In every day adult life it’s hard to have a truly perfect week. It’s even hard to have a perfect day. Most of your day or week can be going great, but there’s so many variables in life that can keep it from being truly perfect. For Eric Goodale, this last week was as close to perfect as it could possibly get.

Goodale scored a big win in Friday’s Open Modified 80-lap feature at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway just two nights before Father’s Day, but he’d already gotten his Father’s Day gift a few days early when his oldest son, eight-year-old Mason, picked up his very first race win in a Bandolero at Riverhead Raceway.

When the elder Goodale climbed from his race car at Stafford on Friday, he said that Mason’s win gave him the inspiration that he needed to get back into victory lane for the first time since last October.

“I’m proud of myself because I am not the only one in my family holding a trophy this week. My son won earlier this week and he was putting me to shame,” Goodale said on Stafford’s FloRacing broadcast. “To my son Mason, thank you. You gave me what I needed to get here today.”

Watch: Eric Goodale Claims Open Modified 80 Win At Stafford

Goodale told FloRacing on Monday that watching Mason’s win was the “most gut-wrenching experience I’ve watched in some time,” and that as special as his win was, it didn’t compare to watching Mason win.

“My win was cool because I owed a couple to my guys,” explained Goodale. “We’ve been so strong in some places, and I feel like we’ve given up some really good finishes that we should have had. But it honestly didn’t compare to watching my eight-year-old wheel it to the win in the Bandos at Riverhead. When it’s your kid you want him to do so good. To watch him go out there and do better than everybody else that’s out there on the track was pretty freaking awesome to watch.”

He explained that Mason had been quick to throw some trash talk Dad’s way, but when Goodale got home from Stafford late Friday night his son was the first person to see him and congratulate him.

“He was certainly very happy. He stays up and watches every lap of every race that I ever compete in. It was cool because when I came home he heard the door open and he was the first one to come see me. He was excited and he wants nothing but the best for me when I go and race. To both be able to win in the same week was pretty awesome. I hope it happens again, but if it doesn’t, then at least we got to share this week and it was awesome to do.”

When you speak with Goodale, or watch his Instagram stories, it quickly becomes obvious just how much he loves being a father to Mason and his youngest son, Wyatt. In the summertime, they’re always going down the custom waterslide that Goodale built, or riding quads, or playing sports. You can frequently find the Goodales at an ice rink, baseball field, or football field.

“I love watching all their sports,” Goodale said. “Probably hockey I love watching the most because I don’t coach it and I’m hands-off. I get to drop them off and just watch Mason and Wyatt do their thing. I just get to reap the benefit of watching them. The racing, between me and Mike Curtis we do all the work on the thing. Mason is always out there picking our brain or telling us what he wants us to do and we laugh. 

“We have a good time. Everybody was giving us a hard time saying, ‘Oh Mason is going to have more hardware this year than you’re going to have,’ and that could probably be. He’s got way less chances than me, but he’s a very determined young man. When he puts his mind to something, he’s very smart and picks things up very quickly. He’s got excellent hand-eye coordination. Better than I’ve ever had in my life. I just see it in all his sports.”

Between racing, football, baseball, hockey, fishing, and all of the other activities, Goodale said his Father’s Day weekend was just like every other day of the year. But, his win on Friday was more special to him as a son than as a father.

“To have my mom and dad at the track when I won was pretty awesome,” he said. “What I am doing with Mason is what my dad did with me when I started in go-karts, I was just much older than Mason. It was pretty cool to be able to be with him in victory lane on Father’s Day weekend.”

When the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour went to Lee USA Speedway on Memorial Day Weekend, Goodale’s No. 58 machine was missing from the pit area. It was the first time in 14 years that Goodale missed a Tour race. He was absent again at Seekonk Speedway. 

It was a decision that Goodale made to spend more time at home with his wife, Amanda, and the kids. It was a decision that to an outside observer might have looked like an easy one because of how much fun he has with his family, but in reality it was a decision that was far from easy to make.

“I love racing. I love racing with all my heart,” said Goodale. “It’s something I look forward to doing all of the time. Not going to the last two races was really hard not to go. But I will tell you that those mornings when I woke up when we would have been traveling and spending it with my kids and my wife instead, we just had awesome days. It was certainly hard and I hated to do it. But at the same time I loved to do it because it gave me a lot more time with my kids and my family and it certainly paid dividends.”

Goodale said he expects to miss a total of five Tour races this season, but he’s back on the entry list for this weekend’s race at his home track of Riverhead Raceway, the site of his very first NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour victory back in 2014. He doesn’t expect to miss another race until the end of August.

“We have a pretty packed up schedule with the Tour and at Stafford with the GAF race at Stafford on July 7, so I’ll definitely be at the race track a bunch from now to the end of the year.”

Which is definitely good, because more races means more chances to win, and more wins means better odds of reclaiming the top spot on his son’s list of favorite drivers. There’s been a running joke between Goodale and his fellow drivers that he’s not his son’s favorite driver, but instead they’re fans of six-time champion Doug Coby, and current NASCAR Cup Series driver, Ryan Preece.

“I will say that I feel like I’ve overcome some of the Doug Coby controversy,” Goodale said with a laugh. “But Ryan Preece is hard to top. We try to watch every Cup race. We stay up to date with it because we love watching him race. Ryan Preece is somebody that between me, my wife, my kids, my parents, we all root for. It’s something we all have in common. I drive that bus a little bit because I love to root for him. They get to watch him on national TV and we went and saw him at the Daytona 500 this year. I feel like I have to win a lot more races to get into Ryan’s realm of their favorite driver. But obviously I am their dad, so that carries a lot of weight too.”