DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript

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Tulsa Shootout continues through the weekend, thoughts on Kyle Busch, what's next for DIRTRACKR | Daily 12-30-2021

Coming up we are talking Tulsa Shootout day one, Chili Bowl results, and what's next for DIRTRACKR. Let's go.

Today is Thursday, December 30th, two thousand and twenty one. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.

Day one of the Tulsa Shootout is in the books and there was plenty of entertainment and plenty of things to talk about from Wednesday. All in all, they completed 118 heat races in a little over 13 hours yesterday, with still more to come today. Today's slate of races will include heats for stock non-wing and the junior sprints, and then we'll start into the alphabet soup for outlaw non-wing, a-class winged, and outlaw winged. Friday will include more soup, and then qualifiers for all divisions. And finally on Saturday we'll have B mains, last chance races, and then the finales for all divisions. Yesterday's racing included heat race wins for Kyle Busch and Ricky Thornton Jr., big names like Christopher Bell and Tyler Courtney moving forward, and plenty of crashes and flips through the day. According to Walkapedia, six drivers are top 50 in points in three classes after Wednesday. They are Alex Bright, Ashton Torgerson, Michael Faccinto, Tommy Kunsman, Colin White, and Jonathan Beason. Plenty of other guys are in good positions as well, including Blake Hahn, Emerson Axsom, and Kevin Thomas Jr. Big shoutout to Chris Wilner, Clinton Boyles and the FloRacing announcing team yesterday. It's a long day, and there are a ton of racers to know and talk about. They did a great job, and will continue to do so through the week. I hope you get a chance to tune into at least a little bit of the racing over the next few days. At the very least, jump in on Saturday night and watch the main shows. The intensity just continues to ramp up the closer to the drillers we move, very much like Chili Bowl. There is bound to be plenty of drama coming up.

A quick side note, Christopher Bell had an awesome tweet yesterday. Somebody asked him about all the left-side panels on the micros and midgets and why he doesn't run them anymore, and he had a great response. He said when he was a kid he always liked watching the drivers, so he's decided to get rid of the left side panels so race fans can watch him work. I love that response. It shows incredible awareness about the fans and what makes the racing interesting to watch, and I'm glad that's why he did it. I also like watching the drivers work in the cars.

Before we move on to other subjects, I did want to talk about Kyle Busch for a second. As I mentioned before, he's in the building this weekend competing in his first ever Tulsa Shootout, alongside his son Brexton. He was a big topic of conversation yesterday, especially with him grabbing a heat race win just absolutely banging the boards, and then following that up with an F-bomb live on Flo. He's having fun, he's tweeting, and I think it's nothing but good for the event. On social media yesterday, you saw the typical "can't believe Kyle Busch is beating up on amateur racers" from a few folks, but remember here that nobody in that building feels that way. Watching guys cross over is fun, and even with the success he had yesterday, Kyle is facing stiff competition. The drivers in the expo are excited to have Kyle competing, and will make things difficult for him, especially as he advances towards Saturday. It's not different than what we've seen from Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, and all the other guys that have dabbled elsewhere recently. This isn't NFL players going up against high schoolers like some want you to believe. It's just racers wanting to race. Good on Kyle for taking on an event like the Shootout.

Once we get past the weekend and the Tulsa Shootout, the focus will shift to the Chili Bowl, and I've been working hard to get the analytics section tuned up for the event and the pool players. Last night I finished up adding every Saturday to the database, so you can now find results and stats for all 35 Chili Bowl main events, going back to Rich Vogler's win in 1987. There is a lot to clean up, and I still need to add in a bunch of prelim results through the years, but there are thousands of new data points and stats to dive into. In total, I've got 74 Chili Bowl race days in the database, and we are approaching 2000 individual driver pages for those that have competed through the years. Stats include all the basics like wins, top fives, top tens, average finish and hard chargers, and I've got the more advanced analytics available like plus minus, efficiencies, value finishes, and more. We'll be talking a lot more about the Chili Bowl and the event over the next week leading into the first day of racing on January 10th, and we'll dive into the numbers and the pools as well. At this moment, the analytics section is now how to results and data for 966 races across the World of Outlaws, All Stars, Lucas, Chili Bowl, and USAC. A lot of the information in that section is free, but if you want more data and tools for breaking down the racing, sign up for DIRTRACKR Plus. $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year gets you access. If you want more information about plus, check out the YouTube video I did where I went through the entire section. I'll link to it in the description below. You can also click Plus in the nav bar at dirtrackr.com.

This is my last show for the week, I'm going to take tomorrow off, and that means this is also my last show for 2021. Come Monday, we'll be starting into year three of these videos and podcasts, and at this point we've done 473 dailies and 55 conversations episodes. The DIRTRACKR project itself launched in September of 2019 with the website and the growth continues to blow me away. We are approaching a million plays and downloads of the shows, we crossed over 4000 YouTube subscribers, and over the last five months, we've been averaging 70,000 plays of the shows a month. That's nuts. Visits and pageviews to the website were up nearly 90% in 2021 and I launched DIRTRACKR Plus this year, which a bit to my surprise actually has paid members. It's wild to think people want to pay for something I've built. Just for transparency, I'm still in the hole in terms of what I spend to make DIRTRACKR happen, versus what it's generated in revenue, but things are starting to turn around. I've been able to support some photographers this year, upgrade the site and my recording equipment, and I've got plans for more coming up. I'm also working on some ways to support some racers in the future as I want to help the community however I can. In the coming days and weeks you'll probably notice changes to my videos, and some of those changes have happened already with a new camera in recent weeks. There will be upgraded graphics, and I'm working on a new space to record. I'm also going to keep working on improving the content, and I'd like to get back into some more predictions for 2022, and maybe we'll even keep track of my record. I'll also keep sprinkling in interviews where I can and I'd like to experiment some more with live watch parties again. I've got a lot of plans and ideas and I'm going to keep my head down and pushing forward. I appreciated all the responses I got to my seven questions video last week, and I'm going to take your requests and suggestions to heart. As always, thanks for riding along.

The streaming schedule has two shows on it today, both on FloRacing. Day two of the Tulsa Shootout will be live starting at 9AM CT and there is FloRacing 24/7. The Shootout continues through the weekend, and if you're looking for other action check out Western Springs on Flo, Perth Motorplex on DIRTVision, and outlaw karts from Roseburg on Fast Four. To see the full daily streaming schedule any time, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.

That's it for the show today, hope you have a good Thursday and enjoy the New Years weekend, please be safe out there. 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!