DIRTRACKR Daily Podcast - Episode Transcript
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The dirt late model industry blindspot that was evident at World Finals, plus more from the weekend | Daily 11-7-2022
Champions crowned, history made, a late model industry blindspot, and more from a big weekend of dirt racing. Let's go!
It's Monday, November 7th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily.
World Finals is in the books, and with it the 2022 season for the World of Outlaws and Super DIRTcar Series are complete. We knew in advance that Matt Sheppard and Dennis Erb Jr. would be champions of their respective series, and they were crowned over the weekend. The one championship still in doubt was on the sprint car side, but Brad Sweet and the KKR49 team never blinked all weekend. Podium finishes Wednesday and Friday, with a top five Saturday was more than enough to top David Gravel and the Big Game team. Gravel ended up with results of sixth, 10th, and 11th on the weekend. Wednesday it was issues in the dash, Friday he went backwards in his heat and missed the dash, and Saturday they had damage from an incident in the dash, and fell to 11th late in the feature. The final points margin was 48. That's about 24 positions over the season. So Brad Sweet is now a four time World of Outlaws champion, with only Steve Kinser and Donny Schatz now having more titles than Brad. Those two are also the only others to win four straight. In 71 appearances this year, Brad ended up with five wins, 43 top fives, 61 top tens, and an average finish of 5.78. It's actually the highest average finish of Sweet's four titles, but was more than enough this season. And strangely, Brad had a negative feature plus/minus for the season. I do continue to wonder if we'll ever see Gravel break through for a championship. He is no question one of the top drivers in the sport right now, and is a sure fire hall of famer when his career is done. But we've seen this same story from him time and time again. He can run really well, win a bunch of races, but he's just missing that little bit extra to go the distance. And I say that as a big David Gravel fan. Looking at 2022 specifically, the deficiencies for Gravel were really in features. He continues to be the best qualifier in the series, and he and Brad had the exact same heat race average finish. He did have four less top five starts than Sweet, and five less top ten starts. And both of his efficiency numbers were lower than Brad, meaning when he started top five and top ten, he was not protecting those spots as well as Sweet. He started outside the top ten 11 times to Brad's six, but incredibly converted 10 of those 11 into top ten finishes. It's pretty wild that in 71 races, Brad only started outside the top ten six times. Going forward, Gravel and the two team just have to continue to try and find ways to be consistent and maximize their feature finishes.
As for the weekend's features, Logan Schuchart was the Wednesday winner, with Donny Schatz taking the victories on Friday and Saturday. It was a nice way to end what was a tough season for Schatz and the TSR 15. They were not a factor for the title, and had their worst average finish in a long time. Hat tip to Cole Macedo for a nice run on Friday. I believe that fourth place result was his best career Outlaw finish. So now the teams will have three months to rest and recover and get ready for next season. You will see several guys head down under to race in Australia over the coming months. We'll also have to wait and see about full timers for next season, and how the High Limit stuff could affect teams. There was supposedly a meeting around World Finals to discuss some of this, but I haven't heard what ended up coming out of that. We do know that James McFadden will return full time to the Roth 83 next year with Toyota power. It was not a great sophomore season for JMac, and the pressure will really be on that team to perform in 2023. Dennis Roth is not known to be a patient man when it comes to his race car drivers. There are rumors of potentially two additions for next year, and maybe one high profile departure. We should also get a schedule announcement in the coming weeks.
On the late model side, weekend wins went to Mike Marlar, Tanner English, and Jonathan Davenport. The Thursday win for English clinched him the rookie of the year battle and second place in points over Max Blair. English is set to make his debut in the Viper car this coming weekend with the XR Super Series in Las Vegas. The car is mostly black with blue accents, and the number 96V. He's replacing Blair who is headed over to partner with Boom Briggs. In his first weekend in the Rocket house car, Hudson O'Neal had finishes of 13th, fifth, and eighth. He did lead a bunch of laps on Saturday night, but was no match for the charging Jonathan Davenport, who went eighth to the win. Dennis Erb Jr. closed out his championship run with finishes of sixth, eighth, and third. His crew chief Heather Lyne was once again the series' crew chief of the year, and she becomes the first woman to win a national touring late model championship as a crew chief. It was a big moment for the sport and for her to earn the award and the title. Erb finished the season with four wins, 22 top fives, and 35 top tens in 43 races. This one was never in doubt down the stretch. Looking ahead, the late model world will be split this coming weekend, with the Flo series finale at Senoia and XR out in Las Vegas. Big money is available at both events, and quality cars are expected for each. We'll talk more about these shows later in the week.
I felt like the best racing of the weekend at Charlotte may have been with the modifieds. We had great battles all three nights, with Mat Williamson taking two of three wins, and Mathieu Desjardins picking up his first career victory on Friday. Matt Sheppard was crowned champion, but he was actually out of the race both Friday and Saturday with mechanical issues. Friday he bowed out from the lead, which opened the door for Desjardins. It didn't matter though, as Sheppard was super dominant all season across the northeast modified scene. With the Super DIRTcar Series, he ended up with seven wins, 13 top fives, and 15 top tens in 19 races. Congrats to all three series champions who were crowned on Saturday night at Charlotte.
I did end up spending some time at the track on Saturday night wandering around again with my camera gear. It was a great atmosphere, and this is an event I would definitely put on your list to attend. I do think the move to four days was good, and we got to see a bunch of racing, and the shows were done at a reasonable hour every night. If you didn't see them already, I posted pit walk videos from both the sprint car and late model pits. I'll link to them in the video description below. And while we are talking about content, there is a noticeable difference between the sprint cars and late models when it comes to content being captured at the track. Camera people are everywhere in the sprint car pits, and nowhere in the late model pits. I've called the late model world out for this multiple times in the past few years, and have gotten quite a bit of hate for it, but it continues to be a massive blind spot for them. Dirt racing is incredibly slow to adopt new technologies and new ways of thinking, and they are very much behind the open wheel side on this. It's a shame, because they are literally leaving money on the table by not jumping in with more of their own coverage across the social media platforms. And I've heard all the excuses for why they don't do it, and that's fine. Stick to those excuses. But it's never been easier than it is right now to grow your own fanbase and make money, and they just flat refuse to get on board. It's something that continues to baffle me.
One other quick story for you. Me and my son were standing in line on Saturday afternoon to get him a drink and some nachos, the kid loves nachos, and I looked up at the guy in front of me in line to see my own logo on the back of his shirt. It took me a minute to register what I was seeing, but it was super cool that somebody was wearing one of my shirts at the track. I complimented his shirt choice and he said he was a regular watcher. That was one of several interactions I had with some of you through the couple of days I was at the track, and it's incredibly awesome to get the response I did. I appreciate you guys tuning in and we'll continue to keep this thing going. If you want to grab a shirt, or a hat, or sticker for yourself, head over to shop.dirtrackr.com.
Alright, elsewhere around the country there are a few other things to note. At Perris for the Oval Nationals and the final USAC sprint car weekend of the year, Brady Bacon won two of three nights, but it wasn't enough to catch Justin Grant. JG had weekend runs of second, eighth, and sixth, and wrapped up his first career sprint car championship with USAC. It was USAC title number two, joining his Silver Crown championship from 2020. In 39 races, he picked up six wins, 24 top fives, and 37 top tens, and is taking home a cool $50,000. Robert Ballou was the other weekend winner. The USAC midgets being their final stretch of races starting November 15th at Bakersfield.
Also in California, Justin Sanders swept the sprint car weekend at Stockton, between the Sprint Car Challenge Tour and NARC 410s. Andy Forsberg picked up his first series championship with the Sprint Car Challenge Tour, while Dominic Scelzi was confirmed as the NARC champion by just rolling out to qualify. A couple of notes. Ryan Timms was in attendance in the Works Limited 57. He finished sixth in the NARC feature. Also, really glad to see Willie Croft walk away from his scary crash. He had issues before the 410 feature even started, spending some time in the work area. And then just a few laps in, he climbed the right rear of Colby Copeland in turn three and went for a big ride, tumbling through the opening in the wall basically back into the work area. It was a wild moment, but thankfully he was okay.
Other weekend late model winners included Garrett Alberson bagging $10 grand at Duck River on Sunday, Jensen Ford won their on Friday. Zack Dohm and RJ Conley were late model winners at Atomic Speedway. I know it was a mess there at Atomic, and I think we'll dive into that on tomorrow's show. Stay tuned if you are interested in that story.
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, have a good Monday. Please hit that like button, and subscribe to the show if you don't already.
Thanks everybody for tuning in, I'll see you tomorrow for more DIRTRACKR Daily!