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  • Al Vine works on a racing lawn mower his son was planning to race in Sunday’s main event at the Nicollet County Fair Grandstand. Lawn mower racing is a national sport that is rumored to have started as an April Fools joke in Illinois in 1992. A Minnesota chapter was started about three years ago. Luke Gronneberg

    Mower racer

August 12, 2007

Mower racers a cut above at Nicollet Co. Fair

Dan Nienaber

ST. PETER — slideshow Click here to see video of lawn mower races at the Nicollet County Fair.



Andy Tronnes had no idea lawn mower racing was already a national sport when he and a few buddies started racing their small tractors around a horseshoe driveway near Hibbing seven years ago.

“We were putzing around, trying to make them faster,” he said. “So I got on the Internet and found the national Web site U.S. Lawn Mower Racing Association. I had no idea they existed.”

It wasn’t long after that when the Minnesota Lawn Mower Racing Association was created, linking what was just a source of family fun up north with others interested in the sport around the Twin Cities. That was three years ago.

Now the group of about 20 drivers travels the Midwest with its racing show. They squeezed in three county fairs over the weekend, ending with a set of races at the Nicollet County Fair in St. Peter. That was after shows at the Mower County Fair in Austin Friday and the Stevens County Fair in Morris Saturday.

“When we first started out, we were just revving the engines,” Tronnes said. “Now we have go carts. They’re lawn mower frames and lawn mower engines, but they’re really little go carts. It’s not a rich man’s sport. You just go out with what you have.”

For Jere Heineman, also known as Dude Mow, that can mean racing his $400 mower in the commercial class of races or his $2,000 mower in the factory experiment, or FX, class of races.

Heineman is Tronnes’ uncle and got into the sport because Tronnes talked him into it. They’ve advanced a bit since they started racing in his nephew’s driveway, he said. Racing mowers generally have between eight and 20 horse power and can top out at speeds close to 50 mph.

The blades are removed, of course, for safety reasons, but that didn’t keep Donna Helgeson of Iron (also related to Tronnes) from injuring herself in a race in Brainerd three years ago. Doctors had to put a plate in her shoulder after she hit a bail of hay and flipped her mower.

That didn’t end her racing career. She was in several races Sunday.

Cody Keller was one of several hundred people who dropped $5 to watch the races at the fair’s grandstands Sunday. The 17-year-old St. Peter resident is a car racing fan who was taking in his first lawn mower race. He admitted it had him thinking of ways to soup up his dad’s Snapper in the garage.

“It’s pretty exciting,” he said after watching the first two heats of racers zip around a dusty track. “I never knew a little mower could get up to 50 mph. It’s kind of cool to see what these guys can do with those little things.”

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