DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
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Kyle Larson, Justin Grant win at Merced; How much harder is racing with the Outlaws vs. All Stars? | Daily 11-24-2021
Coming up we are talking last night's midget and sprint races at Merced, so more schedule news, and I've got some food for thought as we head off into the Thanksgiving weekend. Let's go.
Today is Wednesday, November 24th, two thousand and twenty one. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.
There's nothing like a little midweek racing, even if we have to stay up late to watch it. Last night we got a sprint car and midget double feature at Merced out in California. The sprint car portion of the night was local 360s, but the field did include Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott, with Elliott making his debut with the wing on. In the feature, Ryan Timms started on the pole and led early, but a mistake just a few laps in sent him over the top of the track in turn four, and handed the lead to Larson on the restart. Once green, that was all she wrote. Larson was never really challenged again out front driving away to the win. Colby Copeland charged from 13th to finish second, Chase Randall was third, Black Carrick fourth, and Keith Day Jr. was fifth. Randall was pretty good all race long trying to track Larson through lap traffic, but got passed late by Copeland. As for Elliott, he kept it clean and brought the Tarlton 21 home to an 18th place finish.
In the midget portion of the night, neither driver was ever a factor all night. Larson had engine issues in hot laps and qualifying and was behind through the program. He ended up going 8th to 5th in his heat, then 15th to 8th in the B Main, just missing out on a transfer. Elliott was 11th in the B. Another driver making his USAC midget debut last night was IndyCar driver Santino Ferruci. His night ended in the B as well with a 15th place result. All three will be back tonight to do it all over again.
As for the midget feature, all eyes were on Buddy Kofoid and Chris Windom as this championship continues to play out. Unfortunately for Windom though, Kofoid was able to pad the points lead for a second straight race. Out front in a caution free affair, we had a fun battle between Tanner Thorson and Justin Grant, with Thorson grabbing the lead early, before Grant took over on lap six. Grant led the rest of the way for his second consecutive win and fourth of the season, but Thorson stalked him throughout and really made him earn it. Kofoid started third and finished third, and with Windom way down in 11th, the gap between the two is now 41 with just two nights left. Emerson Axsom and Cannon McIntosh completed the top five. Windom and his Chad Boat team will definitely need to find some speed for tonight if they are going to close this gap back up. If we go to Ventura this weekend with the gap at 41 or bigger, Kofoid will just about have it in the bag. So looking ahead, we've got another full night of racing to come tonight at Merced, and then the teams and drivers have a few days off before Turkey Night takes place on Saturday at Ventura. The finale at Ventura will pay $10,000 to win, and at last check the entry list for Saturday is up over 50 cars. Kyle Larson is the defending Turkey Night winner from 2019, and he and Christopher Bell have combined to win the last four, and five of the last six. Tanner Thorson is also a recent winner, back in 2015. Tickets are still available for Saturday, but if you can't be there, watch all the action live on FloRacing.
We talked yesterday on the show about the 2022 FloRacing Night in America schedule, and not long after I finished recording the episode, Ben Shelton tweeted they are also going to do an Illinois Speedweek for late models next year. The May Flo dates at Spoon River and Lincoln will kick things off on Wednesday and Thursday, and then racing continues Friday, May 13th at Farmer City for a $15,000 to win show, and the week closes out Saturday, May 14th at Fairbury for $30,000 to win. The four nights will pay points towards a $10,000 championship, with the top five in the points sharing $22 grand. There aren't Lucas or Outlaw shows that week, so I'm guessing those races could have some pretty stout fields. Plus it's just more and more money available for late model competitors through the season next year. This feels like it could be one of, if not the richest late model season ever.
And speaking of schedules, we don't have the full USAC slate of races for next season, but we did get to see the Indiana Sprint Week races last night. For 2022 the week will showcase eight races in nine nights, tying it with 2007 and 2019 as the longest sprint weeks ever. Each race will pay $6000 to win and $600 to start, with a total point fund of $20,000 and the champion's share being $10 grand. The week will take place July 22nd through the 30th with stops at Gas City, Kokomo, Lawrenceburg, Circle City, Terre Haute, Lincoln Park, Bloomington, and Haubstadt. Tuesday, July 26th will be an off day for teams. Kevin Thomas Jr. is the reigning sprint week champion. Hopefully we'll get to see the rest of the USAC schedules for the sprint cars, midgets and Silver Crown Series soon.
We are getting ready to head off into the Thanksgiving holiday, and there are obviously not a ton of races going on, but I wanted to talk about a question I've been working on and give you something to think about over the next few days. If you're a regular, you obviously know about the analytics section at dirtrackr.com, and you know I recently launched a premium section of the site for even more stats and analytics called DIRTRACKR Plus. There is already a ton of new information and advanced stats available there, but I have a list of new stuff to add and questions to tackle and one of them is this. How much more difficult is it to race with the World of Outlaws versus racing against the All Stars. It's something I've been thinking about and I believe we can use some stats and numbers to start to try and understand and quantify the level of difficulty. I think we know anecdotally that the World of Outlaws is more difficult than the All Stars, and we can point to guys like Aaron Reutzel as examples. He dominated the All Stars from 2018 through 2020, winning three championships, and he has 28 wins in his last 104 starts, which is about 27%. In his past 119 Outlaw starts though, he only has six wins, which is about 5%. And we can point to the guys that race with the Outlaws like Brad Sweet and David Gravel and Donny Schatz and the others and we "know" that if they raced with the All Stars more often, they'd do well. But how do we actually put some numbers on the difference in difficulty between the two series. Here's what I did. We can't use full time Outlaw guys, because they don't make a ton of All Star appearances through the season as the rules don't really allow it. Since 2018 for example, Brad Sweet has just eight All Star appearances. And if we are not going to use full time Outlaws, we probably shouldn't use full time All Stars either. So what does that leave us? Actually a pretty wide list of guys. I solicited suggestions on Twitter and put together a list of 16 drivers that have all made a decent amount of starts with both series in recent years, but are not full time currently. These guys are our index. The list includes Lance Dewease, Kerry Madsen, Gio Scelzi, Rico Abreu, Brian Brown, Danny Dietrich, Greg Wilson, Tim Shaffer, Anthony Macri, Kyle Larson, Sam Hafertepe, Brent Marks, Parker Price-Miller, Ian Madsen, Scotty Thiel, and Cole Macedo. The list covers multiple parts of the country, guys that have a bunch of wins, and some that are still on the rise. I feel like it's a pretty solid cross section. I took these drivers and I compared their average finishes between the two series. Of this group, when they make features, on average they finish nearly 2.5 positions worse per race with the Outlaws than they do with the All Stars. Right off the bat, that's a significant difference. The next question here though, is how often are they making features between the two series and is it statistically significant. The answer is most definitely yes. Those 16 drivers made just shy 90% of the features they represent back through 2018 with the All Stars. With the Outlaws, that percentage drops to 82.5%. That's right about a 7% difference. So with the Outlaws, you have a significantly smaller chance of even making a feature, and when you do transfer in, you're going to finish 2.5 positions worse. I'd say that's a pretty big difference in difficulty between the two series. This isn't available yet on the site, but it's something I'm going to work towards adding for Plus members. We can do an overall difficulty score based on all races, and then we can compare year to year how different things are. We could also do something like this for the Outlaws versus Lucas on the late model side. Drop me a comment, let me know what you think about this problem, and feel free to suggest other drivers to include in the index. I certainly had quite a few suggestions, and I left off any guys that either didn't have that many starts, or if all or most of their starts were at one track. Look for this to be added soon to the Plus section of dirtrackr.com.
If you're looking for more dirt racing podcasts this week, Winged Nation has Jake Blackhurst, LoudPedal has Brady Bacon, Suavetalk has Joseph Joiner, Passing Points has Joe Bob Lee, Track Talk has Mandy Pauch and Mike Mahaney, and there are new episodes of the Dirt Reporters and the Dirt Nerds. To see the full list of shows and episodes, hit up dirtrackr.com/podcasts. And if you want more about the McFadden to Roth move, check out Sprintcar Hub on YouTube. My guy Toby Bellbowen has about a 30 minute interview with JMac breaking it all down.
There are three shows on the streaming schedule today. DIRTVision has weekly DIRTcar eSports action, and FloRacing has the USAC midgets and 360 sprint cars from Merced Speedway and Flo 24/7. To see the full daily streaming schedule visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
Today is my last show for the week, and it will probably be Tuesday or Wednesday next week before we get back on the saddle. Going to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with some family and we'll be back soon. Hope you do the same, and we'll see you next week.
That's it for the show today, hope you have a good Wednesday. If you have thoughts about the topics on today's show, leave them in the comments below or tweet at me.
Thanks everybody for tuning in, I'll see you in a few days for more DIRTRACKR Daily!