(Photo: Superstar Racing Experience)
By Aaron Bearden

Fresh off of an eventful 50-lap feature at Eldora Speedway, Tony Stewart and Ray Evernham each had smiles on their faces.

Another successful week was complete… With more opportunities to improve moving forward.

Stewart had risen from the back after coming to pit road — he claimed that he thought he hit the kill switch and had to cycle the electronics — and fended off a fierce late challenge from USAC Silver Crown star Kody Swanson to score his second Camping World SRX victory, prevailing in his own series at his own track to the delight of a packed house of fans in Western Ohio. He emerged from his No. 20 machine and was embraced by a cascade of cheers, fireworks and pyro.

After Stewart left victory lane, he shared quick chat with Evernham in the infield before the pair parted ways and rolled on to their next tasks.

A former Cup crew chief and NASCAR team owner, Evernham had just watched the series he founded with Stewart reach the halfway point of its first season, delivering an action-packed show that saw contact, crashes and even heated tempers between two of the recognizable stars running full-time in the Superstar Racing Experience field.

The new short track tour had put on an enthralling event and Evernham appeared content. But he knew he had a couple things to manage in the upcoming week.

Multiple cars needed repairs. A few relationships on-track might, too.

“As race director, I’ve got a couple phone calls to make the people this week,” Evernham said. “(I’ll have to) say ‘Look, this is for fun.'”

It’s likely the phone calls he needed to make were to 2003 CART title winner Paul Tracy and 2000 NASCAR Cup Series champion Bobby Labonte. Tracy was battling Labonte during the middle section of Saturday’s feature when he ran into the back of the Texan’s car, sending him spinning and crashing out of the race in spectacular fashion.

Tracy walked over to a frustrated Labonte and attempted to apologize after the race, but Labonte was still upset. The pair engaged in a heated discussion before going their separate ways.

“I was running with Bobby (Labonte) and I just stuffed it,” Tracy told Motorsports Beat. “I was running the high line and he was running kind of on the bottom. I tried to change up my line, and do the same thing that (Stewart) did to me — just stuff it down his inside, do a slide job —  and I got it all wrong, tagged Bobby and turned him around. It wasn’t cool.

“I wouldn’t do that to him on purpose,” he continued. “And he’s pretty mad at me, but it’s justified.”

(Note: Labonte walked away from his car while the author was talking with Tracy and couldn’t be found for comment afterward.)

Labonte wasn’t the only one with something to say about Tracy at night’s end. After a difficult first two weeks at Stafford Motor Speedway and Knoxville Raceway, Tracy had found pace around Eldora. He led laps and contended for a podium spot throughout the feature, putting together a run that he felt showed he had “one of the best cars on the track all night” and proved he had adapted quickly despite admitting that he was “not a dirt guy.”

In many ways, Tracy was one of the stars of the show. But his trademark aggression had led to contact with numerous drivers. Labonte got the worst of it, but there were nervy restarts with Helio Castroneves and Willy T. Ribbs also fell afoul of a bump from the Canadian-American early on.

“Man. I mean that guy was teeing off on everybody,” Ribbs cracked afterward. “I had a good start in the beginning, but he got into me pretty hard on the back stretch on the second lap.

“But I got into him, too,” he added with a smile.

That mixture of joy and frustration has come to define the series for its dozen competitors each week. Everyone driving in the tour knows they’re primarily doing so just to have fun, but they’re still racers. The competitive edge never fades. Expectations are high, with emotions capable of matching them when things go awry.

“This series has been great, but the first two races I had a lot of speed and it was a lot more fun post race,” Michael Waltrip told Motorsports Beat after a 10th-place run at Eldora. “But tonight it’s just a little frustrating.

“It reminds me of being a race car driver.”

The series was launched largely as a for-TV, entertainment-based product. It’s running for six weeks, all on Saturday nights at 8 p.m. ET. Coverage is readily available on CBS, with a simple format involving two 12-minute heats and a 50-lap feature. The first heat’s lineup is selected at random, the field is inverted for the second and the average finish between the two sets the grid for the feature.

It’s a simple, fair format that can be completed in under two hours, even with commercial breaks and time for storyline and sponsor-based segments. A perfect product for modern TV.

Those contesting the tour are largely familiar names for longtime racing fans – primarily stars from the past that run part-time elsewhere or not at all. Castroneves won his fourth Indianapolis 500 in May but has no full-time ride. Tony Kanaan and Marco Andretti are both part-time in IndyCar, with Andretti also making some sports car starts and Kanaan competing in Brazilian Stock Cars. Stewart runs the occasional sprint car race but is primarily tied to his many ownership roles, while Tracy is more known for his place on the IndyCar broadcast team at NBC while occasionally running in sports car competitions. Bill Elliott, Michael Waltrip and Ribbs don’t compete much at all these days.

There are a couple exceptions in the 12-car field. Ernie Francis Jr. is a young star of Trans Am, looking to use SRX as a platform to increase his profile. “Being a relatively unknown driver, it’s been a huge boost in my popularity with fans, even just recognizing who I am,” he told Motorsports Beat. Francis hopes to parlay his exposure into future opportunities.

One “local hero” also competes each weekend, with stars like modified ace Doug Coby — the winner of the opening race — sprint car star Brian Brown and Swanson joining the series so far. Others like Scott Bloomquist, Scott Speed and Hailie Deegan have also made appearances, with Deegan and Swanson each finishing second to Stewart in the second and third races.

The unique roster, while small, gives the series a similar feel to the old International Race of Champions (IROC) series, which ran for decades and featured champions and stars from many American tours before drawing to a close in the mid-2000s. SRX leans into this with the cars, which are built to be as close to identical as possible and feature unique color schemes to identify each driver.

Points are tallied based on heat and feature results, but each race is shown as its own separate battle for bragging rights. And they’re held in the heartland of grassroots racing scene, foregoing the large venues that comprised IROC seasons for dirt and asphalt short tracks. The field competes at facilities that aim to minimize aerodynamic dependency, place races in the drivers’ hands and encourage fierce battles and contact – all in front of packed local audiences that have an atypical level of access to the stars competing while also being exposed to other local racing on the undercard.

The mixture has made for a wildly unique series that stands apart from everything else being provided right now. No one was sure just how the experience would go heading into the first race at Stafford, but at the halfway point drivers are enjoying it.

“It’s more than I thought (it would be),” Ribbs told Motorsports Beat of the series. “I didn’t expect it. I knew it was going to be competitive, but this is fierce.

“For the fans, it’s an awesome show. Cause that’s what the fans want to see. They want to see a little rough stuff … bumping, banging and sliding. That’s what this product is.”

Fresh off of his first run with the series in Eldora competitor Scott Speed struggled to find another series to compare it to – notable for a driver that’s ran in everything from Formula 1 to NASCAR and is currently preparing to compete in the new Nitro Rallycross series.

“(The format is) kind of like rallycross, but this car is so heavy,” he said. “It doesn’t have any grip. In rallycross the technology we have in the Subaru cars is incredible and it just creates so much grip. It’s a little bit different, even though it’s still on dirt.

“It was so fun,” he later said of his run. “They really throw us in the deep end. Nobody, for the most part, has any experience with these cars and these tracks. So it’s really fun to just learn as quickly as you can. For me, it’s my first ever time running on a dirt oval, and was super pumped. It was a really fun experience.”

The challenging cars, varied schedule and competitive field have made each weekend unpredictable. Stewart’s had consistent pace, but the others have ebbed and flowed depending on the track. Drivers have slowly begun to get the hang of their cars, allowing their own individual styles to shine through more each week.

“The best part is you can see the personality of the drivers, the way they drive the car,” Stewart said of the series. “… If they didn’t have names on (their cars) and you mixed them up, put all these guys in different cars and took the names off of them, I can almost tell you which driver’s driving which car by how they’re driving.”

Series officials have also been learning, adjusting everything from the races to the layout of the cars themselves based on feedback from fans and partners. The heat format was altered to use average finish to set the field for the feature. Drivers have their names plastered on the sides of their machines and have kept the same colors to make them more recognizable. The feature’s been cut from 100 laps to 50 after running long in the opening week at Stafford.

The changes are all made with the fans in mind, with their approval being a key target for Evernham, who acknowledged Saturday that the series has even thrown a few caution flags for the sake of entertainment.

“I hope we can get to a point where we don’t have to throw those close-up cautions,” Evernham said. “That’s my goal. But you know, I want the fans to enjoy the race. I want the fans to see the superstar drivers racing side by side, not running in a line. And the guys are okay with me throwing those cautions because they want to race each other.”

“I’m so afraid that the fans won’t like it,” he later continued about the racing. “But my phone’s blown up with text messages, so I guess it was a pretty good show. We got a lot of torn up cars, but it sounds like they liked it.”

If bringing in fans was key, then SRX appears to be doing its job so far. Races have ran with sizable crowds in attendance, but it’s the TV numbers that have stood out. SRX started with 1.33 million viewers at Stafford and upped it to a record 1.38 million at Eldora according to SportsBusiness Journal reporter Adam Stern. That indicates that the series has retained and potentially even added a few fans after its first race.

Those viewing the events are seeing old stars, while also being exposed to tracks they might not know and drivers looking to make their names like Francis, Coby and Swanson. Coby secured a one-off NASCAR Camping World Truck Series opportunity shortly after his win. Swanson has ran in everything from late models to an Indy Pro 2000 car over the past two years in search of a chance to make the next step.

“I think it’s really cool,” Swanson said of SRX. “You know what I mean? I think there’s been a lot of buzz about it. I think it gives a chance to show race fans across the country on CBS what some of these iconic short tracks are like. … To me, it really was an honor to be considered and included.”

That early buzz Swanson discussed has yet to go away so far. Halfway through its short six-leg debut, the SRX appears well-poised to get through its opening season without any significant setbacks. Only races at Lucas Oil Raceway, Slinger Speedway and Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway remain.

Things are going well. There are opportunities for improvement, though.

Some of the cautions have been confusing for fans. Sorting out the proper distance and format remains a challenge, too. Evernham has multiple things he’d love to perfect moving forward.

“I’ve really got to get the timing, right?” he said. “It’s so hard. … I hate to stretch out on the show, but TV’s got to get breaks for our partners. I really want to get the show a little bit more balanced.

“That’s on me, you know, (to) figure out how many laps and tires. That’s probably the most difficult thing because we came here running a second faster than we tested, and the guys behaved for, you know, 75 of the laps, and then they knocked the hell out of everything for the rest of it. So it’s just so it’s so hard to figure out how long the show’s gotta be.”

There are still many opportunities for the SRX to refine and improve things. But with drivers having fun and fans enjoying it with them, America’s latest racing series, much like its co-founder Stewart on-track, has been making good moves so far.

Keep the Beat marching on. Support us on Patreon.
Become a patron at Patreon!
Aaron Bearden Eldora Speedway Ray Evernham Superstar Racing Experience Tony Stewart