AMES—Have you raced over to Ames lately?
Off the beaten path and inside the old elementary school is Hajek Motorsports Museum. Parked within those walls are more racecars per capita than any other town in the world.
“It wasn’t supposed to be,” said owner Brent Hajek about his millions of dollars obsession with motorsports. “It’s a hobby gone mad.”
The Hennessey native began collecting vintage racecars in the late 1970s before others even thought to collect them.
“They were very cheap then,” Hajek said. He wanted to honor his racing heroes by preserving and/or replicating their cars.
Among the icons he admired was Goltry’s very own Wally Parks, who founded the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) as well as the motorsports magazine Hot Rod, for which he was also the first editor in 1948. In addition, Parks was instrumental in founding Motor Trend magazine.
According to Hajek, his granddad knew Parks when he lived in the area before Parks moved to California during the Dust Bowl era.
In honor of the father of drag racing, NHRA’s national event trophy is nicknamed the Wally, of which Hajek has been awarded at least 20.
He has been drag racing cars and trucks since he was a teenager growing up in Northwest Oklahoma. His 1963 Ford pickup, which he no longer owns unfortunately, was the first vehicle he raced in truck-pulling events.
Like many in the need for speed, Hajek has raced or had sponsored racing teams at the Bonneville Speedway at the Bonneville Salt Flats outside Wendover, Utah. This 30,000-acre span of salt flats is triple the size of the salt flats in Great Salt Plains State Park outside of Jet.
In October 2009, Hajek Motorsports propelled an E-85-powered Mustang to a land speed record at Bonneville into a record-breaking run of 255.764 mph with Danny Thompson, son of motorsport legend Mickey Thompson, behind the wheel.
The team shattered five speed records in seven days, including that experimental 2010 Ford Mustang that was built with soybean-based seats, paint, and body panels and run on the alternative soy fuel.
Over the past couple decades Hajek has been collaborating with Ford Motor Company to utilize soybeans, which he farms outside of Ames, in designing vehicles. His goal was to bridge the gap between biochemists and engineers.
“The third-generation farmer and the MIT engineer … we are so far apart that it worked,” Hajek jested. He added it’s mind-boggling how technology can make a car go so fast.
The chemists made a soy resin used in standard fiberglass molding and it worked, he said, making it as strong as fiberglass but lighter. Hajek’s team was the first to get that new Mustang with the soy-based body style.
“It’s worked out, this partnership,” he said. “Racing has paid for farming.”
He also worked closely with Monsanto, an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation that specialized in corn and soy and was the world’s largest seed company. Monsanto representatives approached him during Enid’s Agrifest farm show, “and next thing we know we’re doing national farm shows,” Hajek said.
He has even traveled to other countries to speak about biofuels at ag summits.
Hajek and his teams have journeyed to Bonneville “speed weeks” multiple times to watch and to compete with their other biofuel-powered vehicles, establishing several more land records too numerous to list here.
But perhaps one of the dragsters Hajek is most proud of are his 2008 Ford Cobra Jet Mustangs, which were the 40th anniversary car to the 1968 Cobra Jet Mustang. He purchased the first 11 off the Ford assembly line, and all are on display at the museum. Most of those Wallys he won happened between 2009 and 2011 with his Cobra Jets.
Hajek started out with 20 or so racecars and stored them in a garage on his farm.
Then Ames Public Schools closed and consolidated into the newly formed Cimarron Public Schools in the early 1990s. The small town tried to secure businesses to utilize the old school buildings but had no such luck until Hajek made a deal and bought them in 2000.
“This building was in bad shape,” he said, referring the elementary school, which was the last to be vacated in 1996. He overhauled it, removing the windows in the school library to accommodate an overhead door, and moved in the 35-40 racecars he had already acquired.
Today there are more than 50 vehicles in the barricaded elementary school, which is rated as a F3 storm shelter, and the other 30 split between the bus barn, the high school, a mechanic shop, or on loan to another museum in the U.S. such as Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Dearborn, Mich.
Also on display at Hajek Motorsports Museum are motorsport magazines such as Hot Rod, dating all the way back to 1948. Hajek and his wife, Rhonda, refer to the magazines when doing restoration of vehicles to ensure they are replicating as closely as possible.
“We have history on our side,” Hajek commented.
At present he owns a total of 86 dragsters, mostly cars but there are a few trucks including his record-breaking 2011 Ford F-250 Super Duty in the mix. Nearly all of the championship vehicles are in restored, track-ready condition.
Hajek is often called upon to showcase one or more cars at a NASCAR or NHRA event, which means extracting them from where they are carefully parked in the already packed museum.
“It’s like playing Jenga to move cars; it’s quite the challenge,” he said. But he’s happy to do so.
Two weeks ago, Hajek traveled to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Charlotte, N.C., to feature his 1969 Ford Torino Talladega built by Holman-Moody Racing and raced by David Pearson for that year’s NASCAR Championship. One of the NASCAR Class of 2025 Inductees was the late Ralph Moody who formed Holman-Moody Racing with John Holman in 1957.
“Displaying the actual cars our inductees, such as Moody, utilized brings their story to life for our guests,” said Kevin Schlesier, NASCAR Hall of Fame’s senior director of museum and industry affairs in a recent press release. “The Hall is grateful for the generosity of museums such as the Hajek Motorsports Museum—which has lent us several cars for multiple different exhibitions—for allowing us to borrow such priceless vehicles as the Torino.”
When Ford Motor Company celebrated its centennial in 2001, the company recognized the museum for having nine of the top 100 iconic racecars.
As a professed gearhead, Hajek participates in most anything involving motors. The museum hosts car club events, is a stop for poker runs and car cruises, and welcomes vo-tech mechanic classes for tours.
In the meantime, the man dubbed “the world’s fastest farmer” by OPTIMA Batteries also still farms, oversees tank trucks, produces oil and gas, films hot rod clips, and runs a hunting lodge on the Cimarron River near Okeene.
So how does he manage the museum along with all of his other duties?
“We’re never open but never closed,” Hajek said with a laugh. Visitors to the museum can only see the dragsters and all the racing memorabilia and uniforms by appointment. And visitors from around the globe, as far as away as New Zealand, have made their way to the tiny rural Oklahoma town of 200 to view anything and everything having to do with motorsports.
To plan a day trip to Hajek Motorsports Museum, 105 E. Corporate Dr., Ames, call (580) 753-4611. Follow them on Facebook or Instagram @HajekMotorsports.