Right now, I’m watching dirt track racing via streaming service. I will also watch it tomorrow. The day after I may attend even attend a race. But how did I get here precisely?
To answer this question, we must first assign blame to a certain Stephen Tyler. Not that one. A different one. Stephen is a friend of mine who I met through the much maligned Twitter because we had shared interests in motorsports and boxing. We’ve hung out quite a bit in the last two years and he’s a pretty excellent travel partner. But I digress. Stephen grew up on the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Long before joining the military and going to law school, his family was one that grew up around dirt track racing. Hopefully I’m not oversharing by bringing up that his alleged first race attended was when he was only a day or two old (his mother confirmed this).
Stephen slowly worked me into possibly borrowing his FloRacing account for a short period of time just long enough that I wound up watching pretty much the entire Alphabet Soup at the Chili Bowl in 2019. He knows his stuff, and he provided context to what was happening. I’d been heading that direction for awhile and getting myself acquainted doing things like “attending races” but this was the final push. And that was pretty sufficient. Short answer, I know. OK, OK, there’s more to it than just seeing one set of races that I now attend to explain how I decided this was such an entertaining thing to see/attend/whatever.
So to that end, I must describe to you what Dirt Track Racing is at a larger level. First of all, let’s get this out of the way: dirt track racing is dense. It is a really dense, deep, deep thing. It is not like other sports. It is not like other racing. It is really it’s own thing, an artifact of a time long ago that has passed everything by except this. And in surviving the way it has, dirt track racing has become a sort of perfect thing for the streaming, everything-is-uber-niche era of media. And perfect for me.
If you know me personally or know of me, you are aware that I did things like travel around the world to ride over 1000 roller coasters. If I am into a thing, I am committed to it or just super casual. To this sport, I was generally casual for a long time because I had no method to interface with it regularly. Until the Chili Bowl. After the Chili Bowl of 2019 when I got my own Flo account, I suddenly came to realize that there was infinite content of all sorts on the service. I watched Flo so frequently that it supplanted regular television. Plus I could take it anywhere - mobile devices and laptops fed it to me in Montana motel rooms and airports. I could stay connected and know what was happening. And that is crucial, because as I stated before, it is deep.
What do I mean by deep? Well, let’s think about baseball. If you know anything about the sociological aspects of baseball, you understand that while every ballpark is a diamond, none of them are exactly alike. They each represent aspects of the surrounding area in design, in food offerings, in views, in name. Dirt track racing is no different. Every track is an oval of some sort, but they are all different. They all have their own characteristics and each favors certain driving styles. They range from the mile circuits at Springfield and Duquoin to the 1/5 mile at Millbridge and even shorter tracks intended karts and “micros.”
”
Most of the tracks in the US operate weekly events, with cash payouts to drivers for performance in each race and also for a track championship. In many cases, geography and collaboration amongst tracks permits drivers to race for multiple track titles on a weekly basis with one track running Friday shows, another track running Saturday shows, and a third on Sundays or Thursdays. Beyond the tracks themselves are touring series which travel around the US. These bring higher caliber drivers and bigger paydays to these same tracks when they visit. The secret sauce then: The weekly drivers and the touring drivers are racing under the same rule sets, whether it be 410 Sprints, Big Block Modifieds, or Late Models. Also, geography determines what somewhere favors. Central New York is all about mods. Indiana is traditional sprint car country; wings not needed. The South loves them some redneck Ferraris, AKA late models.
How often do the touring series visit these different tracks? Well, the 2023 World of Outlaws Sprint Car schedule opened with 87 races and wound up even adding more. 87. They’re the biggest series in sprint cars, but not alone. Among other 410 winged sprint series (410 = 410 cubic inches, the maximum legal displacement of the engines), there’s the All Star Circuit of Champions, the Interstate Racing Series, and the Northern Auto Racing Club just to name a few. Plus the aforementioned track championships. There are literally thousands of such events just for winged 410 sprint cars on a yearly basis. One specific branch of one type of car.
Getting into dirt track racing and really being into it means you learn what track championships mean the most (hint: direct correlation with prize money and attendance), and those drivers can be every bit as good as the touring drivers. Last year in 2022, the top money winner of any sprint car driver was not a touring driver, but the entirely freelance Brent Marks, a member of the “Pennsylvania Posse” known for picking and choosing races across the country to participate in on the cost to enter and potential earnings if he finished well. There’s not just 20 names to recall like in F1. There are many, many, many names from the West Coast to New England to Florida. Hundreds.
Among these names include some of the best drivers in the nation - 2021 NASCAR Cup Champion Kyle Larson is dominating the race I’m watching right now from Attica, Ohio, and other NASCAR talents like 2020 Champ Chase Elliott, 2023 Daytona 500 winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Alex Bowman, Chase Briscoe, and Christopher Bell have all gotten behind the wheel of a dirt car in the last year or so. Two-time Cup Champ Kyle Busch spends most Wednesdays at Millbridge where you can go shake his hand and see him run a micro against fellow Cup star Ross Chastain or NHRA Pro Stock Champ Tanner Grey for $15. Tony Stewart came from dirt. Jeff Gordon came from dirt. Mario Andretti came from dirt. AJ Foyt came from dirt. The talent in dirt racing, by all of their admissions, as good as any in the racing world.
Racing has always been about money. You cannot compete in the Daytona 500 without an outlay of many, many millions of dollars. All major professional motorsports have “ride buyers” - people who would not be able to compete unless someone bought their seat for them. I know well enough that many of the best who ever drove were, at some point, a ride buyer. Fernando Alonso bought his way into Minardi. Niki Lauda bought his way into BRM. “Ride buying” effectively does not exist in dirt racing. You just own your own car. If you succeed, great. If you don’t, well, it’s your money. Dirt racing then is essentially a meritocracy in a way no other motorsport is. Literally anyone can show up for a fraction of the cost of a Cup car and race and beat Kyle Larson if you have the talent. Money is sufficient for the best in dirt racing to simply not chase being in NASCAR; why hustle backwards and pay to play?
Many drivers also make as much or more on merch sales at the track (where they get all the profit vs. 5% as I’ve seen alleged from NASCAR’s Fanatics deal), with some easily netting 6 figures in a major weekend from selling shirts and stickers. This all comes down to the sport being barnstorming by it’s very nature. Drivers often compete over 100 times a year, coast-to-coast, with tracks from Fairbanks to El Paso. And there’s even a live scene for the style in New Zealand and Australia, with drivers crossing over to compete in the most significant/high paying events during the respective off-seasons in those regions.
Oh, one last thing: the events. So instead of sitting and watching one race that is 400 laps or whatever, the racers qualify, are split into heats, and from their performance in the heats, they are seeded into “mains”. Every big show becomes March Madness. And the bigger the shows, the madder the madness. The Chili Bowl draws nearly 400 entrants each each, 90% of whom show up on Saturday where they are seeded in brackets from the Feature to the R-main. And yet, if all goes wrong in your heats and qualifying, you can still progress through raw, unfiltered competition to get to the Feature (sometimes also referred to as an A-main) as the Cinderella of all Cinderellas.
There is a reality I also have to mention - dirt racing is dangerous. I don’t endorse this aspect obviously, but the cars are outrageously fast and are often on tracks where the safety measures can be questionable, to say the least. Understand that while an F1 car costs two orders of magnitude more than a 410 sprint car, 410 sprint cars actually produce equivalent levels of downforce while also having a higher power to weight ratio. On dirt. Literally dirt. Not an entirely solid surface. Clay. Sand. It gets dusty. These cars make NASCAR’s top series look like they are standing still when operating on a shifting surface from a speed perspective. And it has some of the best and biggest names from NASCAR and occasionally other major series like Indycar or sports cars as well. It’s also substantially cheaper to attend.
March Madness 4-5-6 times a night, every Friday and Saturday for 40+ weeks a year at minimum. Super Duper March Madness multiple times a year at Tulsa, Knoxville, Williams Grove, Eldora, Huset’s, and more. A cavalcade of unique venues. A parade of stories and legends going back generations, each with their own sort of individual “lore” you can learn about. Fast. Loud. Danger. Nothing in sports is as organic as what dirt track racing is. Is it perfect? No. Is anything?