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Xtreme Outlaw Midgets debut with Larson, Briscoe, more; Scott Ronk is mad at FloRacing and NOS | Daily 5-24-2022

The Xtreme Outlaw midgets debut tonight at Millbridge, we've got Tuesday night big blocks again, plus Terre Haute promoter Scott Ronk calls out FloRacing and NOS Energy Drink. Let's do this.

Today is Tuesday, May 24th, two thousand and twenty two. Welcome into DIRTRACKR Daily. I'm Justin Fiedler.

After rain spoiled the Monday debut at Millbridge, the Xtreme Outlaw Midget Series will finally get on track tonight to kick off their inaugural season. The season opener was originally supposed to happen at Farmer City back in March during the Illini 100 weekend, but those race nights were lost to weather as well. It's cloudy this morning in the Charlotte area as I work on this show, but the rain chances are very low today after we had heavy storms roll through on Monday, so we should be good to go. Just as a quick refresh, the Xtreme Outlaw Series were started by World Racing Group for this year as the return to non-wing racing for really the first time in decades. They are running non-wing 410 sprint cars, which have already had a few events, and midgets under the Xtreme Outlaw banner. Casey Shuman is leading the charge for WRG, alongside his normal duties as series director for the World of Outlaws Late Models. The Xtreme Outlaw Series for the most part is playing nice with the other non-wing organizations in terms of rules and scheduling, but the question of how long that will be the case remains to be seen. If this new venture gains momentum and is successful, you have to think they are directly challenging USAC down the road. All that aside though, tonight and tomorrow are shaping up to be packed nights of racing at Millbridge. At last check the entry list was over 50 midgets, and it includes the biggest teams and drivers in the sport. We'll have entries from Keith Kunz, Chad Boat, Dave Mac and Reinbold Underwood, with drivers like Kyle Larson, Chase Briscoe, Ryan Timms, Kaylee Bryson, Cannon McIntosh, Zach Daum, Brent Crews, and Nick Hoffman. And you can throw in a little more NASCAR flavor with John Hunter Nemecheck and Carson Hocevar also competing as well. I could be incorrect, but I believe this will be the first time we've seen Larson back in a midget since Chili Bowl way back in January. If you don't know about Millbridge, it's an eighth mile track here in the Charlotte area that puts on regular racing both during the week and on weekends. Normally we see a heavy dose of outlaw karts and micro sprint action there. It's become quite the weekday hotspot, and you can often find Christopher Bell, and Larson, and Hoffman and any number of other well known drivers getting in some laps. This won't be the first time they've had midgets, but it will be the first time for an event this size with the midgets. This will be a good opportunity tonight to check out some of the young and up and coming names in the sport mixing it up with the heavy hitters. I'm not going to officially do win picks for the next two nights, but Larson has to be the favorite. He's the pied piper at this point and he's won a bunch at Millbridge. If you aren't nearby this week and want to tune in, DIRTVision has the live streams.

If you aren't into midgets, maybe you're a modified guy and will be stoked about some midweek Short Track Super Series action tonight. The south region for the Brett Deyo-owned series is headed to New Egypt Speedway tonight with $5000 going to the winner. With two races complete for the south, Mike Maresca holds a very slight five point advantage over Ryan Godown currently. Matt Sheppard and Mike Gular are third and fourth, and Jordan Watson, Mike Mahaney, and Anthony Perrego are all in a three way tie for fifth. Godown won the south opener at Port Royal back on March 20th, and Stewart Friesen took round two at Delaware about a month ago. We should see names like Perrego, Mahaney, Friesen, Watson, Matt Stangle, Godown, Sheppard, and Ryan Krachun tonight along with plenty of others. Perrego is the defending race winner from last year, he topped Mahaney and Max McLaughlin that night. As a quick side note, I haven't jumped into stats and analysis for the northeast modifieds, but if you are looking for stuff like that, check out racestatecentral.com. There is a ton of information available there, similar to what I have in the analytics section of dirtrackr.com. Tonight's program at New Egypt also includes Crate 602 sportsman and four cylinders, with grandstands opening at 5 and hot laps at 6:30. The Short Track Super Series can be watched live on FloRacing.

Over the weekend at the Terre Haute Action track in Indiana, the USAC National Sprint Cars had two races, one Friday, and one on Sunday that had to be moved from Saturday because of weather. As we talked about yesterday, CJ Leary won the Friday show, his first ever at the track, and Robert Ballou won on Sunday, his third Hulman Classic victory. We've followed the progress of Terre Haute a bit here on the show this year, but if you aren't aware, the operation of the track was taken over in the offseason by new promoters. Scott Ronk and Bernie Stuebgen are now running the facility, and in the months since have put in a lot of time and resources to fix up the place. They have put in a ton of new guardrail to make the track safer, and have made other changes and improvements. But apparently after the Sunday night program was complete, Ronk was unhappy with how things went and he took to social media to voice his frustration. In his tweets he blamed FloRacing for killing attendance and called out NOS Energy Drink and Lauren Albano for passing out free drinks while his track is trying to sell a competing brand; Bang Energy drinks in this instance. Every USAC event is obviously live on FloRacing, and NOS Energy Drink is a big sponsor for not only USAC, but several teams and also the World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series. It's pretty common for NOS to have a trailer in the midway at races where they give away their product. That's pretty standard operating procedure at sporting events all over the world with sponsors and partners like this. I've been thinking about these tweets since I saw them on Sunday night and I wanted to point out a few things. First, Ronk and Bernie and their crew have clearly spent a lot of time and money to make moves at Terre Haute. They are obviously business guys, so they hope their investment in the track will pay off. This weekend of USAC sprint car racing apparently did not do that. Promoting races and running tracks are very tough things to do well, and sometimes you can do everything right ahead of time and still not get paid off, for any number of factors. Weather, traffic, the economy, the state of the racing, etc. As a guy that is as deep into dirt racing as Ronk is, I'd assume he knows that better than anyone, but I'm a little perplexed by his takes and his tweets. When you schedule certain series, you have to know that those races are going to bring certain stipulations. In the case of USAC, that means a Flo broadcast and NOS as a sponsor. I'm not intimately familiar with the USAC sanction agreements for these races, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say those things are mentioned in the paperwork that Ronk agreed to when he scheduled these races. Never mind the fact that I'm sure Ronk has been to countless races of this type in the past, so he's seen all of this. As the guy in charge of running the track, if he wasn't okay with these stipulations, why schedule the event? I personally think it's incredibly short sighted to blame streaming services for a lack of attendance, but if you really feel like they are keeping fans from the track, just put on races that don't offer live streams. Or put on racing with a streaming service you control or influence. There are plenty of examples of tracks doing things like this. In the case of this weekend, something tells me that if Flo didn't broadcast the racing and NOS wasn't on the property giving away free cans of GT grape and sonic sour, the financial results of the weekend wouldn't have been any different. We can certainly get into conversations about streaming and rights and revenue shares, and all of that, but there is no question that having more racing available for fans to view is a net positive for the sport. The extra cash in the pipelines and extra exposure are good. Full stop. And in the case of NOS Energy Drink, I find it interesting that he chose to attack a company that has pumped in a lot of money to dirt racing in recent years, probably millions at this point, between their team and event and series sponsorships. I understand his frustration, and it sucks to have a bad weekend and lose money. But I think his focus is on the wrong factors. Do conversations need to happen between the series and tracks and streaming services about revenue? Possibly. How do you decide who gets what pieces of the pie will be an ongoing conversation, and one that probably doesn't have one correct answer. NASCAR and the other major racing series all over the world continue to struggle with what the most viable models for revenue are. Our sport isn't alone in that by any stretch of the imagination. But with dirt racing and streaming, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube now. It's easy to look around and say that fans didn't come because they watched on FloRacing and that's bad. And that you didn't sell more energy drinks because NOS was giving theirs away. But in reality, there are bigger issues to solve here, and those need to be the ones tracks and series are focused on. How can these events be marketed and promoted better and for reasonable costs. How can we continue to improve the at track experience so fans will come regardless of streaming options. What facility upgrades need to be made. These questions and plenty of others in this same vein have nothing to do with races broadcasted over mobile apps or free caffinated sugar water. Promoters can continue to blame things on low hanging fruit tha don't really matter, or they can spend their time coming up with solutions and making things happen.

Speaking of the much hated streaming services...

There are three shows on the streaming slate for today. DIRTVision has the Xtreme Outlaw midgets from Millbridge, and FloRacing has the Short Track Super Series from New Egypt and Flo 24/7. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.

That's it for the show today, have a good Tuesday. 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!