By the time Max was 11 he was racing a micro extensively at Sacramento and Stockton‘s Delta Speedway. The wins came in bunches. He was the non-winged champion at Delta and that‘s when it really hit Scott that his son truly had talent.
In terms of his overall development, there was even more to the story. Max recalls that one of his first times in a micro he knocked an axle out. On the way home he made a decision. He told his dad he wanted to be responsible for fixing the car. “That started the process of me working on them,” Max says. “And from there I was really hands on. Even at a young age I was interested in setups and that sort of thing. I was really interested in understanding how to make a car go faster and was even willing
to try goofy stuff.”
Adams may not have realized it at first, but what his early career results suggested was that he had an affinity for wingless racing. The championship at Delta provided one of the first clues. Still, given his location, there was every reason in the world to go winged racing. “I was doing both a wing and a non-wing 360,” Adams says, “and Placerville was 15 minutes from me, Marysville was 45 minutes away, and Chico was an hour and a half.
“I lived in wing 360 country, and there were so many car owners and so many people who helped me in that area. But it got to the point where I had to do one or the other, and I had always felt more comfortable in the non-wing car. I also felt the non-wing stuff fit our budget a little better. So we ended up going that route. With the wings, you really have to have your motor program dialed in.”
Budget issues aside, his father also agreed with the decision. “He was more comfortable in a non-wing car,” Scott says. “Which is kind of funny because usually it is the opposite. I think the first time he raced with USAC at Placerville he led a few laps and finished third. That‘s when we decided we were going non-wing.
To climb the ladder in non-winged racing in Californian means progressing to the USAC/CRA series. It‘s a tough place for a rookie to find their legs. With a sprint car now in the garage, and with his father‘s help as always, the pair committed to making longer tows to the race track. The good news is that he held his own.
After a couple of runs in 2015, Max made 22 starts in 2016 and finished in the top 10 in over half of his feature appearances. When the points were tallied, he landed in the seventh spot in the standings and was named Rookie of the Year. The following season he underscored that his freshman year was no fluke, a point that was emphatically driven home on the first day of July at Santa Maria.
It was a night he rightfully remembers well. He had found a seat in veteran owner Dwight Cheney‘s car and, with all the preliminaries complete, he was set to fire off in the feature from the inside of the second row. Shortly after the drop of the green flag he fell back to the fourth spot. There was no way around it, now he had work to do. “I had to pass (Danny) Faria, I had to pass Jake (Swanson), and I had to get past Brody (Roa),” he recalls. “It was pretty much out of nowhere, but it was cool. I think I passed Brody with two laps to go or coming to the white flag.”
He had made it clear that he belonged. A year later he would get back into the winner‘s circle once again at Santa Maria, and again finished in the seventh position in season points.
It was at this time that Adams began to seriously consider his career options. Once again it was his mother who may have charted the course. If it wasn‘t bad enough that Georgeann and Scott had a child involved in an expensive sport like racing, their daughter Carson was deeply involved with horses. Like her brother‘s racing, it was an activity she took seriously and involved a fair degree of travel.
According to Max, his sister had found a good trainer to work with, and to nudge this dream along she and her mother moved to Marion, Indiana. They had scouted a property with plenty of acreage for horses and other animals, and after some deliberations decided to pull the trigger. Adams is sure there was a bit more to the story. He remains convinced that the move was also a way to lure him to Indiana. It was a step he had been pondering and it seemed his mother was motivated to do what she felt was best for her children.
Scott Adams also realized that moving east would help forward his son‘s racing career but, as always, life‘s realities can complicate things in a hurry. “We were racing once or twice a month,” he says. “And we were driving 10 to 12 hours to get there and 10 to 12 hours to get back. Max was getting to the point where he was starting to excel. He was taking that next step and getting really competitive. We had actually thought about moving back a couple of years earlier, but both of my parents got sick and I was the only one there. I ended up taking care of them until they passed in 2016, so it took a year or two to settle everything and clean everything up. I wanted to come a year before but he was doing well and was up in the points at Perris, so he said let‘s wait until the next spring.”
With personal matters squared away, by the end of May, 2019 Adams was racing regularly in Indiana. At this point in the game, he was convinced that the best plan was to do it on his own. “I pretty much had the mindset of going out there and starting off with my own equipment,” he says. “I had raced (Ted) Finkenbinder‘s and Cheney‘s stuff some, but I just didn‘t have the confidence to make those phone calls and put my name out there. So, I wanted to go out there and show that I could do it.”
While many were happy that Max was getting a chance to realize his racing dreams, some also offered a quick word of caution. “When we were getting ready to move,” Max recalls, “everybody was telling me that I was going to take an ass whipping the first couple of nights. I think the first night I raced at Putnamville (Lincoln Park Speedway) I ran second in the heat to Kevin Thomas and seventh in the feature. That felt pretty good. I wasn‘t in the B-Main, I didn‘t struggle horribly, and it was the first race of the year for me.”
So far so good, and now came the time to execute the plan he had established to get his program and reputation on a firm footing. “That year the goal was to run Sprint Week,” he says. “So, we wanted to run every track before Sprint Week started, and we did that. That was the intention. Then a few weeks after that Jerry Burton called and told me he saw me running really well and asked about doing some races together. Everything happen really fast. I got noticed and found a ride really quick. It was really surprising to me, but it was cool.”