DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript

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It crashed, but people weren't mean! Plus, it all starts tonight... | Daily 2-12-2024

High Limit's 2024 campaign starts tonight, and we'll talk about who's racing, who could win, and why this will be very different than what we saw in 2023. Plus Flo crashes and doesn't take an absolute beating for it, racing tonight at Volusia, and an update on Lawrenceburg Speedway. Let's go!

It's Monday, February 12th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily.

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The first big time season of High Limit sprint car racing begins tonight at East Bay. A field of 50ish cars is expected, and teams are already at the race track as I write today's show. Photographer Dan McFarland was posting some images of the track this morning to Twitter, and the High Limit signage has replaced the Lucas banners from the past week. Haulers are already in and some teams have begun maintenance to get cars ready for tonight. There is some weather in the area for later this evening, so tonight's break after qualifying for the fan fest has already been scrapped, and the series will be in hurry up mode to try and get action complete. Besides the High Limit sprint cars, mod lites are also on tonight's card. If tonight does get rained out, I do not know what the plan is for any sort of makeup or rain date. East Bay has a pretty packed schedule for WinterNationals all week, so I don't know if they could reschedule or not. Hopefully that won't be needed though. Tonight's field includes the 17 full time teams, including Dominic Scelzi subbing for James McFadden. There are also a ton of travelers, and plenty of names we didn't see at Volusia. I was actually surprised how many midwest teams have made the trip, including a bunch of guys from places like Huset's. I had Shawn Neisteadt in my head reading names like Christopher Thram, Gage Pulkrabek, and Riley Goodno on the pre-entry list. Quick sidenote here, I'm glad to see this pre-entry list continue to be shared as High Limit transitions from midweek to national tour. This is something I'd like to see the Outlaws do as well, is share as early as possible who will be at the track for each event. If you're looking for a win pick tonight, I'd say Brad Sweet, Kyle Larson, and Tyler Courtney will be the three to watch. Sunshine won three of the last four All Star races at East Bay, Larson was a winner there in 2020, and Brad Sweet ran second to Aaron Reutzel when the Outlaws went to East Bay in 2021. Reutzel has won there as well obvioiusly, but those victories came with other car owners, and we haven't seen A-Aron be quite at the same level as of late. This will be the first run for this new High Limit, with a lot of new people in new spots around the track. We'll have completely different officials, broadcast folks, and more, so these High Limit shows will look and feel very different to those we had a year ago when it was just an 11 race midweek series. As we did with High Limit going back to their inception, we'll continue to track their race results and stats in the database over at dirtrackr.com/analytics. So we'll continue to be able to dive deep on the numbers as the season gets rolling. Keep that in mind if you are doing race picks and fantasy selections. Obviously if you can't be at East Bay tonight, the racing can be watched live on FloRacing.

Speaking of Flo, I did want to double back to their outage over the weekend. Back on Friday, they had some sort of platform issue that caused a bunch of people to have issues watching any programming across FloSports, and not just FloRacing. They ended up moving a bunch of the streams over to YouTube for free until everything was resolved. I just wanted to point out how far the streamers have come. In the past, an outage like this would have turned into a social media rage fest, and I know, because I was on the nasty end of that rage when issues used to pop up with DIRTVision. But the responses to this weekend's Flo issues were actually pretty nice from people, a lot of understanding. And that's really the case because stream and platform issues have been reduced in a big way by all of the investments made by the big players as this area has continued to grow. Better systems and more redunancies have been built in to help avoid these cases as much as possible, and they have become a much rarer occasion. It also helps too that platforms can flip a switch and co-stream to places like YouTube when there are issues, so fans can keep watching along as problems are worked out. Interesting to see how far things have come in just a few short years.

At Volusia tonight, DIRTcar Nationals continues after the facility was quiet on Sunday. The winged sprint cars and modifieds are gone, and late models and non-wing cars are in action today. These next three nights of late model action are DIRTcar sanctioned, and not for Outlaw points. It's possible you could see some guys mix and match these early DCN nights to give their teams and equipment a night or two off. As for the sprint cars, USAC moves over to Volusia after spending Friday and Saturday at Ocala. They'll race the next two nights, and unlike 2023, these are full points, regular national events for the USAC sprint car teams. The USAC programs will be available to watch on both FloRacing and DIRTVision as well. Justin Grant won both shows at Ocala and he leads the early USAC championship standings over Logan Seavey and CJ Leary. Going back to last season, Daison Pursley and Jake Swanson split the USAC nights at Volusia, but interestingly, both are driving for different teams this season. Weather seems to be a bit less of a factor, with Volusia in a different part of the state versus East Bay, so hopefully no issues tonight. We'll have cars on track tonight around 5:30PM eastern.

Finally today, I wanted to give an update on how things are going at Lawrenceburg Speedway. The track has undergone a shift to new promoters, and there have been plenty of questions about the status of progress. We know that the facility will host multiple USAC events in 2024, along with weekly racing, several late model shows, and High Limit on May 31st. In recent days, the new promoters have been able to get out and work on the facility and the track surface, and some images and video have been shared to social media of the progress. They have actually been working to remove some of the banking from the track, with estimates that it's gone from well over 20 degrees, down to 14 degrees. That should definitely make for some different racing then we've seen there in the past. At the moment, the track's Facebook page is the best place to keep up with happenings, as their website is still supposedly in progress, and there don't appear to be any other social media accounts active. Lawrenceburg's first scheduled event is open practice on March 30th, with the first weekly show coming April 6th. USAC will take to the Burg on April 13th for the first time.

That's it for the Daily show today. Make sure to stop by dirtrackr.com to see today's dirt racing news and the streaming schedule. You can also check out the analytics section and sign up for the free email newsletter, The Slider.

Hope you guys have a great Monday out there, we'll see you back here tomorrow!