DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript

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Nearly half a million! Outlaws get another rookie, crappy situation goes public | Daily 12-16-2025

Today on the show we're talking the nearly half million dollar price tag on Spire's High Limit franchise and why they bought one, a crappy situation regarding race pay comes to light on social media, and breaking sprint car news. Let's go!

It's Tuesday, December 16th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily presented by Kubota Genuine Parts.

We are deep into the holiday season, and if you are still scrambling to figure out what to get that special someone in your life, what about the gift of dirt racing? A subscription to FloRacing will get them thousands of hours of racing content a season, and even though it's quiet right now, things will start popping back off here soon. High Limit in Australia, Tulsa Shootout, Chili Bowl, and Wild West Shootout are just around the corner. If you want to tune in, and don't have a Flo subscription, head over to dirtrackr.com/floracing and sign up. Once you're signed up, you'll be ready to roll straight into the 2026 dirt racing season. I've been a paid FloRacing subscriber myself for a long time, I've got the app on my Roku, phone, and use the website itself regularly to watch. So if you want to join me and thousands of your dirt racing friends, that's dirtrackr.com/floracing.

Breaking sprint car news here just a few minutes ago with the World of Outlaws adding another rookie to the 2026 class. Joining Ashton Torgerson and Scotty Thiel in the chase for the Kevin Gobrecht rookie of the year is Australian driver Scott Bogucki. He and the Three Stooges 51 team will hit the road next year full time to tackle the Outlaw schedule with Noah West as crew chief. Bogucki joined the team toward the latter part of the 2025 season making starts against the All Stars, POWRi, and the Outlaws. Overall it was 30 410 starts for Bogucki last year, with five top fives and 11 top tens. Four of those top fives came in weekly action at Knoxville. Over his career, he's made 60 appearances against the Outlaws, with a best finish of fifth, that came at Knoxville in 2024. He only raced six times with the series in 2025, including two weekends at Knoxville, plus Pevely, and Lincoln Park. Bogucki has four career 410 wins, with those coming at Knoxville, Jackson Motorplex, Huset's and Mississippi Thunder against the IRA. Adding another rookie takes the Outlaws to likely 13 at the moment. Besides the three rookies, that includes David Gravel, Donny Schatz, Spencer Bayston, Cole Macedo, Chris Windom, Logan Schuchart, plus Buddy Kofoid, Carson Macedo, Sheldon Haudenschild, and Bill Balog. We still don't know plans yet for Garet Williamson, and there are still some rumblings Hank Davis, TJ Stutts and Emerson Axsom could be in play. I think the series adds at least two more before things are all said and done.

I want to double back today with some reaction to some of the Spire Motorsports stuff that came out of the PRI show. We obviously talked last week about the deal for Gio Scelzi and Spire to join High Limit next year becoming official. There is some sort of alliance here with Clauson Marshall, and the new team has hired Eric Prutzman to crew chief. Several weeks ago once it became clear that Spire was buying the recently earned franchise from Jason Meyers, we talked on the show about what the purchase price of that franchise possibly was. Given that Meyers' sixth place result will net $240,000 next year in franchise payouts, I surmised that the price wouldn't be less than that. And now we know it was more, much more than that. In an interview at the show with Sprint Car Unlimited, Spire boss Jeff Dickerson revealed they paid quote "north of $400,000" for the franchise. That would make a lot of sense given what we know about future High Limit payouts, and basic knowledge of business valuations. If you Google 'how to price a business', you'll run into all sorts of articles, and most of them mention some variation of an earnings multiple. So for those asking how the franchise could be worth that much, the math is actually not that complicated. To simplify it, say that franchise is again worth $240,000 in 2027, a 2X multiple would value that franchise at $480,000. Pretty easy. The next question becomes, if you're Spire, why not just earn the franchise over the next two years, instead of outlaying the cash up front. We know given what the series has released that there is a clear path to a franchise in 2028, which is a top three points finish one year, or top eight both years. Dickerson talked about wanting to get in on the ground floor, and that if they hadn't had this chance to get the Meyers franchise, they wouldn't have run full time right away. Reading between the lines a bit, and thinking through this, the easy answer here is mitigating risk. It doesn't seem for a team like is being assembled here, that a top eight points finish is a crazy ask. Gio is a good driver and Prutzman has won a bunch of titles. But we've seen all sorts of crazy things happen in sprint car racing, and there is no guarantee, even with what they have, that a franchise in 2028 is a given. Paying the money up front to get in means they know exactly what their ownership revenue will be going forward, which helps them figure out and understand budgets, and now they can just go race for wins and a championship. A lot of those new team questions go away in this scenario. Regardless of how well or poor they run, $240,000 is coming in. Whether you like this system or not, it worked in this case exactly how Brad Sweet, Kyle Larson, and FloRacing hoped it would. An owner made a serious investment to put a car on the road for multiple seasons, his circumstances changed and he was able to get something back for what he put in, and a new team can hit the ground running with a lot less risk. As we move forward, nobody, including those folks at High Limit, have any idea how this will continue to play out. In this instance, it worked really well. In the future when someone wants to sell, is there going to be a willing buyer. We don't know. And regardless of how Google tells us how to value businesses, these franchises are only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. We may feel or look upon this system differently down the road, but right off the bat here, the early returns look pretty good.

Moving on to this situation at Atomic Speedway and STP Motorsports' Facebook post last night. If you missed it, STP with sprint car driver Bryce Lucius won a late season show at Atomic, but had not received their $15,000 payment for the victory. In a lengthy Facebook post, the team explained the situation, and categorized it as a public service announcement. The team detailed multiple returned checks and promises of a wire transfer they had not yet received, and they tagged a number of different accounts for tracks and entities. As you can imagine, this post garnered quite a bit of attention, which in the end was the point. STP clearly wanting to put public pressure on Atomic and Charlie Vest to make good on the outstanding payment. Since then, the post has been updated to say that payment has been made. I did reach out to the track last night, and got all the same details other members of the media have shared; that Vest was working to make it right after some struggles to close the year. And at this point, we know he's done that. I understand that feeling stiffed by a race track is something that makes folks angry, and I don't blame STP for being upset. Nobody likes their money being messed with. I don't remember hearing of Atomic and Vest missing payments before though, and Lucius has ten career starts at the track, so I'm assuming they've been paid before when they raced there. I wish sometimes we could take a beat before we make these types of things public on social media. STP ended up with their funds, but the amount of damage done to the track is likely significant. I've seen a bunch of comments from people saying they won't support the track in the future. The onus is clearly on the promoters to make sure purses are paid out and funds are available, I don't want to overlook that point, but in the event of bank snafus, or other weird situations, I think going public has to be a last resort. Use the threat of that public post to help move things along, but only use it when absolutely necessary. Things definitely got screwed up here for Atomic, but you'd hope these types of things could get handled behind the scenes before damage is done in the open. This team was well within it's rights to do what it did, again I understand being angry, I just really hope everyone is considering the weight of these things before going public. Glad to see this resolved however.

That's the show for today. Don't forget, if you want even more dirt racing content, make sure to follow DIRTRACKR across social media. That means Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Wherever you are, so is DIRTRACKR.

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