WHEATLAND, Mo. — Rodney Sanders’ five United States Modified Touring Series championships stand above anyone else.
A sixth is starting to come into focus entering this weekend’s 16th annual USMTS Slick Mist Show-Me Shootout Presented by Foley Equipment at Lucas Oil Speedway.
But you won’t catch the 35-year-old from Happy, Texas, sitting around and calculating points or a specific strategy as he attempts to complete the six pack. This weekend’s doubleheader will be business as usual.
“It would be great,” Sanders said of what a sixth title would mean. “I know it’s gonna be tough to finish it out, but it would be really cool if we could.
“The goal of every race is going into it to win. If you’re not running solid, you get the best you can to not do anything dumb that would jeopardize a bad finish. We try to go to win and the points kind of take care of themselves … while trying to be smart about it at the same time.”
Sanders brings a 141-point lead over defending USMTS champ Jim Chisholm into the action on Friday and Saturday, the second time that the Show-Me Shootout has been expanded into a two-night affair with full shows both nights.
It’s been a vintage Sanders season so far with five USMTS wins in 21 attempts along with 17 top-five finishes. Overall, he has 10 wins in 2025 while focusing entirely on his modified team after dabbling in late models the last few years.
“I’d love to do it,” Sanders said of running the late model. “But we can’t afford to do it and the modified. I had to do one or the other.
“It’s been a really good season. We’ve been really consistent and it’s been a solid year.”
Sanders has won USMTS championships in 2013, 2014, 2019, 2020 and 2023. He’s seen drivers come and go and the technology in the cars changes from his early days in the sport, but he continues to excel through the challenges.
“It’s always been really tough, the USMTS,” Sanders said. “You have different people, but the competition is really tough in that series, from when I started to now. It seems like the cars are so much different now than back then.
“The biggest difference is how much clean air matters and how much the body makes a difference,” Sanders said, comparing it to the Late Models but without quite as much importance in shocks and springs. “But we’re getting close to that, just on a smaller scale.”
As always, he expects the Lucas Oil Speedway surface to test him and the others this weekend. He won the Show-Me Shootout in 2019 and 2023, but ran sixth and 10th in last year’s rendition.
“We’ve had really good runs there, but also have struggled there,” Sanders said. “There hasn’t been a whole lot of in-between. It seems like every time we go we’re almost on a different set-up. That place is very unique. It’s a great place and I like going there. It’s just it can throw you curveballs with what the track can be.”
