a shock to catch up with Steveo again, at
Reno, and find myself looking up at a lanky
young man who now speaks in a deep voice
and towers over me. It’s hard to believe it’s
the same kid I used to babysit and go 15
rounds with over getting dressed for preschool in the morning. But the freckles and
grin are still there, as is the quiet, serious,
take-it-all-in-and-think-about-it personality I
remember from those early days.
Talking with Steveo about his flying and
racing career, it also becomes clear that his
path and his victories (he won Reno again in
2010) were far from preordained or a matter
of simply stepping into his father’s shoes. In
fact, when Steven talks about his flying
experiences, his father’s name comes up
only rarely.
“I didn’t fly with my dad that much,
growing up,” Steven says with a shrug. “He
was gone and busy a lot. And the advice he
gives me is pretty minimal. If I ask him,
‘How did you fly the race course,’ he says,
‘Oh, it’s been so long, I don’t remember.’”
“I didn’t want to influence him,” Steven’s
dad explains. “[When it comes to flying] you
have to want to do it. And sometimes I’d
actually make things more difficult for him
because I think it means more if you have to
work for something.”
That’s not to say that Steven didn’t bene-
fit from his family’s immersion in aviation.
He learned to fly in a Luscombe owned by
his father. And as he accumulated flying
hours, he was able to gain additional experi-
ence in a Stinson L- 5, a Stearman, and a T- 6
owned by the museum, as well as, eventually,
his father’s stock P- 51 Mustang. Steven also
benefitted from the widespread network of
pilots and friends who were associated in
one way or another with either Chino
Airport or the Air Museum. Nobody handed
him anything, but he had no shortage of
pilots who were willing to take him flying or
trade him some flying time in their airplanes
in exchange for work around their hangars.
“When people ask, ‘Why don’t more
young people do what you’ve done or get
involved in aviation?’ I say, ‘Well, a lot of it
depends on the older generation,’” Steven
says. “Because I had a lot of people who
helped me and gave me opportunities. Jeff
Pearson [a pilot at Chino] told me if I’d strip
the landing gear on his [Cessna] 195, he’d
give me five hours’ flying time in it. Mike
Steven fell in love with the race plane Strega in 2002. It’s a dream come true for him to race the highly modified P- 51 today.
Nixon [an engine builder in Los Angeles]
offered me an internship in his shop one
summer. It would have been very difficult to
do what I’ve done without all that help.”
“It would have been
very difficult to do
what I’ve done without
all that help.”
All that is true. The other half of the
equation, however, is that Steven Hinton has
also worked very, very hard to get where he
is today.
When Steven told his dad about his new-
found love of Strega and his dream of
somehow being involved with the race team,
his dad shrugged and told him to give the
plane’s owner a call. It took two years before
Steven felt brave enough to introduce himself
to Strega’s owner—six-time National
Champion Bill “Tiger” Destefani. Tiger
makes his living as a cotton and alfalfa farmer
in Bakersfield, California, a couple of hours
north of Chino. So Steven asked Tiger if he
could come up and look at the plane some-
time. Tiger said, “Sure, just give me a call.”
Steven says he sat in front of the phone
for a full half-hour, trying to figure out what
to say, before he finally screwed up the cour-
age to make the call. In fact, Steven says he
was more nervous about making that call
than he was at the start of his first air race,
four years later.
