USAC SPRINT WINNER, 4-TIME INDY STARTER, HULSE PASSES

Speedway, Indiana (July 14, 2020)………Chuck Hulse, a four-time Indianapolis 500 starter, 1959 CRA champion and one-time USAC National Sprint Car winner in 1963, passed away Monday, July 13.  He was 93 years old.

The 2012 National Sprint Car Hall of Fame inductee appeared in USAC’s Sprint Car standings each year between 1959-1964, finishing 24^th and 16^th in the 1959-60 Midwest Sprint seasons.  When USAC’s Midwest and Eastern Sprint Car divisions combined for a National trail in 1961, that’s where the South Gate, Calif. native began to hit his stride.

Prior to coming to USAC, his 1959 CRA season was one of dominance.  Driving the Morales Brothers’ famous Tamale Wagon, Hulse won 13 of the 43 races that year despite missing nearly the entire first quarter of the season.

Hulse finished inside the top-ten of the USAC National Sprint standings in 1961 (9^th), 1962 (8^th) and 1963 (4^th).  The 1963 season proved to be his most productive with the division, starting 18 races and earning his first and only career feature win with the series in August of that year at Ohio’s New Bremen Speedway aboard Clem TeBow’s No. 8.

New Bremen was the site of Hulse’s violent USAC Sprint car crash that cut his 1964 season short and put him on the sidelines for both the rest of 1964 as well as the entire 1965 campaign as he recovered from an eye injury.

Though he’d never return to a USAC Sprint Car lineup following 1964, he did return to USAC Championship Cars where he made a total of 60 starts between 1953 and 1968.  He finished as the runner-up at the Arizona State Fairgrounds in 1963 and the California State Fairgrounds in 1966.

Hulse made his four Indianapolis 500 starts between 1962 and 1967, starting 16^th and finishing 21^st in his Rookie year of 1962.  In 1963, he earned his first top-ten at Indy, moving from 11^th to 8^th.  In his return in 1966, he qualified a career best 8^th, but dropped back to 20^th.  He made his final start his best in 1967, starting 27^th and charging up to a 7^th place finish.