Steele won three Tampa Bay Area Racing Association (TBARA) championships. Between 1996 and 2007 he claimed sixty wins in USAC competition: 26 in sprint cars, 18 in midgets, and 16 in Silver Crown races.
Steele claimed the USAC Silver Crown Series championship in 2004 and 2005, placing him in the company of past champions including Mario Andretti, A. J. Foyt, Al Unser, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart.
He won the Turkey Night Grand Prix midget car race in 2001 and 2003. He was a two-time winner of the Little 500, held annually at Anderson Speedway, making 16 starts in that race with five pole positions and ten top-five finishes. Steele won the Copper Classic at Phoenix International Raceway eight times — five times in the Silver Crown portion and three times in the Midget race. In 1998, he won the Night Before the 500. He won the first five races in the history of the Southern Sprintcar Shootout Series, which was his last series before his death.
Steele attempted his Indy Racing League debut in 1996 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for ABF Motorsports but failed to qualify. He made his first start in 1998 at Phoenix International Raceway driving for RSM Marko, then drove the final two races of the year for Panther Racing. He failed to finish all three races. He was entered in a Panther car for the 1999 Indianapolis 500 but crashed in practice.
Steele drove in the first two races of the 2000 NASCAR Busch Series for Felix Sabates, recording finishes of 23rd and 34th before failing to qualify for the next three races. He also competed in four ARCA Racing Series races in 1999 and 2000, and two Infiniti Pro Series races in 2002 and 2003. In 2002, he raced for Bowes Seal Fast Racing at Michigan, finishing eighth in the Infiniti Pro Series.
Steele was killed on March 25, 2017, during a Southern Sprintcar Shootout Series race at Desoto Speedway in Bradenton, Florida. His car's front wheel struck and overrode the rear wheel of another car during the event, sending him into the wall; he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Carb Night Classic at Lucas Oil Raceway, starting in 2018, was renamed the Dave Steele Classic in his honour. He was elected to the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 2018 under the six-month rule, and to the United States Auto Club Hall of Fame in 2019.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.