Donny Schatz and Tony Stewart Racing are staying in World of Outlaws.
The announcement was made on Friday morning at the Performance Racing Industry trade show that the 10-time World of Outlaws champion would not defect to High Limit Racing and so much of that determination had to do the themes of legacy.
“Once you get that knowledge in the Sprint Car world, the premiere drivers were the Steve Kinsers and the Sammy Swindells and Doug Wolfgangs, the guys that ran the World of Outlaws,” Schatz said in an Outlaws press release. “That was what my goal and my vision and dream was as a young child. So, getting into racing and doing all that you realize that under this World of Outlaws banner the man with the vision was Ted Johnson. I got the great fortune of meeting Ted.”
And yet, Schatz has not looked like a championship threat the past several years, averaging four wins since 2020 when Tony Stewart Racing started developing the Ford Performance Stewart 410 engine platform.
And yet, Schatz has also won the Knoxville Nationals and Kings Royal the past two seasons, so its just a matter of establishing consistency with the engine platform.
“We’ve had some challenges the last several years,” Schatz said. “Part of the engine development program has been real tough on all of us. And I’m not getting any younger, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any slower. Things have changed. This and that. It’s on all of us. It’s not just having performance lacking from engines. Ford has worked hard on getting us what we want. We’ve made some changes We had to change the person doing it halfway through some of this stuff.”
Schatz believes their team has turned a corner.
“We have all these pieces to the puzzle that got scattered out across the table,” Schatz explained. “And now I feel like we have them all in the same spot where we can see the colors and align the corners… I know what I’m capable of. I know what my guys are capable of. I know what our equipment is capable of. We’ve got that stuff in a way better position than we were, and the guys feed off me. You’re going to see a different Donny Schatz in 2024. I need to lead my guys better. My focus has maybe been a little shifted for reasons outside of racing or this or that. I worked on it hard trying to make sure we got all of that right. You definitely will see better results.”
Those are the press release quotes but really last year was even more taxing than he let on to the sanctioning body media outlet.
There were times where Schatz had considered leaving Tony Stewart Racing. There were tense times over the summer when Stewart wasn’t around, tending to other duties, and the 10-time champion just felt a disconnect.
In some ways, winning the Kings Royal, at Eldora, a track Stewart owns might have changed the entire course of their tenure together. Equally, there were moments where Tony Stewart Racing wasn’t guaranteed a return to World of Outlaws either.
There were real frustrations with the financial package for teams, and with Stewart selling the All Stars Circuit of Champions to High Limit, it seemed like a real possibility that some combination of Schatz and TSR could have raced on the new national tour.
But in announcing this decision, Schatz has released a branding line titled #AlwaysAnOutlaw and it seems like he aiming far beyond a 10th series championship.
“We’ve had some challenges the last several years,” Schatz said. “Part of the engine development program has been real tough on all of us. And I’m not getting any younger, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any slower. Things have changed. This and that. It’s on all of us. It’s not just having performance lacking from engines. Ford has worked hard on getting us what we want. We’ve made some changes We had to change the person doing it halfway through some of this stuff.”
Schatz has 310 wins, third on the all-time series list, with 229 of them coming with TSR.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.