DirtonDirt exclusive
Streaking Michigan ace ready for Hell Tour's visit
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt managing editor
Travis Stemler's Anklam Racing entry. (Chris Johnston)
During his blistering first half of the racing season, Travis Stemler is approaching two key milestones.
The 35-year-old Ionia, Mich., Dirt Late Model driver is just three victories shy of his 100th overall dirt racing victory, and just a few away from his 50th triumph since connecting with Anklam Racing six years ago.
At the rate Stemler is racking up victories in what’s almost certain to be his best-ever season, those milestones will fall soon.
Since Stemler scored his first victory of of 2025 on May 16 at Tri-City Motor Speedway in Auburn, Mich., he’s won at least one feature each successive weekend, including two over the Fourth of July weekend at Crystal (Mich.) Motor Speedway.
The wins have come so fast it’s almost hard to keep up, but Stemler calls that “a good problem to have” with 10 midseason victories, a total that already matches his career-high.
"It's a good problem to say, ‘Man, how many have we won this year?’ Kind of really a God's blessing for a year, for sure,” said Stemler, who works for the Ionia County Road Department. “Words can't explain just how crazy it's been, just one right after another. It’s just really cool. I'm kind of speechless to say that you're at 10 wins and it's July 7 today.”
Freeland, Mich.’s Chad Anklam, who along with his wife Kayla owns the No. 4 Infinity Race Car, is enjoying the team’s hottest streak since striking a deal with Stemler at the 2019 World 100 that didn’t turn out quite like Anklam expected.
“We were supposed to get out of racing when we met Travis, and then we went into cahoots instead. He was trying to buy our car — and instead we got him to drive for us,” Anklam said. “We've been really successful ever since him and I partnered up. It's been great and this season, of course, really great. But you take it as it comes. Everybody knows that it could end, your luck streak. But the chemistry and all that, we've got along great this whole time and I think that's what makes the team.”
The Stemler-Anklam combination came hot out of the gate with 10 victories in 2020, including a pair of five-figure paydays and the Allstar Performance Challenge title. They’ve never slowed down in adding another five-figure payday at Merritt Speedway in Lake City, Mich., in 2021, more solid seasons and a standout nine-victory campaign in 2024.
For 2025, Michigan’s winningest Dirt Late Model racer points to a couple of keys to success. It was about a year ago the team switched to an Infinity Race Car, the fledgling chassis from Hazard, Ky.-based Wells Motorsports, where the team previously sourced its Longhorn Chassis.
About the same time, the Stemler clan — Travis along with his wife Tori and young daughters Myla and Lola — moved 7 miles out of Ionia to a picturesque white farmhouse in Muir, Mich. Yes, the 125-year-old house has the wraparound porch, 3 acres and four bedrooms, but there’s no doubt what the man of the house loves most about the property: the 2,400-square-foot red barn at the end of the driveway.
“I got my oasis,” Stemler said. “About 20 steps away from the front door. With the race car, you pretty much live in ‘em.”
Previously, Stemler’s No. 4 race car was kept in his grandpa’s cramped two-stall garage that he shared with his brother. It was less than a 10-minute drive, but working on the car sacrificed family time. Not anymore.
Anklam, who lays fiber optic lines for Great Lakes Directional Drilling and lives about 80 miles northeast of Stemler, is glad for the shop’s new proximity.
“We knew it would be a good thing,” said Anklam, whose firm sponsors the car along with Cusack Collison, CL Trucking & Excavating and others. “Him and his brother shared the shop, it was hard to work in there, but being away from his family, and I know he's got two beautiful girls and wants to spend time with them also, and once he did get the house, it did turn for the better. Just playing with the car when he wants, not have to drive to the shop. That took a lot of stress, I’m sure family life stress, off of him.”
The Stemlers had long been looking for just the right house — and just the right outbuilding for a race shop — without success. While he loves the house, Stemler says “we jumped on it because of the pole barn.”
“We’ve been looking and looking, the house was too small or the barn was too small, and we went back at it for years looking for the right home,” said Stemler, a former modified champion at Eldora Speedway who has been in Late Models for 11 years. “One you can pull the rig in with the trailer and all that stuff and this was the golden gem for being patient.”
(This is the paragraph Tori Stemler might skip, because the family’s move did come with a single downgrade. “The only problem is the old house had three bathrooms and this one has one, and I got two little girls plus a wife,” Stemler said. “So, you can only imagine how that is.”)
But for Stemler, the race shop trumps all because it “makes life a lot easier when everything's right here, right outside your doorstep,” even if he’s gained a little weight recently because the neighbors might pop in to see what’s going on at the race shop. “My neighbors are awesome. Every time they come over they bring a case of beer, so yeah, that catches up to you real quick.”
While Stemler’s shop situation is now ideal, his Infinity Race Car has been just as a good. After a multiple rollover wreck at I-96 Speedway in Lake Odessa, Mich., last spring, the team decided to sell that damaged Longhorn Chassis and take the plunge with the first-year Infinity chassis developed by former racer Eric Wells and now supported by veteran crew chief Tim Douglas.
“The owner wanted to get another car, and I said, ‘Well, we could go out on a limb and try this new chassis, and try to see where this goes.’ But we always had a Longhorn, too. And he said, ‘Well, if your judgment is to go this way, let's jump on board then,' ” Stemler said. “And it's been a real big blessing because Eric's help and Tim's help, just, you know, everybody back at Wells and their new shock programs they've got and stuff, it's just been really helpful.”
Stemler says the steerability and comfort of the year-old car has been unmatched, allowing him to win even when starting midpack.
“We've been able to pass cars and it's just a really good-handling race car,” said Stemler, who captured a career-richest $11,000 victory in the Dan Salay Memorial last month at Crystal from the seventh starting spot.
Stemler has top-five finishes in 16 of his 17 feature starts, and the team’s lone dud was Memorial Day weekend’s Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series event at Crystal won by Tyler Erb.
Crystal ran a regular-season race the night before the Iron-Man tour’s visit, and while Stemler won the feature, he and crew chief Victor Stank had gone with an unfamiliar setup that didn’t feel quite right. The weakness was exposed for the next night’s $5,000-to-win event.
“We thought (a setup) was gonna be good on the car and it was the total opposite and we had a bad qualifying lap and we never could dig ourselves out of a hole,” Stemler said. “The track was a little latched down and everybody was kind of the same speed, so it was kind of a difficult situation watching a feature that you know you wanted to be in. And that's kind of where this little bit of a hot streak came from was shortly after that race.
“We just told ourselves to go back to what we know and don't touch it. Go back to what we know and keep things simple.”
Back in the groove, Stemler has six victories in his last seven starts, and he’s eager to bring his hot streak to the weekend’s upcoming DIRTcar Summer Nationals events at Butler Motor Speedway in Quincy, Mich., Crystal and Oakshade Raceway in Wauseon, Ohio.
"I just think having this stuff at home and being able to work on it with my family around me has been a huge success,” Stemler said. “Plus just the people that are surrounding our team, all the way from the owners to the sponsors to family and crew. It's just a really good feel inside knowing you're jumping in this car. And I think that helps out a lot.”
