by Tyler Piester, Cronkite News
August 6, 2026
Cronkite News offers an audio version of this story using an automated voice created by AI. Errors in pronunciation, pacing and intonation may occur. If you notice an error please contact [email protected].
PHOENIX – Each year, spectators packed the grandstands for Buckeye’s demolition derby. During the intermission, however, the excitement would die down and fans would wander to the concession stands or head out to the parking lot and leave.
Mike Linderman, at the time a member of the Buckeye Chamber of Commerce, had an idea to alter that pattern.
“I had recently seen lawn mower racing in England,” Linderman said. “So I said we should try that.”
Lawn mower racing traces its roots to July 4, 1963, when residents of Twelve Mile, Indiana organized what is widely considered the first lawn mower race. The event became an annual tradition and the sport continued to grow.
In 1973, the British Lawn Mower Racing Association was founded in the United Kingdom.
Inspired by its success, Bruce Kaufman founded the United States Lawn Mower Racing Association in 1992 and local clubs began popping up around the country.
In the mid-1990s Linderman was able to convince a friend of his from the local fire district to race.
“He literally took the lawn mower he mowed his yard with, took the deck off, and brought it down with a good attitude,” Linderman said. “I had an old mower where all I’d done was change the sprockets to make it faster.”
The result was hilarious.
“I would make about two laps for every one of his, but the crowd loved it,” Linderman said. “That was the very first race.”
That race planted the seed for what became the Arizona Lawn Mower Racing Association, a club that transformed an unusual idea into one of the state’s most unique grassroots motorsports.
For former racer and Buckeye resident David Calvert, this was something he always wanted to try.
“When I was about 9 years old, I used to mow lawns up and down my street,” Calvert said. “I always dreamed about making a lawn mower go faster. Eventually I got to realize that dream.”
The club in Buckeye wasn’t the only one in the area.
“I didn’t realize it, but there was already a lawn mower racing club in Phoenix,” Calvert said. “They came to race against us and just blew our doors off. They were serious racers.”
The two clubs ended up joining forces, with Calvert eventually becoming the president of the new club.
“It was really grassroots racing,” Calvert said. “People would see it and think, ‘I can do that. I have a lawn mower in the backyard I can fix up.’”
Buckeye resident David Calvert drifts his racing mower while pointing to the camera during a race in Arizona. (Photo courtesy of David Calvert)
Unlike many forms of motorsport, lawn mower racing didn’t require deep pockets.
“It was cheap,” Calvert said. “You could get a free lawn mower just by asking around, or pick an old one up for 50 to 100 bucks.”
For fellow Buckeye native Marty Fauss, it wasn’t just the affordability that brought him in.
“My brother and my nephew built a mower, joined the club and began racing,” Fauss said. “After that, my son and I built a mower and started racing as well. It seemed like just a crazy idea and something I just had to get myself involved in.
“We called it ‘poor man’s NASCAR’, it looked so fun.”
A standard lawn mower can reach speeds of up to 3 to 6 miles per hour. To make mowers race- ready, drivers must make modifications.
“The main thing that we stressed was safety,” Calvert said. “You had to make the front axle solid so it wouldn’t pivot and improve the brakes by adding a disc brake because you were going much faster than the original brakes were designed for.”
Calvert said they also made the wise choice of removing the blades and adding a tethered kill switch. If the driver was thrown off the mower, it would shut itself off.
“To make them go faster, we would change the pulleys on the engine and transmission to get the transmission to spin faster,” Calvert said.
With modifications, racing lawn mowers could reach unbelievable speeds.
“My lawn mower was clocked at over 80 miles per hour,” Fauss said. “Which is kind of stupid when you think about it.”
Calvert said he was once clocked at 90 miles per hour. On average, the mowers stayed between 25 and 50 miles per hour.
Despite the safety modifications, racers understood the risks every time they climbed aboard.
“We didn’t have a roll cage or racing harnesses,” Linderman said. “We were sitting on a lawn mower going somewhere between 25 and 50 miles an hour inside a rodeo arena. If you lost control, you were going to hit the bucking chutes.”
Linderman said the worst scar he ever got was from a lawn mower racing accident.
“I got thrown off the mower and burned my shin on the exhaust system. I’ve still got the scar today,” he said. “The biggest tragedy for me was that I was supposed to go deer hunting a few days later. It made getting around pretty difficult, but I went anyway.”
The club initially began racing during the intermission of the demolition derby in Buckeye, where the event became known as “How the West was Mowed.” As the sport grew in popularity, they began racing in Apache Junction, Queen Creek, Tucson, Show Low and the Maricopa County Fair before traveling to California and New Mexico for a few events.
The club even made it to the big screen.
“Our whole club went to California to participate in the filming of an episode of the CBS sitcom ‘Yes, Dear’,” Calvert said. “They paid us stuntman wages to race and help promote the show, it was a lot of fun. (Professional stock car racer) Greg Biffle actually drove one of our mowers, which was a huge deal for us.”
The racing was only one aspect of what made the club great.
“The whole experience was really great because if you broke down, everyone pitched in to help,” Calvert said. “If you needed a part, a belt or another hand, everyone was pulling for you. It was a very family-oriented atmosphere.”
Parents even raced with their children. Calvert’s daughter began racing at 14.
“By the time she was 16, I joked that it was basically her driver’s ed training,” he said.
Fauss remembers another father-and-daughter duo competing together.
“During one of her first races we told her to just stay behind her dad and follow him,” he chuckled. “Well he ran into a wall and she followed him right into it.”
The fun happened off the track as well.
“I built a five-seat limousine out of three lawn mowers,” Calvert said. “We even mounted a barbeque on the front of it because we’d always tailgate at our races.”
Calvert believes that the races eventually became bigger than their original purpose.
“We started out as halftime entertainment,” he said. “Toward the end, it became more of a lawn mower race with a demolition derby tacked on because it became so popular.”
Fauss never imagined it would reach the popularity it did.
“I thought it was just kind of a redneck thing that we did here in Buckeye,” Fauss said with a laugh.
Eventually, the racing slowed down.
“There were always plenty of people interested in racing,” Fauss said. “But it was difficult to get people committed to leadership roles.”
As racers got older, many retired and the association in Buckeye gradually faded away around 2020.
“I retired because I was getting to be about 58 or 59 years old, and I’d been in a couple of crashes,” Fauss said. “I figured I was getting too old to be thrown off a lawn mower.”
Buckeye resident Marty Fauss celebrates victory by waving the checkered flag after a 2013 race in Arizona. (Photo courtesy of Marty Fauss)
In 2018, Linderman was awarded a plaque with a chrome wheel on it by the chamber of commerce. It reads, “Mike Linderman, the Grandfather of Lawn Mower Racing in Buckeye.”
Today, lawn mower racing in Arizona exists only in small pockets, with racers such as Dale Letcher continuing the tradition in Show Low. For the people who helped build the sport, the memories have outlasted the roar of the engines.
“We just enjoyed racing and being with all our friends and family,” Fauss said. “We didn’t care if anyone was watching us or not.”
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Arizona racers proved lawn mowers could do more than cut grass
Tyler Piester, Cronkite News
August 6, 2026
Cronkite News offers an audio version of this story using an automated voice created by AI. Errors in pronunciation, pacing and intonation may occur. If you notice an error please contact [email protected] – Each year, spectators packed the grandstands for Buckeye’s demolition derby. During the intermission, however, the excitement would die down and fans would wander to the concession stands or head out to the parking lot and leave.
Mike Linderman, at the time a member of the Buckeye Chamber of Commerce, had an idea to alter that pattern.
“I had recently seen lawn mower racing in England,” Linderman said. “So I said we should try that.”
Lawn mower racing traces its roots to July 4, 1963, when residents of Twelve Mile, Indiana organized what is widely considered the first lawn mower race. The event became an annual tradition and the sport continued to grow.
In 1973, the British Lawn Mower Racing Association was founded in the United Kingdom.
Inspired by its success, Bruce Kaufman founded the United States Lawn Mower Racing Association in 1992 and local clubs began popping up around the country.
In the mid-1990s Linderman was able to convince a friend of his from the local fire district to race.
“He literally took the lawn mower he mowed his yard with, took the deck off, and brought it down with a good attitude,” Linderman said. “I had an old mower where all I’d done was change the sprockets to make it faster.”
The result was hilarious.
“I would make about two laps for every one of his, but the crowd loved it,” Linderman said. “That was the very first race.”
That race planted the seed for what became the Arizona Lawn Mower Racing Association, a club that transformed an unusual idea into one of the state’s most unique grassroots motorsports.
For former racer and Buckeye resident David Calvert, this was something he always wanted to try.
“When I was about 9 years old, I used to mow lawns up and down my street,” Calvert said. “I always dreamed about making a lawn mower go faster. Eventually I got to realize that dream.”
The club in Buckeye wasn’t the only one in the area.
“I didn’t realize it, but there was already a lawn mower racing club in Phoenix,” Calvert said. “They came to race against us and just blew our doors off. They were serious racers.”
The two clubs ended up joining forces, with Calvert eventually becoming the president of the new club.
“It was really grassroots racing,” Calvert said. “People would see it and think, ‘I can do that. I have a lawn mower in the backyard I can fix up.’”
Unlike many forms of motorsport, lawn mower racing didn’t require deep pockets.
“It was cheap,” Calvert said. “You could get a free lawn mower just by asking around, or pick an old one up for 50 to 100 bucks.”
For fellow Buckeye native Marty Fauss, it wasn’t just the affordability that brought him in.
“My brother and my nephew built a mower, joined the club and began racing,” Fauss said. “After that, my son and I built a mower and started racing as well. It seemed like just a crazy idea and something I just had to get myself involved in.
“We called it ‘poor man’s NASCAR’, it looked so fun.”
A standard lawn mower can reach speeds of up to 3 to 6 miles per hour. To make mowers race- ready, drivers must make modifications.
“The main thing that we stressed was safety,” Calvert said. “You had to make the front axle solid so it wouldn’t pivot and improve the brakes by adding a disc brake because you were going much faster than the original brakes were designed for.”
Calvert said they also made the wise choice of removing the blades and adding a tethered kill switch. If the driver was thrown off the mower, it would shut itself off.
“To make them go faster, we would change the pulleys on the engine and transmission to get the transmission to spin faster,” Calvert said.
With modifications, racing lawn mowers could reach unbelievable speeds.
“My lawn mower was clocked at over 80 miles per hour,” Fauss said. “Which is kind of stupid when you think about it.”
Calvert said he was once clocked at 90 miles per hour. On average, the mowers stayed between 25 and 50 miles per hour.
Despite the safety modifications, racers understood the risks every time they climbed aboard.
“We didn’t have a roll cage or racing harnesses,” Linderman said. “We were sitting on a lawn mower going somewhere between 25 and 50 miles an hour inside a rodeo arena. If you lost control, you were going to hit the bucking chutes.”
Linderman said the worst scar he ever got was from a lawn mower racing accident.
“I got thrown off the mower and burned my shin on the exhaust system. I’ve still got the scar today,” he said. “The biggest tragedy for me was that I was supposed to go deer hunting a few days later. It made getting around pretty difficult, but I went anyway.”
The club initially began racing during the intermission of the demolition derby in Buckeye, where the event became known as “How the West was Mowed.” As the sport grew in popularity, they began racing in Apache Junction, Queen Creek, Tucson, Show Low and the Maricopa County Fair before traveling to California and New Mexico for a few events.
The club even made it to the big screen.
“Our whole club went to California to participate in the filming of an episode of the CBS sitcom ‘Yes, Dear’,” Calvert said. “They paid us stuntman wages to race and help promote the show, it was a lot of fun. (Professional stock car racer) Greg Biffle actually drove one of our mowers, which was a huge deal for us.”
The racing was only one aspect of what made the club great.
“The whole experience was really great because if you broke down, everyone pitched in to help,” Calvert said. “If you needed a part, a belt or another hand, everyone was pulling for you. It was a very family-oriented atmosphere.”
Parents even raced with their children. Calvert’s daughter began racing at 14.
“By the time she was 16, I joked that it was basically her driver’s ed training,” he said.
Fauss remembers another father-and-daughter duo competing together.
“During one of her first races we told her to just stay behind her dad and follow him,” he chuckled. “Well he ran into a wall and she followed him right into it.”
The fun happened off the track as well.
“I built a five-seat limousine out of three lawn mowers,” Calvert said. “We even mounted a barbeque on the front of it because we’d always tailgate at our races.”
Calvert believes that the races eventually became bigger than their original purpose.
“We started out as halftime entertainment,” he said. “Toward the end, it became more of a lawn mower race with a demolition derby tacked on because it became so popular.”
Fauss never imagined it would reach the popularity it did.
“I thought it was just kind of a redneck thing that we did here in Buckeye,” Fauss said with a laugh.
Eventually, the racing slowed down.
“There were always plenty of people interested in racing,” Fauss said. “But it was difficult to get people committed to leadership roles.”
As racers got older, many retired and the association in Buckeye gradually faded away around 2020.
“I retired because I was getting to be about 58 or 59 years old, and I’d been in a couple of crashes,” Fauss said. “I figured I was getting too old to be thrown off a lawn mower.”
In 2018, Linderman was awarded a plaque with a chrome wheel on it by the chamber of commerce. It reads, “Mike Linderman, the Grandfather of Lawn Mower Racing in Buckeye.”
Today, lawn mower racing in Arizona exists only in small pockets, with racers such as Dale Letcher continuing the tradition in Show Low. For the people who helped build the sport, the memories have outlasted the roar of the engines.
“We just enjoyed racing and being with all our friends and family,” Fauss said. “We didn’t care if anyone was watching us or not.”
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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