Dave Kallmann / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via Imagn Content Services, LLC
If there were such a thing, Donny Schatz would be on the Mount Rushmore of sprint car racing but it’s a monument that feels a little defaced these days.
The 10-time World of Outlaws champion averaged over 20 wins a year from 2006 to 2019 but this decade has provided very little to celebrate on a nightly basis. Schatz has still won 28 times over the past five years and two of them were the Knoxville Nationals and Kings Royal. However, consistency has completely eluded them with championship finishes of third, fourth, fourth and sixth since the turn of the decade.
Of course, that downturn has also coincided with the development of the Ford Performance Stewart 410 engine — a completely messy process that nearly tore one of the most successful race teams of the past decade apart from within.
Stewart has an increasingly busier schedule and is spending more and more time with his wife and their NHRA endeavors. Both morale and communication had reached rock bottom by June. Schatz couldn’t find the feel he wanted across the entire schedule no matter what they tried.
Put it all together and the inconsistency and friction nearly drove Schatz to leave Tony Stewart Racing altogether.
Then, fortuitously, they won Kings Royal at Eldora in July with Stewart in attendance. The triumph took some edge off everything that had started to unravel over the spring and early summer. They all sat down together and hashed it out.
Schatz owned some things he could have done better and they ultimately agreed to another season in 2024. It’s an effort that the 10-time champion says will look considerably different from the past three years.
“The performance hasn’t been there, my personality hasn’t been there and the past several years was a snowball effect,” Schatz said on Friday at World of Outlaws media day at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “When it rained, it poured. We didn’t have the best performance, struggled to get things pointed the right direction and we needed a fresh mindset.
“We had some highlights but we have to put the whole package together and it’s not just the cars at the race track. A lot of things in my life had changed in a drastic manner here and there. I didn’t cope with a lot of things like I should have.
“We all make mistakes. We all have errors or cope with things different and the first step was acknowledging that we needed to change our mindset and I have the past six months. Right now, it looks good and everything is pointed in the direction we feel it needs to be going.”
And again, those candid conversations only transpired because they won Kings Royal, benefiting that night from the format, track conditions and a degree of fortune. They also raced the Eldora Million and Jokers Wild that week and it provided TSR an opportunity to troubleshoot their entire operational approach.
“We ran a lot of different engine set-ups that week and come Friday night, (crew chief) Scuba (Steve Swenson) and I sat down and it was like, ‘what do we try now’ and he said we could pull the upstairs car down, one from last year, with a motor that hasn’t been redone and I said ‘we have nothing to lose.’
“We won the race, and track conditions played out in a way where, the stars just aligned but it set the table for how we all looked at what we were doing.”
Schatz said he and Swenson were just getting lost in all the different options they gave themselves. They had so many different levers to pull that they never really committed to one package, at a variety of tracks, before moving on to the next one.
Being in Ohio for a solid week, with four races in a row at Eldora, gave them a lot of time to sit down and work through their process.
“That weekend forced us to figure out that we needed to sit down and try to simplify some of these combinations,” Schatz said. “We needed to pinpoint the combination that ran the way we wanted it to, or close to it, where were just trying to force some things that just weren’t realistic.
“Scuba did a great job with it. What gives me excitement this year, is that when you need to throw a Hail Mary, you can sometimes throw two and he won us one of the biggest races of the year. We’ve learned from all of this. We’ve taken some wrong paths but we’ve learned from all of it.”
It also needs to be remembered that this is actually the second attempt at developing the Ford Performance Stewart 410 as initial development was handled by Andy Durham but then transferred to Ron Shaver, initially a consultant, in 2021.
There was also the COVID pandemic, which challenged supply chains across the entire industry, making it even harder to develop a new engine platform.
“There is a lot of trial and error and one thing I’ve learned about racing is that you learn a lot of what not to do first before you learn what to do,” Schatz said. “We learned everything not to do. … I don’t know that there was a turning point because we’ve been so hit and miss.
“We’ve won Knoxville Nationals and Kings Royal with this program. We just haven’t put the whole puzzle together from a championship standpoint and what you need from the big tracks to the little tracks. When you take 10 different engine setups, it came down to flipping a quarter over what we were going to try each night.”
Schatz said they have tested a great deal over the winter and what they have uncovered is a legitimate reason for optimism. And where a 10-time champion, and 313-race winner, typically wouldn’t have anything to prove three decades into his career, the past three years have provided a degree of motivation.
“I’ve worked hard to get to the top of this industry but I also feel like I’ve been at the bottom too,” Schatz said. “The work ethic on both sides is the same. You work just as hard to be where you want to be as you do to get out of where you don’t want to be.
“I’m a competitive person and I’ve worked a long time to build the Donny Schatz brand to where it is today. I think I’ve learned a level of respect with the fans and my fellow racers and that’s what keeps me going.
“The competition is why I’m motivated. When you want to race with the Outlaws, or a national series, you better be competitive. You have to be a competitive person. You set out to win an Outlaws race, you do that, but then you’re not complete. You’re not done. Then there’s championships but you’re still not done.
“I don’t have anything to prove but I still want to prove that I’m competitive. It’s what drives me. It doesn’t change if I win one race, 500 races, that doesn’t define me. The competition does.”
And that competition is driving him towards what he hopes is a return to form and another championship caliber season.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.