Part I

Like many other American success stories, the Wahl Brothers' didn't begin in America. In fact, the Wahl Brothers story starts in Scandinavia - early in the 1900's.

Iver Hansen came over from Norway. He made his first stop a short one near the modern day Hayward Wisconsin. He then moved on to the north and to the west, settling near the farming community of Greenbush, Minnesota. Grandpa Hansen quickly found out that Northern Minnesota had a few too many Hansen's, so he changed his name to Wahl. The name is a reflection of the area of Norway Iver came from.

The newly named Mr. Wahl married and had a son named Erling. Erling married a local girl named Helen. Together as the second generation Wahl family, Erling and Helen settled into Greenbush and raised their family.

The farm was 320 acres and they raised mostly wheat and oats, as well as taking care of dairy cattle. Like so many other families in that area, their main "crop" and the endeavor they most enjoyed was their children.

Together, Erling and Helen had 5 children - 4 boys and one girl. In order, they are Doug, Dennis, Durmont, Debby, and Dave.

The kids grew up doing farm work, but none of them really liked it, nor did they feel they were cut out to always do such work. Their nature, they discovered, was to be welders and mechanics, which they liked - a lot.

Dad was into welding and shop work, often staying up late after all the farm chores were done to tinker into the wee hours of the morning. He didn't have a garage to work in, so the chicken coupe was converted in to shop. It's in this chicken coupe that the Wahl family history begins to mold itself into the story of Wahl Brothers Racing. It's also where the story becomes a bit more like your typical American success story.

In the chicken coupe, the Wahl brothers found the equivalent of one of the greatest of the American institutes of higher learning: the garage.

The American garage - free of deadlines and corporate Bureaucracy, but filled with the capacity to learn through experimentation, trial and error. The Wahl Brothers "garage" had a distinct advantage over many others in the form of constant encouragement from family members, and a true passion for making things work.

The boys joined dad in the late night chicken coupe experiments building all kinds of motorized inventions. Dad and Dennis built sno-planes - made from scratch with oak skis. They bent the oak with steam and added steel reinforcements. The sno-planes had plywood bodies, and they powered them with whatever they could find to make more power. They started with Volkswagen engines and eventually built some with airplane engines.

Besides the farming and constant tinkering in the chicken coupe, brother Doug worked construction. Durmont worked for different farmers all over the area and sometimes outside the area as well.

There was one other big influence in those early days of the Wahl Brothers: Very close proximity to the Arctic Cat company in Thief River Falls and Polaris up in Roseau. Like so many others in the area, the Wahl's lives were directly affected by the presence of these two companies.

Durmont and Dennis got their early start on being inside the snowmobile industry when they began working for Martin Johnson, a local subcontractor who was welding up suspensions for Polaris In the mid 1960's.

It was Durmont and Dennis that first discovered the Wahl Brothers need for winter speed on snowmobiles. Both had Sno*Jet's, which they raced in every town the could, summer and winter. In the garage, Durmont and Dennis were free to dream up anything they could to make the blue racers go faster. Innovation came easy to them. They mounted carburetors on the crank cases, oxygen tanks on the handlebars. Whatever they thought of, they tried. Some things worked, some things did not. But they learned with every flip of a wrench and with every bead of weld.

Their big break with snowmobile racing first came with the inception of "big time" racing at Arctic Cat in about 1970. None other then the great Davie Thompson of Team Arctic called and asked if Durmont would come work in the Arctic Race department. Of course, Durmont jumped at the chance.

Durmont's primarily role at Cat during the early years was engines and chassis. Cousin Del was brought on at Cat to drive the Cat Support trailer with another Arctic Cat legend - Charlie Lofton. Durmont would stay with the original Team Arctic all the way until they went out of business (temporarily) in August of 1981.

Part II