DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript

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A win lost because a part fell off, and a run-in with a VERY different result | Daily 1-13-2026

Kyle Larson makes Chili Bowl night one look pretty easy, we'll talk a little Wild West Shootout including DQs and run-ins, I think Sheldon Haudenschild and Kyle Ripper are just messing with us at this point, and plenty more. Let's go!

It's Tuesday, January 13th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily.

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Something a little bit off the beaten path a little bit that I'm assuming most of you haven't seen, but Hawk Wings, as in sprint car wings hosted a sprint car chassis clinic back on Sunday at their Minnesota shop. A few guest speakers there included Cody Jacobs, he's David Gravel's crew chief and Kyle Ripper. They talked about a bunch of different topics. They looked to have a pretty packed crowd there in the building. I had multiple folks send me photos and videos from the event. And one important thing to point out here, Kyle Ripper is wearing a KCP racing hat pretty much the whole time. And remember we've been talking for weeks now, months probably at this point about Sheldon Haudenschild going to KCP. People have been coming at me wanting to know why we keep talking about this, and maybe Sheldon's going somewhere else, maybe I'm wrong. I know I'm not wrong about this, but, we keep continuing to get these little bits of information. I think Ripper and Sheldon just messing with this at this point, I doubt that Ripper was just there wearing the KCP hat because he's a fan of the race team. Remember Sheldon's Stenhouse Jr. Marshall departure announcement said he and Ripper were excited to build on their success and focus on the future in 2026. We'll see if an announcement happens or not, but just another sign of what's coming.

One other sprint car team note, is actually happening at Kasey Kahne Racing. Andrew Bowman has departed the team for NASCAR again, so that's leaving them a little bit short on crew help. Bowman worked for Kasey Kahne Racing previously, was on some of those Brad Sweet championship teams. He then went to work in nascar. Then came back and you might remember last year he was lead guy on Kasey Kahne's team. I don't know if we call him the crew chief or what exactly his title was, but he came back and then got swapped over to Brad Sweet's car when they made that big crew change around the Knoxville Nationals. But now he's headed back for pavement land, and the nine team with Daison down a crew guy at this point. Jarrett Martin is set to be the crew chief of that team. We'll see if they try to fill that hole or if they'll start the season here with just a handful of crew members.

Chili Bowl night two is on. As we as we talk about this, as you watch this probably and maybe it'll be afterwards that you watch this from Chili Bowl stuff, but we've already had flips tonight, all sorts of stuff going on. Tonight is Ryan Timms, Blake Hahn, Hank Davis, Landon Brooks (he won this prelim night last year), Drake Troutman is running tonight (he's in his first Chili Bowl), Parker Price Miller (he's teamed up with Brady Bacon), and Ricky Thornton Jr. also going tonight. I think this might be the most wide open night of the entire event. I don't know that you could really put your finger on one guy who's the favorite tonight. I think there's a couple of guys who we could see jump up and get this prelim night win. Christopher Bell went flag to flag in the race of champions on Monday. He's driving his own stuff this week, that's obviously notable. It was his fourth career win in that event. Outside of a heat race incident that he rebounded from, Kyle Larson looked really good last night going to the win. A four to one in the feature. Got to the lead pretty easy. Things got a little bit spicier as they caught lap traffic and, he had Cannon McIntosh and Briggs Danner battling him there, but looked pretty comfortable. No big celebration from Yung Money. Just looked like business as usual. I think this could be a bad sign for the rest of the building. Larson even talked about going home for the rest of the week, so he's gonna go home, rest up, and then be back on Saturday to try to defend that golden driller win. Briggs Danner locked in. He's in with that Alex Bowman Racing team. He'll start his second career main event and then everyone else on down in Bs and Cs that was in the feature last night. Cannon McIntosh, Shane Golobic, they'll have some work to do come Saturday. No big disasters or any real big misses last night. Pretty much went chalk for the most part. No big names struggling and out of things. We'll see what tonight brings. dirtrackr.com/floracing if you need a Flo subscription because you would like to watch.

I want to jump back as well to the Wild West Shootout. We didn't get a chance to talk about some of the Sunday stuff that happened. We did a live stream last night and we talked about a couple of things, but didn't really go deep in on it. Hudson O'Neal the winner there. He's obviously driving with Kevin Rumley at the Wild West Shootout. At the event, they were off yesterday, they're off again today, and then they race on Wednesday. Hudson O'Neal, he won with Rumley again. Last time we saw them in victory lane together was at World Finals. It's a very, potent combination as we've seen. Interesting to note Cade Dillard and Dustin Sorenson, both DQd from the night's modified feature for muffler infractions. Dillard lost the win, and Sorenson was third at the checkered. So both of those guys losing podium positions, Cade Dillard later shared too social media that the muffler broke off. Sorenson said the same. How are they attaching these mufflers that these things are falling off in a modified feature? Cade Dillard also had a dust up with Tyler Erb. He ended up crashed after Erb threw a short slider there. Dillard reacted very differently to this one versus the Garrett Alberson incident last year that got him suspended from Lucas competition for quite a few months. There were not much comments afterwards about the whole thing, but interesting to see the two differences of reactions. I had some people asking me last night on the live stream if maybe Dillard reacted differently because of the suspension, but if you get suspended from the Wild West Shootout, it's not going to affect the rest of the season. This isn't a sanctioned event. This is a one-off deal for the next week. So it's not like suspension from this would've affected the rest of his year. But anyway Bobby Pierce, Jonathan Davenport, they had much better nights than the first night. JD went, pole to fifth though backing up in that feature. We'll see if those guys can continue, pushing for some wins here later in the week.

Jumping into the PA Posse 410 series. They're already reversing course. Did you guys see this announcement? PA Speedweek still will be sanctioned PA Posse 410 Sprint Series races. They're calling them series races, but they're not gonna be part of the points championship. So what was 47 series races is now 37 races. So cutting way back here. Teams will still get three throwaway races if they want to miss events. They basically have up to three freebies that they can use to not show up to events and still, be eligible for the championship and stay up there in the points. This whole thing, it feels a little bit odd. It feels like it could have been handled before they made announcements. If they would've just talked to more drivers, talked to more teams, they could have had this stuff all worked out in advance. It's very odd to me. I think the other thing to note here, we haven't really heard much publicly from teams and drivers in the area about this series. We certainly know that there are some very vocal drivers in the area. You wanna talk about a guy like Danny Dietrich. He really hasn't said a whole lot about what he thinks about this series, curious to see how this situation continues to evolve as we get closer to the start of the season. And if this thing, ends up really taking off, obviously all along we've been rooting for this. It just seems like it's being run very oddly here. But leave your comments below on everything that we talked about today.

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