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Buddy Kofoid wins first USAC Midget title, Kyle Larson's potentially smaller dirt schedule | Daily 12-1-2021
Coming up we are talking Buddy Kofoid's midget championship, Kyle Larson's potentially smaller 2022 dirt schedule, Chili Bowl entries, and more. Let's go!
Today is Wednesday, December 1st, two thousand and twenty one. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.
We are back in the saddle today after a few days off for the holiday. I hope you had a chance to enjoy the long weekend and spend some time with family. The amount of dirt racing going on continues to slow, but there are still things to talk about coming up, including racing indoors at Gateway, the PRI Show is coming up in a few days and news always comes out of that event, and Chili Bowl entries are rolling out. So this show will keep rolling along all winter long to keep you updated on what's happening.
First up, I wanted to jump back to the weekend and highlight Buddy Kofoid's first ever USAC midget national championship. He picked up the feature win on Wednesday at Merced, and with a solid qualifying effort on Saturday at Ventura, all he basically had to do to lock up the title was start the feature. He did much better than that, leading laps and finishing second to Turkey Night winner Logan Seavey. In the end, Kofoid's margin of victory over Chris Windom was 89 points, which on the surface makes it look a little easier than it was. But don't forgot this battle went back and forth several times in the final weeks. Went it mattered most though, Kofoid came alive down the stretch and ended with a series best average finish over the final five races of 2.6. Over that same span, Windom had three finishes outside the top ten at Placerville, Merced, and Ventura and couldn't maintain the pace. Big congrats to Kofoid and that Keith Kunz Motorsports team. They were very good all season, finishing second in the win column with six and leading the series in both top five and top ten finishes. Buddy was able to both protect his good starting positions with a top ten efficiency of over 93%, and he was able to move forward when he didn't start in the top ten, picking up 9 top tens in 10 outside top ten starts. That was a series best 90%. Kofoid is clearly one of the top talents in the sport right now, and the only real question is where does he go now. He had started to dabble in the pavement world this year before a midsummer late model crash sort of forced him to focus on the midget. He also didn't make that many sprint car starts, appearing just four times with the Outlaws and just five times with the All Stars. You have to think he's on a similar trajectory to a Kyle Larson or a Christopher Bell in that Toyota development program, and that more pavement racing is on the horizon. Either way though, it was a great season and I'm super curious to see what the future holds.
And speaking of Kyle Larson, he finished up his sprint car season last week by sweeping those two 360 races at Merced. Not a bad way to end with the wing on. Things didn't go quite that well with the midget though. After winning at Placerville on November 19th, Larson had finishes of 18th, 8th in a B main, 24th, and 4th to close the USAC season. Certainly not what we expected to see from a driver that hadn't finished outside the top ten in his previous 10 USAC midget appearances. It wasn't all his fault though, as that Placerville finale was plagued with on track incidents, and there were engine issues at Merced. I don't know Larson's schedule going forward, but I'd assume the next place we'll see him is Tulsa in January for the Chili Bowl. I had Ryan reach out to me via Instagram to ask about Larson's dirt schedule for next year with the change in the NASCAR weekends and I think it's an important thing to note. With the Cup Series going back to having practice and qualifying for a lot of weekends, the opportunities for Larson to race on dirt in 2022 will be cut down. Some weekends this year, Larson was able to run Friday and even some Saturday nights with the Cup stuff only happening on Sundays, but now he'll need to be at the track for multiple days. That's going to mean he'll only be able to race the midweek shows and then whenever the Cup Series has off weekends. The FloRacing Late Model schedule could still be in play if he continues racing with Kevin Rumley, and then whatever else he can put together from there with the sprint car. I'm sure we'll still see him pretty often though.
One other note from the USAC weekend, hat tip to Kaylee Bryson and Taylor Reimer. They qualified one-two and became the first two women to ever lock out the first two spots in USAC midget qualifying. They also made history by starting the race on the front row together. Bryson ended up fifth after leading 17 laps, while Reimer finished 8th. Four women total were in the feature, including Maria Cofer who finished 13th, and Jade Avedisian, who came home 23rd. It was just the second time that four women were in a USAC midget feature together. The last time it happened was 2016.
Elsewhere in midget racing, the first round of Chili Bowl entries has been released, and as of seven hours ago the list includes 133 drivers, including 9 TBAs, 22 feature starters, 24 rookies, and two past champions. Nice numbers there from Bryan Hulbert. We are still about six weeks away from the event, so that list will continue to grow. It is not uncommon for the entry list to swell past 300 cars for the week long event. You can find the full list at chilibowl.com. This is an event we'll talk a lot more about the coming weeks.
The World of Outlaws and Brad Doty announced yesterday that in 2022, the Brad Doty Classic will be bumped up to $15,000 to win from the $10,000 to win it has been in previous seasons. Spencer Bayston is the defending race winner. What was notable about the announcement though, was some of the tweets from Doty after the announcement in regards to the finances of the event. Several folks noted that the race used to pay more to win in the past, but Brad tweeted about how different the purse structure is now along with what it takes to break even on the event. Back when it used to pay $15,000 or more to win, Doty said the total purse was probably less than $30,000, while now it has ballooned to over $60,000. He also said he and the track could break even on the event at around $40,000 total, while now they need to get to $100 grand to break even. That $100K includes the purse plus expenses to put on the event, including marketing and promotion. I don't know what Attica's seating capacity is, but at $35 a ticket, they need to sell nearly 2900 seats to break even. It was definitely some interesting insight on what it takes to make just one World of Outlaws race happen in this day and age.
If you want to listen to some other dirt racing podcasts this week, Winged Nation has DJ Foos, Ohio Dirt has Ayrton Gennetten, Passing Points has Buddy Kofoid, and there is a new episode of the Dirt Reporters over at Dirt on Dirt. To see the full list of shows and episodes, hit up dirtrackr.com/podcasts.
The only thing on the streaming schedule for today is FloRacing 24/7. As always, to see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.
Coming up tomorrow we'll dive into the Gateway Dirt Nationals and get you ready for all the racing inside the Dome. Stay tuned for that.
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!