Candidly, the Often Imitated, Never Duplicated is hitting differently in the World of Outlaws this year but the Greatest Show on Dirt is absolutely still delivering early in 2024.
David Gravel, in the absence of Brad Sweet taking his 2019-2023 championships to the High Limit Room, is the favorite and has largely raced like it. The Big Game Motorsports No. 2 team has staked an early claim to what would be their first championships but it’s still too early to make any sort of definitive statements.
- David Gravel
- Donny Schatz -58
- Giovanni Scelzi -62
- Carson Macedo -80
- Logan Schuchart -116
- Michael Kofoid -134
- Sheldon Haudenschild -180
- Bill Balog -324
Points spreads don’t tell the whole story because Gravel is one DNF at Paducah away from having an even more commanding lead but everyone else has their share of ifs and buts as well. And ultimately, Gravel knows he’s a potential streak of misfortunes away from being in a dogfight.
“I’m a guy that stays pretty calm and doesn’t get too worked up and you just have to stay level headed as much as you can,” Gravel said after winning at Lincoln Speedway on Wednesday night. “There are highs and lows in this deal and I’ve experienced a lot of both over 10 years now.
“It’s just repetition. When you do it for this long, you learn from the mistakes and try to limit them.”
Resurgent Schatz
Meanwhile, Schatz is second in the standings but isn’t quite back to the form that saw him win 10 championships over two-plus decades but this version of the Tony Stewart No. 15 is inching closer every weekend.
But really, Schatz is just happier than he has been over the past three years where the development of the Ford Performance Stewart 410 left everyone involved in a perpetual state of crisis. It’s no secret that infighting within the team threatened to break them apart until a well-timed victory in the Kings Royal lowered their temperatures.
“Last year felt like a full-blown disaster and it doesn’t feel that way anymore,” Schatz said. “We’re all pulling the same direction and really feel a lot of positivity.”
Schatz went from a perennial championship threat, one that won double digit races every year, to a non-factor for wins virtually overnight. In hindsight, Schatz was seemingly bit by a combination of developing a new engine at the same time Hoosier implemented a new tire compound and it just made for a miserable summer.
In hindsight, Schatz wishes he had done a better job managing expectations and relationships within their group.
“I wasn’t a good leader to these guys last year when we were down,” Schatz said. “I had a poor attitude and that trickles downhill. Everything trickles downhill so I accept the blame on a lot of that.
“When you’ve been on top for so long, it’s hard to swallow not being there and it’s just the nature of the beast when you’re as competitive as I am. That doesn’t make it all right but I’ve had to acknowledge things I could have done better, live up to my mistakes, and put them behind me.”
It’s certainly easier to do when he has won twice and has seven podiums on the season. Again, this isn’t where Schatz expects to be but the year-over-year progress isn’t lost on anyone.
“We have our competition call every Monday with everyone at TSR and then one with Ford, where we try to put our best foot forward with what we’re doing with (engine builder) Ron Shaver and those guys.
“They’re still trying some things and we are too, and it isn’t always great but (on Wednesday at Lincoln) we set fast time on a track with a lot of grip and this thing is just an animal. They’re making really efficient heads and with really good air flow and we just need to do better. We have all the tools.”
Even though the engine is way more competitive, it’s also still a work in progress in the sense that their notebook was previously based off what previous crew chief Ricky Warner established while they were running a Chevrolet block engine.
Now, the Steve Swenson led crew is just now starting to establish their own direction with the platform they’ve raced the past four years.
“As you know, these things aren’t one size fits all and there’s a lot of trial and error when we go to some of these tracks,” Schatz said. “Everyone else has built on their notebooks for years and we’re just now adding our first pages with ours.
“All we can do is keep working on it and once we get it right, we can go on one of those runs David is on. And until then, we just have to keep maximizing our nights and win where we can.”
Streaking Macedo
Don’t look now, but short of the wins that Gravel is running off, no one is hotter right now than Carson Macedo and Jason Johnson Racing. In fact, if not for a disaster of a DIRTcar Nationals, Macedo and the No. 41 team very well could be leading this championship right now.
Like, the first four races produced finishes of 14, 12, 16 and 14. Since then, they’ve only finished outside of the top-5 on three different occasions.
Entering this weekend at Williams Grove, they are on a nine-race top-5 streak, which is how Sweet won his championships.
“I watched Brad a couple years ago win five races and just be in the top five every night and win the championship,” Macedo said, “Like, we won 11 races that year was third so it pays to be consistent. It feels good to win and we’re working hard to get there more but these kinds of finishes is what gets you there.”
To start the year, car owner and crew chief Phillip Dietz was behind in filling out his traveling roster and that certainly didn’t help. Macedo also says the second-year tire has changed his driving style and the wicker bill changes have challenged him around the margins too.
But again, the No. 41 team is right on the cusp of their own heater based on everything that has transpired after the DIRTcar Nationals.
“There have been stretches of my career, where we are so good that we expect to win every time we unload,” Macedo said. “And then, there’s stretches, where even if you’re running good, you just can’t break through.
“So, it just comes down to working on us, staying consistent, keeping our heads down and working towards our goals.”
Buddy: Time to win
Driving for Dennis Roth on the World of Outlaws tour is both a pressure and a privilege and Buddy Kofoid feels both right now.
There has been a grace period of sorts for the two-time USAC National Midget champion in his first full-time season on the tour and second year overall driving a Roth Racing Enterprises No. 83 but now the urgency is starting to kick in.
For one, everyone at Roth feels like their Toyota Racing Development powerplant is starting to bear fruit and provide the durability it lacked over the past year-plus of its refinement phase. Some of Kofoid’s best runs were negated by mechanical failures.
So now, Kofoid says they are starting to run its final form so now it’s time to execute.
“This is the most comfortable I have been in a Sprint Car,” Kofoid said. “Even last year to this year feels like a night and day difference. We had a podium streak where we were like five races out of six and then Eldora was tough and ran six both nights but drove up to second and third.
“Our team has gotten me really comfortable at places I haven’t had a lot of experience at. So I’m thankful for them, the Roths, Mobil1 and Toyota for sticking behind us, trusting us to get this engine going and now I really want to get that first win of the year out of the way.”
Kofoid’s season has a similar profile to Macedo in that there was a lot of trial and error at Volusia and in their case, several blown motors in the cold humidity of Speedweeks.
Since then, Kofoid either finishes in the podium or is racing for it each race and that’s why the pressure to win is mounting. He already has three wins with the World of Outlaws, but it’s different, he says when it’s full-time.
“With the streak of podiums, I haven’t won but it shows we can be there, and there’s pressure because we’ve been so close,” Kofoid said. “It turns into, when is it our turn and when do we get our chance, and it keeps me hungry and the team is hungry to do it.”
Banter and rivalries
Another reason, beyond his improved performance, that Schatz feels good about his championship chances is that he believes Gravel is more susceptible to a handful of DNFs that he is over the course of a full season.
“We’ve dug out of a 200-point hole to win a championship before so fifty-whatever doesn’t concern me at all,” Schatz said. “Its early and that’s doable. You have to have a little bit of luck too.
“And you know David should be a lot further out front but David does dumb David things to put him in this position and he’s going to continue to do that.
“David Gravel is a great racer, but he does do somethings, sometimes to where its like, ‘dude, you’re racing for a championship and you can’t do that but that’s the way he can be sometimes, and he’s going to continue to do those things and he’ll put himself in bad positions and we have to capitalize when he does.”
Gravel said in response that Schatz is just playing mind games with him.
“That’s Donny, he’s like that,” Gravel said. “He says stuff to plant it in your head but I don’t buy into that. If you look back at our DNFs last year, they weren’t issues from crashing. They were from flat tires and breaking a rear end gear at Haubstadt, broke the radius and messed up the wing past halfway.
“That’s not doing anything stupid. Donny is Donny and he’s going to say what he wants and he’s a veteran and is Steady Eddie.
“Have I done stupid things over the years? Yes. We all have and Donny has DNFd more over the past three years than his entire career. The intensity has definitely stepped up and it’s a different type of racing right now and sometimes things happen.”
A great example of all of this is what happened at Paducah when Kofoid threw a slider on both Bill Balog and Gravel. The end result was Gravel crashing out of the race and running across the track under red to have a conversation about what had happened.
There was also a run-in the week before between the two at I-55 Federated Auto Parts Speedway in Pevely, Missouri and that’s what made the tensions between them more notable had this been a one-off.
In real time, Kofoid stood his ground and he says he expects them to be fine.
“We’re all good,” Kofoid said. “We’ve been on the frontstretch stage and podiums since then. We’ve made small talk. I have a lot of respect for David and their team and want to keep that positive. I’ve taken blame for part of it and hope we can keep racing hard and not have any more issues.”
Gravel echoed that sentiment too.
“We haven’t talked about it specifically, but we’ve talked about other things and moved on from it,” he said. “He’s a good dude. He is a very talented race car driver and I just felt like we didn’t have to race that way.
“It kind of reminds me when Macedo first started racing with us. He was hated out here for a bit. But I understand, when you’re driving for Dennis Roth, you have to perform and there’s pressure.
“I also recognize that the style of racing has changed the past 10 years. It’s definitely more aggressive, more slide jobs. I feel like racing used to be way more methodical but even that era had Joey (Saldana) against Donny, Sammy and Jason Meyers. Dale Blaney.
“That’s me and Donny right now, I feel like, and Rico (Abreu) and (James) McFadden are the aggressive guys. That’s just how it is today.”