Rick Huseman

Huseman racing at the 2010 World Championships at Crandon International Off-Road Raceway.

Prior to racing, Huseman worked along with his father at a Ford dealer in Riverside, California.[2] Huseman attended a 1996 SODA race at Glen Helen Raceway after being a sand dune enthusiast in motorcycles with his brother Danny.[3] The brothers built a Class 7s Pro Light truck for 1997, racing in desert races along with Glen Helen.[3] They attended the Off-Road World Championship races at the Crandon International Off-Road Raceway in 1999 and decided to build a PRO Lite chassis to race in Championship Off-Road Racing (CORR).[3] Huseman competed for the 2000 CORR season championship finishing ninth of the fifteen drivers.[3] In 2001 he battled Jeff Kincaid for the championship. Kincaid won four races to Huseman's five but Kincaid won the championship by seven points.[3] It was the first of Huseman's four consecutive second-place finishes in the points.[3]

Huseman moved to Pro 4 trucks in 2005 when he bought a four-year-old truck from Johnny Greaves.[4][5] In his first season, he had two podium finishes and finished seventh in the points standings.[6] His team built a new truck for 2006.[5] He won his first Pro 4 race in the following year at Antelope Valley Fairgrounds.[4][5] He finished sixth in season points with six finishes in the top five.[5] In 2008, Huseman was tied for the points lead when CORR closed near the end of the schedule; he was awarded second place on a tie breaker.[6] Huseman had two wins and Carl Renezeder had four.[5]

Huseman celebrating his 2011 Pro 4 World Championship race win at Crandon

Huseman joined the Traxxas TORC Series (TORC) in 2009 and he took on sponsorship by the series' title sponsor.[6] He won five of the first six races that year, finishing the season with six wins and seven pole positions, and won the series' inaugural championship.[7] Drivers in the series voted him the 2009 TORC Driver of the Year.[7]

In the following year he competed in TORC and LOORS. He won 10 of 15 LOORRS events in 2010 which set a short course off-road racing record.[7] He had 13 podium finishes with two 2nd-place finishes and one 3rd.[5] Huseman was named the 2010 Driver of the Year by DirtSports Magazine.[8] He finished second by three points in the TORC season standings.[7] In that series he won five races, three 2nd places finishes and one 3rd.[5] In 2011, Huseman decided to run in just the 2011 LOORS series.[5] After winning the first four races, he added two more wins in rounds 9 and 10.[5] These wins gave him 50 career victories.[5] He was second in the 2011 LOORRS points when he died.[7]

On October 16, 2011, Huseman and his brother Jeff were traveling home to California from a race in Las Vegas, Nevada when the small Beechcraft 33 Bonanza airplane began having engine trouble.[4] Huseman had called his mother on his cell phone to tell her about the trouble.[8] The aircraft crashed as pilot Daniel Hicks was attempting to make an emergency landing at the Barstow-Daggett Airport in the Mojave Desert and left Huseman and two other passengers dead.[8]

Huseman's brother and chief mechanic Kevin Huseman did a ceremonial full-speed lap with his truck before the start of the following race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.[1] His truck number 36 has been retired by LOORRS in the Pro 4 class.[1]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rick Huseman.

• Official website

Date of plane crash is 10/16/2011 per NTSB records not 10/14/2011