Winning builds confidence. For Brad Sweet – who already has every reason to be a confident racer – winning last year’s Knoxville Nationals was a big boost.
KNOXVILLE, Iowa – Winning builds confidence, and for Brad Sweet – who already has every reason to be confident as a racer – winning last year‘s Knoxville Nationals was a mental booster shot.
As he returns this week to the Marion County Fairgrounds with the goal of repeating his biggest career win, Sweet is enjoying his best year on the World of Outlaws tour.
He‘s the tour‘s biggest race winner with 12 victories. He‘s already claimed the tour‘s biggest payday, the $175,000 Kings Royal, and he comes into the Knoxville Nationals this week leading perennial WoO champion Donny Schatz in the title chase, even if his lead is as tenuous as his fraction-of-a-second margin of victory at last year‘s Nationals.
The space of .133 seconds is less time than it takes to blink. Rocket launches take a lot longer. But for Sweet, that faster-than-an-eye-blink margin of victory over Schatz became a rocket launch that has lasted for the entire year.
As the country‘s top-ranked 410 sprint car driver, Sweet has certainly lived up to his nickname, “The Big Cat.”
“Winning Knoxville gave me confidence and made me mentally tougher,” Sweet acknowledged.
He describes it as a “sixth sense” of what it takes to win, something he believes Schatz has more than any other driver on the Outlaw tour.
“Without years of experience (and 45 other WoO career wins), I wouldn‘t have been prepared to win Knoxville,” said Sweet.
But Sweet credits his Knoxville win for amping up his mental muscle. Sweet contends that involves more than a driver simply hitting their marks on the racetrack.
“It‘s understanding what the car needs to be,” said Sweet, “and thinking about every detail of the race to know what it takes to win.”
Sweet respectfully suggests that Schatz is better than anyone at the mental preparation that leads to the checkered flag.
“It‘s hard to knock him off that mountain,” Sweet concedes, “and it‘s something I‘ve been studying for a while.”
But winning at Knoxville, Sweet believes, “got me a step closer to him and maybe a step further from the others.”
Schatz, more focused on his own efforts than paying attention to what other teams do at the track, does not necessarily agree with Sweet‘s perceptions. But he does admit casually that “we‘ve been seeing a lot more of the (No.) 49 tail tank lately.”
But throughout his racing career and in years before, Sweet has always relied on his ability to out-think the competition to make up for being smaller or having fewer resources or making up for some other disadvantage.
That internal mental intensity is a stark contrast to his personable, easy-going manner.
“I learned about mental toughness by wresting in high school,” Sweet recalled, who at 98 pounds routinely wrestled against competitors who outweighed him by 10 pounds.
“Even if I‘m not better than somebody else, I can find a way to out-work them … or at least make myself more equal,” he added.
His dad, Tom, recalls Brad bringing home videos of his wrestling matches to study his opponents.
“Once he becomes a student of something, nobody works harder than he does,” noted Tom Sweet.
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