When you grow up just 20 minutes away from Bowman Gray Stadium — the Madhouse of short-track oval racing — and the headquarters of RJ Reynolds, the manufacturer of longtime NASCAR sponsor Winston cigarettes, with a dad who works there, it’s safe to say that you’re pretty well surrounded by asphalt stock car racing.
So for most of my life, dirt racing was something I knew little to nothing about. Sure, I had heard of and respected drivers like multiple-time sprint car champion Steve Kinser, but I couldn’t exactly relate to that discipline of driving. It just seemed like a bunch of crazy-looking cars sliding sideways in the mud.
However, when iRacing announced several years ago that they were adding dirt racing, I decided to give it a closer look. As someone who prides himself on being a successful all-around racer — winning in road and oval cars at a variety of circuit types — I wanted to show that I could conquer dirt racing as well.
In preparation, I drove two full seasons in the asphalt sprint cars, expecting that if I could master the car control and finesse needed to drive those high-horsepower, zero-downforce beasts, I would be just fine on dirt as well.
Slinging a sprint car around Irwindale Speedway.
On the day that dirt arrived, I jumped straight into the Limited Late Model and had some incredibly fun races with other drivers who, like me, were just beginners on dirt.
But after a few weeks went by, once many of those curious early adopters of dirt racing went back to their comfort zone on asphalt and the cream of the dirt crop had risen to the top, I had a troubling realization.
I’m not a very good dirt racer.
It wasn’t just in terms of pace, although I was stuck in the back half of the fields I raced against. I also found myself hitting other cars and even getting called out by other drivers.
“Stay away from that orange car,” one opponent warned his competitors about me after I rear-ended him earlier in the race.
The frustration of being slow combined with the fear of being a hazard caused me to largely step away from dirt oval racing, vowing to return to it some day in the future.
That day is tomorrow.
Close racing in the late models around a dusty Eldora track.
It was an impromptu decision spurred on by a weekend Twitter poll asking which discipline I should race. But those poll results aside, it also felt like an appropriate time to hit the dirt again.
In a gap between the winter endurance season and a second iteration of my Summer Road Trip, I have found myself searching for things to drive, and the dirt ovals recently got an update to their track surface model, improving the look and feel of the cushion.
Plus, when iRacing added rallycross content last fall, it created new dirt oval and road license classes, effectively providing a clean slate — including the standard starting iRating of 1350 — to all drivers.
So for this week and a few others this spring, my goal is to finally get the feel for dirt racing. I want to find speed. I want to race cleanly around other cars. I want to be comfortable racing even the more powerful higher-level cars. And in the process, I want to see just where my dirt oval iRating can end up.
I’ll still be in an orange car, but this time, from my preparation to my execution, I’m cleaning up my act. The only mudslinging I plan on being a part of is with dirt tires on a tacky track.