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Jonathan Davenport going NASCAR Cup racing at Bristol | Daily 3-10-2023

Jonathan Davenport is going Cup racing, the Xtreme Midgets open tonight, and an update on Ashton Torgerson. Let's go!

It's Friday, March 10th, I'm Justin Fiedler. This is DIRTRACKR Daily.

I'm sure by now you've seen the news from yesterday, but if not, here's what went down. When the NASCAR Cup Series returns to Bristol to race on the dirt coming up on April 9th, Jonathan Davenport will be in the field. It was announced yesterday that Superman will pilot a third entry for Kaulig Racing, joining regular drivers Justin Haley and AJ Allmendinger. Davenport's big sponsor is Nutrien Ag Solutions, and Nutrien has been a partner of Kaulig's for several years, so that is your connection. JD will drive the 13 car with Nutrien serving as his primary sponsor. Davenport mentioned yesterday to FloRacing that Steve Martin, who is the General Manager for Nutrien, helped set the whole thing up. Supposedly this has been in the works since September or October of last year, and Davenport has been at a handful of NASCAR races since then to hang out with Kaulig. He mentioned the Roval last season, and he was at the 500 weekend just a few weeks back. I heard about this just about a week ago, and had some NASCAR industry friends confirm it, and I'm honestly surprised it hadn't leaked out sooner. This is a super cool deal, and it will be fun to see JD get the chance. Nice cross-promotion opportunity too for the two disciplines. So now the next question is, how well do we think JD will do at Bristol? Based on past results from dirt drivers doing these one off deals, I'd keep your expectations pretty low. We didn't really have any dirt ringers in the Bristol Cup race in 2022, but we had several in the first race there in 2021. Stewart Friesen was the highest finisher in 23rd, although he's not really a ringer at this point. Jumping from a truck to a Cup car isn't a huge leap. The guys in that race who were making big jumps included Shane Golobic, Chris Windom, and Mike Marlar. Although honestly, Marlar and Windom had past NASCAR experience as well. None of them finished higher than 31st. If we widen the scope and include some of the truck races, we have seen Rico finish third at Eldora, plus top tens from guys like Brian Brown, Logan Seavey, and Bobby Pierce. There are also some not great results in there, including Donny Schatz in a truck at Knoxville getting caught up in a crash and finishing 32nd. The Cup car that Davenport will drive will be dramatically heavier than his super late model, and it will have less horsepower. And that's on top of it not being a car built specifically to race on dirt. That's why the Cup regulars have such an advantage in these situations. Their car experience outweighs track and surface experience for someone like a Davenport. Either way though, it will be fun to watch JD learn and hopefully if he keeps it clean, he'll snag a good finish. Drop me a comment with your early Jonathan Davenport Bristol finish prediction.

Before we move on, we are trying to cross 15,000 subscribers this weekend, and when we do, I'm going to give away some DIRTRACKR shirts. If you want to be in on it, make sure you drop a comment on yesterday's video and subscribe to the channel. We are less 100 away from that 15K mark, so if the momentum continues, we should get there later today or tomorrow. Subscribing to the channel is free, and it helps make sure you don't miss future episodes. For 2023, we're still about 64% of show watchers who aren't subscribed. You can also hit the notification bell to get alerts on when I post new stuff also.

It was about two weeks ago that we last did an update on Ashton Torgerson, who was injured in that insanely scary crash at the Chili Bowl where he came completely out of the car. The family announced yesterday that Ashton has been cleared by doctors and will return to racing this weekend. He'll hop in a micro at Central Arizona Speedway alongside his brother Austin, and the weekend will also include appearances from Kyle Busch and Matt Crafton. If you're in the area, definitely check that one out. Absolutely incredible that Ashton will be back racing again after what we witnessed.

The weather around the country this weekend continues to wreak havoc on dirt races, and we've lost the Short Track Super Series at Hagerstown as well. We were supposed to get a $12,000 to win race there, and Tim McCreadie was going to participate, but now officials are looking for possible reschedule dates. The next date on the calendar for the Short Track Super Series is March 18th at Selinsgrove.

In Illinois though, you hopefully won't have to worry about weather cancelling the Xtreme Outlaw Midget opener, as they are racing indoors at Du Quoin. Tonight and tomorrow kick off their 35 race season, and it will be a good year to be a midget racer. No conflicts between Xtreme and USAC and there are a number of drivers who plan on running both schedules. One of those is Rudeen Racing's Chance Crum. The driver from Washington has been on the rise in recent seasons, showing impressive speed at the Chili Bowl, and leading laps and finishing well with USAC. Crum will contend on both sides in 2023, and Rudeen is planning on adding a non-wing sprint car to their stable for select races around Indiana. No more details were provided, but Crum's efforts and this new non-wing deal join the already sizeable winged sprint car schedule that Rudeen runs with Zeb Wise. Looking at MyRacePass this morning, they've got 35 cars pre-entered for tonight's action and the field is very good. Names like Mitchel Moles, Thomas Meseraull, Cannon McIntosh, Chase Johnson, Zach Daum, Ethan Mitchell, Karter Sarff, Daniel Robinson, Jade Avedisian, Taylor Reimer, Chase McDermand, and many others are expected. Zach Daum is the defending series champion, and he's back to try and do it again, but instead of racing with Bundy Built like he did last season, he's in his own car now. He's partnered with New Zealand's Justin Insley and King Chassis to run his own program. If you want to see the future of motorsports, this is a good place to start. A lot of these drivers are already in development pipelines, and getting chances to race against vets like Daum and TMez will help push these drivers along. Du Quoin is a little race track, and the fighter jets in a gymnasium metaphor applies here. There should be a ton of action both nights, and if you can't get there, DIRTVision will have live coverage.

These weekend streaming schedules continue to ramp up as we get closer to the spring. There have been a bunch of cancellations this week, but there are still plenty of races to check out across DIRTVision, Clay Per View, XR Plus, FloRacing, and more. To see the full daily streaming schedule with links to watch, visit dirtrackr.com/watchtonight.

Have a good Friday out there, we'll see you guys back here on Monday.