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Get to Know:

Grant Landrum

Carpenter

Start Date: 2012

(Editor’s note: This original story ran on June 1, 2022. We decided to update it since Grant dominated the 2023 4×4 quad series, winning 7 of 10 races, to take the Midwest Cross Country Racing Overall Championship. Congrats, Grant!)

Grant Landrum grew up on a farm racing quads with his friends. He waited until he was 24, though, to enter his first sanctioned race.

The speed, adrenaline, and mud hooked him, and more races followed. The addiction of upgrading equipment also gave him plenty of options to eat up his paycheck, he joked.

It didn’t take him long to commit to racing the entire yearlong series, but the long season wore on him. “When you’re chasing points almost every weekend, though, it wears on you,” said Grant, who’s been with RLTurner for 10 years. “Wherever the event is and whatever the weather, you have to race.” The national series took him to Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and more. His first win on the national level, though, was right in his backyard.

At Crawfordsville, just a few miles from his house, he grabbed the top spot on the podium. He started fast and took the lead right away. After each lap, racers’ names and positions pop up along with the time gap between riders. “Since I was in first there wasn’t a time gap,” he said. “My sister was in my pits kept telling me I was in first, but what I needed her to tell me was how fast I needed to go or if I could ease up at all.”

As it turns out, it didn’t matter. He held onto first and brought home a plaque and a medal. “My plaque made it home, but my niece grabbed my medal and kept it,” Grant said. Since the race took place on Halloween weekend, she wore the medal as part of her costume as she trick-or-treated around the campground.

While that was his only national win, he’s accumulated a few plaques from winning local races. (He keeps them in a box rather than in a trophy room.)

Grant doesn’t run a full series anymore, but he competes in as many national races as he can. At this spring’s race in Crawfordsville, the course was extremely wet and muddy from the previous day’s rain. Despite the mud, he nailed the hole shot and led the first lap.

The sloppy track and stress of racing took their toll on his quad. On the second lap, Grant lost his brakes. “I pulled off the course when I knew they weren’t working rather than risk crashing,” Grant said. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

After Crawfordsville, he fixed his brakes and was off to another event two weeks later. Rather than race, though, he opted to volunteer and help the event’s officials. “It’s a good deal because I got free entry and food on a weekend that I’d typically be paying for everything,” Grant said. “I’m planning on doing a few more national events this year, and I’ll be back at Crawfordsville to race in October.”

If anyone is interested in seeing the Oct. 22-23 race, information can be found at: https://gnccracing.com/event/ironman.