DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
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Exploring Donny Schatz's World of Outlaws Sprint Car regression | DIRTRACKR Daily 3/24/21
It is Wednesday, March 24th, two thousand and twenty one and you are tuned into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.
Today we dive deep into Donny Schatz's struggles the past few seasons with the World of Outlaws, plus we have details on the USMTS King of America weekend, new podcast episodes, and more. Let's jump in.
One of the podcast episode topics I've had on my list for a while was to take a look at Donny Schatz's regression the last few seasons and try and understand where things have gone sideways for he and this TSR team after winning the championship in 2018. And by regression and sideways, understand that these terms are very relative in this case. Schatz finished a very close second to Brad Sweet in 2019, and was third in 2020. So we aren't talking about utter disaster here. But we are talking about a team that had won 10 championships in 13 seasons, and in 2019 and 2020, just were not the dominant force we'd come to expect them to be. Before 2020, the last time Schatz didn't have double digit wins in a World of Outlaws season was 2011, a year in which nobody had more than nine wins. Jason Meyers was the champion that season, and there was a ton of parity with Steve Kinser and Craig Dollansky both having more wins than Schatz, but they finished behind him in the standings. Starting in 2013, Schatz went six straight seasons where he had at least 20 wins, including that magical 2015 year where he had 31 wins and 60 top five finishes.
Since 2018, two big changes have hit the TSR 15 team. The first was the departure of crew chief Ricky Warner following the last title run in 2018. Warner had dealt with some health problems, and also came back into the shop to help the development of the new Ford sprint car engine. That put long time crew member Steve Swenson in charge of the 15. The other was the introduction of that Ford engine, which Schatz campaigned all season in 2020. Whether Schatz will admit to it or not, switching crew chiefs is a big deal. Nobody is going to do things 100 percent the same, and I think that crew chief change affected Schatz a bit, which combined with the rise of Brad Sweet, left the door open for the championship. If you look at things by the numbers, from 2018 to 2019 Schatz actually improved his qualifying average by nearly a full position, and his average feature start by over half a position. But where he wasn't the same was average finish. In 2019 he was 1.2 positions worse vs. 2018, and his feature plus minus was down an incredible 124 spots. In 2018 he led the series in feature plus minus, averaging more than a 3.5 position gained per night. It didn't matter that he was starting further back in features, because he was passing a ton of cars. Whereas in 2019, he was qualifying and starting better, but just not passing as many cars come feature time. He dropped to fourth in feature plus minus, and only averaged a gain of 1.75 positions per night. Brad Sweet's five more wins, along with an average finish that was 0.3 positions better was good enough for him to win the title by a scant four points.
As for 2020, we didn't get a fair chance to see if Schatz and Swenson were finding their footing because of the introduction of that Ford engine and some of the issues they were dealing with during a pandemic shortened season. Schatz himself even talked about some of the supply chain issues they had trying to get upgraded engine internals that would have made a big difference in the Ford engine's power and reliability. There were some bright spots in 2020, as Schatz did get five wins, including that incredible race at Lernerville in July for the Don Martin where he came out on top of a three car battle between himself, Kyle Larson and Sweet. But he also had 11 finishes outside the top ten, which dropped his top ten finish percentage below 80%. He was down in qualifying average, average start, average finish, and win, top five, and top ten percentages versus 2019. It wasn't like he wasn't trying though. Incredibly, his feature plus minus was back up in 2020 to +143, or 2.65 positions gained per night on average. Even with some of the issues they were facing, Schatz was racing his butt off to try and get good finishes. He inevitably finished third behind Sweet and Schuchart in the standings.
For this season, Schatz and the TSR 15 are headed back in the right direction. They haven't won a race in 15 Outlaw events, back to the National Open in 2020, but they are trending up. They have six top fives and seven top tens in eight starts, and their other finish of 15th came on that night where Schatz was dominating at Volusia and had the ignition go bad with only a few laps remaining. His average finish is two spots lower than Sweet's currently, but he's still within striking distance, sitting 38 points back in fourth. If he'd won that night, his average finish would be about 3 tenths of a spot worse than Sweet, and he'd probably still be behind Sweet in the standings, but only by a few points. We talked yesterday on the show about just how good Sweet has been lately, and with Schuchart and Gravel and Sheldon and Reutzel and Macedo, this could be one of the toughest Outlaw seasons in years. Schatz and the team will need to be on their A game all season to be in the fight. We'll talk more about the Outlaw races upcoming this weekend on Friday's show.
A big weekend is on tap at Humboldt Speedway in Kansas for USRA and USMTS modified competitors. The tenth edition of the King of America Modified Nationals gets underway tonight with a practice night, with racing then happening through Saturday night's $20,000 to win feature. The weekend's finale was supposed to be $10,000 to win, but racer Joe Duvall kicked in a $1000 from his Duvall Electric company and then put together a group of sponsors to get the additional money needed to double the winner's share to $20,000. They've also bumped the race from paying $750 to start, to $1000 to start. Because of covid restrictions in 2020, the event was pushed back a full year, and a busy weekend of racing awaits competitors and fans. Following tonight's practice night, Thursday features a $2000 to win USRA modified feature along with B-Mods, Friday is a $5000 to win USMTS show with USRA stock cars and B-Mods, and Saturday's big finale will include the $20,000 to win USMTS feature, a $10,000 to win B-Mod race, and USRA stock cars racing for $1200 to win. In the previous nine events, the USMTS race has had eight different winners including defending winner Ricky Thornton Jr., Lucas Schott, Ryan Gustin, Zack VanderBeek, Jason Hughes, Rodney Sanders, Stormy Scott, and Kelly Shryock. If you can't be at Humboldt Speedway the next few nights, RacinDirt.TV has you covered on the streaming front. For more event details, visit usmts.com.
If you're looking for other dirt racing podcast episodes to listen to this week, there are plenty to choose from. Winged Nation has JJ Hickle, Sheldon Haudenschild, and Dominic Scelzi. Open Red has Kasey Kahne, LoudPedal has Haley Shanley and Karsyn Elledge, Stick Signals has Scott Childress from Cherokee Speedway, the Rigsby Report has Ronnie Johnson, Forward Bite has Duane Goins and Kyle Strickler, Ohio Dirt has Nick and Rob from Open Red and Trey Jacobs, Quicktime has JJ Hickle and Scotty Cook, Passing Points has Walkapedia, Midwest Autosports has Bill Balog, Track Talk has Matt Weaver, and there are new episodes of the Dirt Nerds and Wednesdays with Wayne. To see the full list of podcasts and episodes, visit dirtrackr.com/podcasts.
There are two items on the streaming schedule today. Besides FloRacing 24/7, DIRTVision has the opener of the next season of DIRTcar eSports action from Weedsport Speedway featuring big block modifieds on iRacing. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
That's it for the show today, hope everyone has a good Wednesday.
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