelling to LaCrosse, and he picked up his first feature win at the track on May 30.
“We did it just to kind of break the cycle a little bit of racing at Dells every week and ended up having a decent run up there,” he said. “We just really enjoyed ourselves with the NASCAR sanction.
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“It’s definitely an honor to go up to a different race track such as LaCrosse. It’s got so much history at it, and being able to get a victory there is really special.”
Lichtfeld is second in the Dells standings this season with two wins and five top fives in six races. He has one win and three top 10s in three races at LaCrosse. He’s seventh in the NASCAR Local Racing Series Midwest region standings and first in the Wisconsin state standings.
Even though he’s added another track to his schedule, Dells will always be home to Lichtfeld and his family, and he feels extra pride every time he’s able to get back to Victory Lane there.
“It means so much,” he said. “I watched my dad race there for so many years, and my dad was kind of the racer where he had good equipment but not the best, and he always made do with what he had. He always tells stories about back in the day racing where he would qualify into the feature but then take his good tires off and put his old ones on to race the feature just to save money so he had good tires to make the race again next week. So I take that to heart. Everything I do in the race, I try to honor him as much as possible.
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“I have a great pride for the Dells Raceway Park and I’m just thankful that (general manager) Jerry Auby’s doing a great job keeping it open because, as we all know, it’s tough business being in the race track owning nowadays. So, it means a ton to be successful at the Dells.”
MyRacePass: Track 2026 NASCAR points
The biggest goal Lichtfeld wants to accomplish this season is making it back to the NASCAR banquet in Charlotte, N.C., this winter. He said following the points for multiple championships has changed the way he drives for the better.
“You’ve really got to look at the big picture of things and have in mind that you’ve really got to stack those top fives, top threes to gain the NASCAR points,” he said. “But that’s probably a good thing for me, because I spent my career not really worrying about the points as much and would kind of get myself in trouble sometimes, so maybe in a way it calmed me down a little bit.
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“The banquet we were lucky enough to go to last year was top notch and such a cool experience that it’d be an honor to get to go back there again.”
The key to getting back there, Lichtfeld said, is continuing to put in the time in the race shop and staying prepared — while also remaining humble.
“We’ve got to keep working and can’t get lazy,” he said. “It’s hard to get to the top, but we don’t want to slip down the slope and lose ground to anybody. We just have a goal to do as best we can each and every night, not beat ourselves. The points will shake out where they shake out. Obviously the only thing that we can control is what we do on a weekly basis. We can’t control what happens in Minnesota or Oklahoma or anywhere else in the country, but if we put a good product on race track and I do a good job driving, hopefully things will shake out and we’ll look at that stuff come September when it gets closer to be in the end.”
Lichtfeld doesn’t have the same opportunities to play football and basketball that he did 20 years ago in high school, but he’s OK with that now. He’s found a new competition, and he’s so successful, he doesn‘t see himself quitting any time soon.
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“Once high school ended and I didn’t have those opportunities to be competitive, racing stepped in to fulfill my competitive needs,” he said. “And it’s been history ever since then. It’s definitely in my blood now.”
