Ty Fredrickson scored the signature victory of his young career Sunday and made quite the statement along the way.
The 17-year-old second generation ASA Midwest Tour driver held off five-time Oktoberfest 200 winner Ty Majeski on four restarts to take the main event of the Oktoberfest weekend extravaganza at the La Crosse Fairgrounds Speedway, the season finale for the Midwest Tour.
“It’s everything,” Fredrickson said. “To beat the 91, to win the 200 here, La Crosse has so much history.
“I’ve lost this race two times. In 2024 I made a mistake, got sent to the back, and then last year I was in the exact same position. So I can always find myself in position to win this race, but today nothing went wrong and all the cards played right for me.”
Fredrickson led the final 82 laps and 117 in all, survived four restarts while leading and finally pulled away from the five-time Oktoberfest winner Majeski by 3.676 seconds at the checkered flag. Justin Mondeik was third, Jacob Goede fourth and Casey Johnson fifth.
“My car drove through the center better than the past couple years, which is was a little bit of our weakness and I thought my car was really pretty good,” said Majeski, who gave up some drive off the corners in the compromise. He regained the lead briefly after one of the restarts, but it was short-lived.
“If (Fredrickson) wasn’t in the field. I would have been able to manage it better and it would have been fine, but he was just so good today that it forced me to push him, and hope that his car went before mine. It wasn’t quite good enough today.”
Although the restarts were pesky, Fredrickson stayed calm.
“We got that green-flag run there at the end, that short one (24 laps), and I just kept looking at my mirror to see where he was,” Fredrickson said. “He just got a little smaller each time.”
Fredrickson’s father, Dan, a four-time Oktoberfest winner, was choked with emotion as he talked about the race. He won Oktoberfest four times as a driver and was the 2013 Midwest Tour champion.
The Minnesota duo became only the second father-son winners of the event in its 57 years, following Tom and Bryan Reffner.
“It’s always been my favorite race and probably where I’ve had the most success,” the elder Fredrickson said. “Ty Majeski is probably the best at this, and we just whooped his ass., th
“My son worked so hard to get an opportunity just to get to the next level. My family, myself, have given everything we could … and to beat Majeski handily, it means the world because it just proves that my son deserves an amazing opportunity in the upper ranks.”
The race ran clean for nearly the first one-third on the five-eighths-mile track but ultimately had seven cautions. One resulted in a red flag just past the midpoint after Ryan Farrell, who was attempting to gather up his car after.a slide in Turn four, got tangled with Luke Fenhaus and then collected Levon Van Der Geest.
The series was slow in calculating points, a process complicated when Penn Sauter, who came into the weekend with the lead, had his qualifying time disallowed for his car being too light.
But Johnson’s fifth-place finish was enough to earn him a second straight title and fifth overall.
The 2026 season was special to Johnson because it marked a complete and successful return from concussion systems that had dogged him for years.
Although 2027 was one of his best seasons overall — including a victory in the Slinger Nationals in July — Johnson went 0 for 8 on the Midwest Tour.
“I’m not sure I love that, but I’m so glad we got the championship,” Johnson said.
“Last year, we won the first three out of the gate. It’s just been one of them years. We were on second or third in almost every one of them that we finished.”
