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Wild West Shootout at Vado on tap, details on Chris Windom's winged sprint car plans | Daily 1-6-2022

Coming up we are talking Wild West Shootout, and more details about Chris Windom's 2022 plans. Let's go!

Today is Thursday, January 6th, two thousand and twenty two. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.

The big main Chili Bowl pool came out yesterday, and we will definitely go through it, but I'm going to save that for tomorrow's show. There is a lot to talk about there and I want to give it some space, so we'll do that Friday. Today we'll focus on some of the other racing happening this weekend, including some late model stuff. So let's get into that.

Out in New Mexico on Saturday, the Wild West Shootout gets going at Vado Speedway Park. Super late models are the focus of the event, but modifieds and X-mods are also on the card through the week. Racing gets going on Saturday, with another show on Sunday. Racers then get Monday and Tuesday off, they race Wednesday, have Thursday off again, and then the event closes out with three nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday January 14th through the 16th. All super late model features are $5000 to win, except the Saturday finale on the 16th which is $25,000 to win. THere is also a $300,000 bonus for a driver who sweeps the week, $100,000 for five wins in six nights, and $25,000 extra for four wins in six nights. I'd say the $25k might be doable, but the $100 grand and $300 grand are definitely out of reach here. The mods will race for $1000 to win and $2000 to win all week, with the X-mods going for $500 and $1000. The event moved to Vado Speedway Park this year because of the closure of Arizona Speedway near Phoenix, and there are some big question marks for the week. Vado is located between El Paso, Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico right on I-10, but it's nearly six hours away from the previous base of fans it was drawing from. Vado is an amazing facility, but will fans actually travel to see this event? The jury is definitely out right now. And it sounds like the event promoters are leaving things wide open for the future of this offseason racing week. It might stay at Vado, or it could be on the move again. As for the racers, we know we won't see Jonathan Davenport, who was front and center last year, winning multiple nights and the week long championship. And we won't get near the car counts that were at Arizona Speedway in 2021, but I did hear Ben Shelton say they should get 30 plus cars each night. The list of expected entries includes Tyler Erb, Bobby Pierce, Brandon Sheppard will be there in his family B5 machine, Earl Pearson Jr., Mike Marlar, and Johnny and Stormy Scott. Apparently Donny Schatz is also going to race some of the event, but he will be going back and forth between Vado and the Chili Bowl. He can do that though with his airplane. It also sounds like we'll see Ricky Weiss, Cade Dillard and guys like Mason Oberkramer, Rusty Schlenk, Garrett Alberson, Rodney Sanders, and Jake Timm. The World of Outlaws took on Vado to start the 2020 season, and several of those entered this coming week were in attendance back then. Dillard, BShepp, Weiss, Marlar, Pierce, Alberson, EPJ, and the Scott brothers may have a leg up on the competition with their past experience. But even so, I think this week could be wide open in terms of who could win these races. You probably already heard me make a case for EPJ having a much better season. BShepp is always fast when the family car shows up for things in the midwest. Tyler Erb can win anywhere he shows up, as can Bobby Pierce. So you just never know who's going to unload good out there. If you'll be headed out there or tuned in on FloRacing over the next week, drop me a comment and let me know who you are high on for wins and to run well out there. Or are you going to have your attention elsewhere this weekend because some of the big names aren't going. Let me know.

Elsewhere this weekend, the Ice Bowl is going down at Talladega Short Track in Alabama. Eight divisions of racing, including super late models, several Crate Racin' USA divisions, plus sportsman, factory stocks, and more. With the late models, Saturday's finale is $6000 to win, and the track has put an additional $1500 bounty on Michael Page, as he's won five straight Ice Bowls. If anyone else can win, they'll get the six gees plus the additional 15 hundred. You can also watch the Ice Bowl over on FloRacing this weekend. The 2022 late model season is officially off and running.

Over at sprintcarunlimited.com this week, Jeremy Elliott has Chris Windom on his weekly podcast and in the show, Windom revealed some more details about his upcoming move from full time non-wing competition to a much larger winged schedule. Windom is joining fellow non-wingers in Tyler Courtney and Kevin Thomas Jr. who've made the switch recently to winged sprint car racing. Courtney did it in 2021 to obviously massive success, grabbing that All Star championships, with Windom and KTJ doing it for 2022. We know Thomas has teamed up with Clayton Snow to tackle the full All Star Circuit of Champions schedule, but we didn't know much about Windom's plans outside of the fact that he talked during the Gateway Dirt Nationals about making the transition. On Jeremy's show he revealed that his non-wing sprint car team in Hayward Motorsports is who he'll be in the wing car with. It sounds like right now the plan is to start the year at Senoia Raceway in Georgia with the All Stars, but from there the full schedule for the team has not been finalized yet. Windom did say he will still do some non-wing stuff between the sprint car with Hayward and the midget with Chad Boat. He is on the Chili Bowl entry list for next week with Boat, who he won the 2020 USAC midget championship with, and finished second in the standings in 2021. Over that two year span in the midget, Windom had 11 wins in 68 races, with 45 top fives and 54 top tens. In USAC sprint car competition, he added another five wins in 70 starts, with 34 top fives and 57 top tens. He's been a fixture in the non-wing world for a while, but don't expect his transition to winged racing to go as smoothly as Sunshine's did. Windom is plenty talented, but he has very little seat time with the wing on in recent years. I have five years of World of Outlaws results and three years of All Star results in the dirtrackr.com database, and I count three starts total between the two series for Windom. He made a single Outlaw appearance in 2020 at Kokomo where he finished sixth in a B-Main, and he made two All Star shows in 2021. He was 24th at East Bay early in the year, and finished 21st at Eldora during the 4-Crown weekend. 2022 feels very much like it will be a learning year for both Windom and the Hayward team and any expectations should reflect that. Remember that for Courtney, he ran a fairly sizeable wing schedule in 2020 to prepare for the full All Star assault he made last year. Not that Windom isn't capable of winning at some point in 2022, but I would not expect him to compete for a championship, and that is if they decided to go full time with a series, which I kind of doubt will happen. I'm excited though to see what both Windom and KTJ can do in 2022. Both are obviously very good race car drivers, and they will definitely add something to these races this season.

There are two shows on the streaming schedule today. Speed Sport has the IMCA Winter Nationals from Cocopah Speedway, and there 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 Thursday. 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!