The racing legend lost his life in an airplane crash near his home in Tennessee.
Scott Bloomquist, aged 60, has died after a small airplane crash near his home of Mooresburg, Tennessee. The accident happened around 7:15 AM EST on Friday, August 16. Bloomquist, the son of a pilot, collected vintage airplanes with his father. According to FloRacing, the collection was displayed during the Road to Eldora back in 2022.
It’s hard to memorialize a legend with mere words. You can call Scott Bloomquist the greatest late model dirt racer of all time, but simplifying his life to that singular statement would be doing a disservice to the man’s legacy. In his career, he won over 600 races, the 2004 World of Outlaws Dirt Late Model Championship, and the Eldora Dirt Late Model Dream eight times. His larger-than-life personality endeared him to legions of fans, and his life story – including brushes with the law and tales of alien abduction – is better than any Hollywood racing movie we’ve seen. Bloomquist told his story on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s podcast, the Dale Jr. Download, last year. We’re fortunate that we got to hear the story from the man himself just a year before his passing.
In the 1990s, he worked on self-improvement after those aforementioned legal troubles. He returned to the sport a changed man, removing his sponsor decals and racing in a simple black and white car. He changed his racing number to 0, with a yin yang symbol – later a skull and crossbones – in the center. With over a half dozen national touring series championships under his belt, it’s clear that his strategy worked. In 2018, he celebrated his 600th career victory at the Diamond Nationals in Wheatland, Missouri at at Lucas Oil Speedway.
In recent years, Bloomquist dealt with numerous health issues, including injuries related to a 2019 motorcycle crash, back problems, and a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2023. Prior to this racing season, Bloomquist had undergone shoulder surgery, and more recently dealt with complications from an insect bite that resulted in blood loss from a major artery. Regardless, Bloomquist worked through these issues to make it back to the race track. The final start of his career came on August 3rd, where he raced at the USA Nationals at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wisconsin.
Bloomquist leaves behind a daughter, Ariel Rouse Bloomquist.
May his memory be eternal.