Logan Schuchart might be the most ambivalent millionaire imaginable.
For one, winning the Eldora Sprint Car Million didn’t really make him a millionaire and most of what Shark Racing earns goes right back into their family owned and operated team resource pool but Schuchart just wanted more out of this past season.
“The Million in July makes it a very successful season, but when you take away that race, I don’t know how I feel about it,” Schuchart told Sportsnaut prior to the World Finals at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Schuchart finished his 10th full-time World of Outlaws season with six wins and 26 top-5s with a 8.83 average finish, fifth in the final standings behind Brad Sweet, David Gravel, Carson Macedo and Giovanni Scelzi.
It’s not a huge deviation from where they have run since their near championship campaign in 2020 but that runner-up season is closer to what Schuchart, team owner Bobby Allen and team general manager Bill Klingbeil have aimed for.
“I felt like we could come out and be a lot more consistent this year and it hasn’t been there,” Schuchart said. “It seems like we’re really high or really low so now we have a little bit of an off-season to kind of sit down, look at things, figure out how we can be better in certain areas.”
Shark Racing has a good support group around Schuchart but the veteran Pennsylvania driver effectively serves as his own crew chief too. These technical decisions ultimately fall on his lap in addition to the race craft related stuff.
“Well last year Logan won $310,000 on year,” Klingbeil said. “This year right now without the million, he’s at $280,000 so we’re kind of apples-to-apples with where we are.
“He’s, he won six outlaw shows this year so we’re having a decent year but he wants to be a champion, we want double digit wins and we don’t want to have 12-13 finishes outside of the top-10 because that’s how you beat (Sweet and Gravel) and that’s our ultimate goal. We want to be World of Outlaws champion.”
Schuchart hasn’t even had a chance to really sit down and figure out where they need to get better. He knows they need to be more consistent but there isn’t just one thing or track type or performance related metric that stands out as the difference between their best and worst days on the tour.
“Working with these group of guys, I think we can continue to communicate better, work better as a team and use all of our assets to make us better across the board,” Logan Schuchart said. “There are a lot of great teams out there but I think we match up with them. We have the people.
“So we need to go back and look at our notes and understand, what made us good at our best race tracks and where can we improve at other types of tracks. If you look at the win category, it stays pretty stead but the top-5s and top-10s is what we need to improve on from between 2020 to now.
“We’re going in the right direction but like I said, I’m looking forward to spending the winter sitting down with the team and understand the areas where we can improve.”
This kind of talk makes if sound like a disappointment, and its not, but Schuchart again just really wants to be a champion. It’s something he talks about frequently. But if you are unable to win a championship, winning what could have been a once in a lifetime achievement in taking a million dollar to win Sprint Car season is a more than acceptable alternative.
“Obviously, I’m very proud of it,” Schuchart said. “That race track has been very good to us over the years and the moment they decided to run a million dollar to win race at Eldora, we circled that on the schedule. I knew we would have a great shot at winning that race.
“I felt like we would be a top-five favorite to win, but to go out and string two really good days and win the thing is still so wild to me. To win that kind of money in one night in one night is just unbelievable. I’m very thankful that we could go out and race for that kind of money in one night and much less be able to come out on top of it.”
But true to form, he is just more occupied with the goal he has had since he was a kid. He wants to be a champion and that will consume him and Shark Racing until racing resumes in February.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.