It’s been almost 26 years since Karen Stoffer made her NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle debut in Denver.
This season is very likely her last.
Stoffer, an 11-time national-event winner, is ready to hang up her helmet, but only in terms of full-time Pro Stock Motorcycle competition. She’s in her third season with the White Alligator Racing team because she skipped the abbreviated 2020 campaign due to COVID-19’s impact on her career in Nevada. At the season-opening race for the class at the Gatornationals in March, she not only won, she recorded the quickest run in the division’s history at 6.665 seconds in a second-round victory over Eddie Krawiec.
“Because I have dual careers, people call me a hobby racer, which is true for as long as I’ve been racing with NHRA,” said Stoffer, who lives in Gardnerville, Nevada, and is now in her 29th year of a full-time job at Bently Nevada. “I don’t necessarily think it’s a negative. For me, it’s been a big positive. I have a really good work/life balance, and I’m very fortunate and blessed in every aspect of it.
“But I have had people make the comment, ‘Just think if you were doing this professionally and could test and could do your own engine program and all that, you might have taken a different path.’ But I don’t regret anything, and I would never have given up my job. If I had had to give up one for the other, it would have been racing. I love them both, but I would have given up racing, not my job. I love my job.”
Stoffer’s never won an NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle crown; fourth in 2019 is her career best. She was victorious at World Wide Technology Raceway that season.
The 2020 season was to have been her last, but COVID forced a change of plans. NHRA was idle for three months due to the pandemic, then returned with a compressed schedule that was crammed into a smaller window in the calendar.
“It was such an erratic schedule that I could not balance my work career with their changing, dynamic schedule, plus I had to stay close to work,” she said.
Stoffer opted to shift that PSM retirement plan to 2021, but a late-season surge and some strong persuasion helped energize her to return for 2022.
“They put the big motor in my bike for the last three races, and we went to the final round in every one of them,” she said. “I was going to be done again. I finished on a high note, so I was OK with that. Then my husband (Gary) and (sponsors) the Skillmans and Big St. Charles and Suzuki Extended Protection got together and said, ‘We all think Karen should race another year. Does she want to?’
“So, this is going to be my last year riding a full season, I think. There are other people that want to ride the WAR bike. I think there are some other things I could do in NHRA, so I could still be out there with the race teams. I think there are some teams that could use some of my skills and assistance.
“I’m pretty sure that this year is going to be my last full season. I’ll still have my license, and I still might jump on a bike here and there, but I think from a full-season standpoint, this is probably going to be it.”
Gary Stoffer works on Jalina Salinas’ Pro Stock Motorcycle, and when he and Karen aren’t competing at NHRA national events, they participate in NHRA divisional races and big-money bracket shows from coast to coast. They keep a set of bikes at home in Nevada for racing from the Rockies to the Pacific, and two others are housed in a shop in Indianapolis.
During the down time in 2020, the Stoffers filled their need for speed with grassroots racing – and that’s not going to change.
“We never did leave racing altogether,” she said, “and we never, ever will.”
