DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript

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Christopher Bell wins USAC Midget show at Du Quoin, 2017 World of Outlaws look-back | Daily 12-20-2021

Coming up we are talking USAC midgets indoors, the Sprint Car Challenge Tour schedule, and the 2017 World of Outlaws. Let's do this!

Today is Monday, December 20th, two thousand and twenty one. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.

On Saturday night the USAC National Midgets took on the Southern Illinois Center at Du Quoin for a special, non points event. The Jason Leffler Memorial has traditionally been at Wayne County, but this year they moved it inside with $8000 going to the winner. I think we were at 36 cars on hand for the night, but that didn't include any Keith Kunz teams or any Chad Boat cars, which I found a tad strange. I would have thought this was a good opportunity to get some indoor laps in the midget before the Chili Bowl rolls off in a few weeks, and we would have seen a few more guys like Windom or Thorson or Kofoid. Even without the super teams though, we still had names like Christopher Bell, Chase Briscoe, Cannon McIntosh and others in the field. Bell will be back in a Kunz midget for the Chili Bowl, but he raced on Saturday with RMS Racing, who we are used to seeing campaign cars for Justin Grant and Thomas Meseraull. Briscoe debuted his new Mahindra Tractors sponsorship, which will also be on board for the Chili Bowl, and his 2022 NASCAR Cup season. And this was the first event for the new partnership between Dave Mac Motorsports and Robert Dalby. They showed up with cars for Cannon Mac and Mitchel Moles. The night featured a round of heat races and a round of qualifiers to set the field with passing points. For the feature, Chase Briscoe and Cannon McIntosh were on the front row together. McIntosh was quickly to the lead at the start, but it wasn't long before third starting Bell was knocking on his door. On lap 14 with the leaders in traffic, Bell slipped past the 08 of McIntosh and went unchallenged the rest of the way to take the win in the 50 lap main event. McIntosh settled for second, Chance Crum was third, Sam Johnson fourth, and Mitchel Moles completed the top five. Briscoe ended up 10th after running up front early and then suffering a spin. Hat tip to past DIRTRACKR Conversations guest Chad Boespflug who ran seventh and looked good even though it's been a while since he was behind the wheel. He's on the Chili Bowl entry list as well after missing the 2021 event. If you didn't get a chance to watch it, go find the replays on FloRacing. It was a fun night, and your typical indoor midget race. Some good racing, but also some bent metal and hurt feelings. It's what makes these types of races entertaining. The indoor season continues in about a week with the opening of the Tulsa Shootout, which features winged and non-wing micros and junior sprints inside the Tulsa Expo Center. They are expecting a record field of entries, with over 1400 cars and more than 600 drivers pre-entered. And then beyond that, we are three weeks way from Chili Bowl, which at last check was sitting at 364 entries, just shy of a record for that event.

Back on Friday the Sprint Car Challenge Tour out in California released their 2022 schedule which features 16 races from March through November. The traveling 360 winged series will have stops through the year at Placerville, Merced, Thunderbowl, Keller Auto Speedway, Stockton, Marysville, Silver Dollar, Petaluma, and Ocean. Ryan Robinson was the 2021 series champion over Colby Copeland and Justyn Cox. The winners list last season was a who's who of California open wheel racing and included Robinson, Copeland, Cox, Andy Forsberg, Tanner Carrick, Kaleb Montgomery, Shane Golobic, DJ Netto, Dominic Scelzi, and Justin Sanders. For more details on the series and the schedule, check out sprintcarchallengetour.com.

Since things are quiet right now, I've been working on adding more races to the database at dirtrackr.com and over the weekend I finished up adding the 2017 World of Outlaws Sprint Car season, which featured 84 race nights. So I've now got five complete Outlaw seasons, from 2021 through 2017, which includes 367 races. It brings the total race count for all eight entities on the site to 938. If the 2017 season feels like it was too long ago, here's a quick refresher. Donny Schatz went on to win the championship by 210 points over Brad Sweet with 20 wins, 66 top fives, and 74 top tens. This was peak Schatz, right in the middle of his stretch of six straight seasons with at least 20 wins. He opened the year with a 14th at Volusia, then won five straight and six of the next seven through Tulare in March. At one point he had 27 straight top ten finishes. Schatz won the Nationals that year as well, after David Gravel lost his engine leading 22 laps into the Saturday main event. And even though he ended up third in the standings behind Sweet, Gravel was the other big storyline from that season. To this day, it's still the year with the most wins for Gravel, who ended up with 18 official victories. He was so good that year driving for CJB, but lacked just a little bit of the consistency it would have taken to challenge Schatz for the title. Donny had an insane average finish of 4th that year, while Gravel was just shy 6.5. Gravel actually led more laps that season than Schatz did, and had a better qualifying average, but the 15 car led the series in both heat race plus minus and feature plus minus. That led to better starting positions for Schatz and ultimately better finishes. And it's that ability to pass race cars where Schatz's greatness truly lies. He doesn't have the best average feature start, but that hasn't stopped him from leading basically every major statistical category over the previous five seasons, including wins, top fives, and top tens. Up next on the to-do list for the analytics section is more past Chili Bowl races. I'd like to have that section nice and tuned up over the next few weeks to help those of you who participate in the pool picks. Maybe we can get someone out there a win and some cash. If you want to see more stats and analysis, hit up dirtrackr.com/analytics.

My plan here around the holidays is to have dailies every day this week, including Friday, and then Monday thru Thursday next week, taking Friday off. There probably won't be a ton of news, but we'll find some topics to chat about either way. If you have questions, we can do a mailbag episode also, so feel free to shoot those to me if you want.

The only thing on the streaming schedule today is FloRacing 24/7. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.

That's it for the show today, hope you have a good Monday. 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 tomorrow for more DIRTRACKR Daily!