SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Just less than two years ago, there was a point in time in which Kyle Cummins was preparing to hang up the helmet and walk away from the sport.
But after receiving an opportunity of a lifetime, the Princeton, Indiana driver’s entire landscape changed, and ultimately led to a historically dominant USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship season in 2025.
By the numbers, Cummins was the most dominant USAC National Sprint Car champion ever. He led the points for all 49 events, which is the longest duration anybody has led the series standings. He’s also the first driver to lead the points from start to finish since Tracy Hines in 2002.
Cummins’ final point margin of 386 surpassed the all-time mark of 369 points that had been held by Pancho Carter since 1976. Along the way, Cummins accumulated 38 top-five finishes and 44 top 10s, both new single season series records formerly held by Brady Bacon since 2021.
With 10 feature victories and 13 second place results, Cummins’ 23 top-two finishes in 2025 broke the record of 21 top-twos in a season held by J.J. Yeley since 2003.
Cummins’ 13 runner-up finishes also set a new single season series record in that department, breaking the former mark of 10 by Chris Windom (2011) and Brady Bacon (2016).
In what was his 23rd season of sprint car racing, at the age of 38, Cummins became the oldest first-time USAC National Sprint Car driving champion since Tom Bigelow (39) in 1978. Overall, Cummins is the oldest series champ since Tony Elliott (39) in 2000.
On the path to a championship season in which he earned more than $236,000 in prize money, Cummins recorded an average feature finish of 4.5, all while kicking off the year with 22 consecutive top-10 finishes, breaking the record of 21 straight to start a season set by C.J. Leary in 2019. Meanwhile, Cummins provided Petty Performance Racing its first USAC entrant title.
The Cummins/Petty pairing all started at team owner Jerry Petty’s urging. While Cummins competed for Hank Byram’s Rock Steady Racing in 2023 in a car sponsored by Petty’s company – Avanti Windows & Doors – Jerry approached Cummins with the idea during the latter part of the season.
”Man, I’ll be honest with you. I think I’m done racing and I’m going to run for Hank for a couple of races, but I’m not into traveling all over. I just want to focus on my business,” Cummins recalled. “In that conversation, Jerry said, ‘what do you mean? You’re still young and you need to keep going.’ I said, ‘I don’t know; I’m getting old and I don’t want to run full-time; I’m slowing down. It might be my last season. Hank and I are going to do a farewell tour.’”
Before long, akin to Vito Corleone, Petty made an offer that Cummins couldn’t refuse to drive his Petty Performance Racing/Avanti Windows & Doors – Premier Recycling/Mach-1/Stanton Chevy.
“Before the conversation got over, (Jerry) was like, ‘well, what if it was at your place and we started a new team and you took care of everything? Would you be interested in something like that?’ I told him I did that in 2018 and it was the worst year of my life. But, if I had people to help, I think we could do something. He said, ‘tell you what. Just draw up what you would like and send me a plan of what you think would be the perfect scenario for you. I’ll take a look at it and see if it’s possible or not.’”
After some slight alterations, the math on the proposal checked out. Cummins was going to run the program out of his Princeton, Indiana shop while not having to worry about anything on the financial side. Soon, USAC’s newest duo was ready to give it a go on a two-year deal, and from there, see how it goes.
That said, for three quarters of the 2024 season, the team struggled to find its footing. But Cummins cites a few specific turning points that altered the tide, so to speak, namely Arkansas’ Texarkana 67 Speedway where he crashed while leading on the final lap. Then, there was the practice session on the final weekend of the year at Oklahoma’s Red Dirt Raceway, where the team tested a variety of configurations that they found out clicked.
Then, to close out the year, the team captured the Western World Championships at Arizona’s Mohave Valley Raceway. In fact, the car used in all these aforementioned events was the same one in which they ran throughout the majority of the 2025 campaign.
To start off 2025, Cummins knew he had to become a more complete driver, one who is able to adapt and excel on both short and long dirt tracks in order to position himself as a legit championship contender.
“Starting this year, I knew I had to focus on the bigger tracks,” Cummins revealed. “On the quarter miles, we’ve always been good, but on the other ones, we’ve always struggled. I knew if we were going to try and win the championship, we needed to focus on the tracks we were the worst at, and that’s what we did.”
Through trial and error, swapping between different engines and even crew members to find an all-around package, Cummins found himself becoming more comfortable on the big tracks. It wasn’t necessarily a change in mindset as Cummins put it. It was more the fact that he always ran the same stuff on tracks big and small, which left him too tight on the three-eighths and half-miles.
In turn, that made him feel like he was forever stuck in one groove, and that if the car wasn’t good, he wasn’t going to run up front very often. Now, he was able to experiment and come up with some options that concocted a championship formula.
He won his first half-mile USAC Sprint Car feature in the 2025 season opener at Florida’s Volusia Speedway Park, which he cites as his personal favorite moment of the season, surprising not only the racing world at the time, but also himself.
By the time he left Florida, he had earned the Big Gator as the DIRTcar Nationals champ at Volusia, and after adding a second win a few days later at Ocala, he earned the Winter Dirt Games XVI title.
Back in his home state, in April, he won again at Honest Abe Roofing Lincoln Park Speedway, the doubled up in mid-May with a weekend sweep at Bloomington Speedway and Tri-State Speedway. He scored at Pennsylvania’s Big Diamond Speedway in June, then collected the win in USAC’s return to Ohio’s Millstream Speedway following a 37-year absence. After a three-month hiatus from victory lane, Cummins shined in USAC’s first run at Michigan’s Butler Motor Speedway in 35 years. In October, he added two more, including the Greg Staab Memorial at Indiana’s Lawrenceburg Speedway, and notched win number 10 in the series’ return to Kansas’ Dodge City Raceway Park for the first time in 14 years.
With four races to go, Cummins had wrapped up his first USAC championship, a title he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams just a short while ago.
“It was something I thought I’d probably never do,” Cummins admitted. “From when I started, I never thought it was really going to be possible. I honestly never knew if I really wanted it that bad. I thought it would be cool to do and I knew all the guys wanted it, but I never thought it was something plausible. I think it’s that first one; you have to get over the hump. Like my first USAC win, I didn’t think I’d ever get one. It took a long time to get one, but we only ran a handful back then.”
One of the major changes for Cummins’ operation was the addition of young crew members Cameron LaRose and Drake Edwards, both of whom have had their fair share success behind the wheel in 2025.
They take care of the racecar, which frees up Cummins’ time to focus on his day-to-day business, a machine shop that maintenances a variety of automobile parts, racing components and even such random items as sewing needles, and also has contract jobs with coal mines, basically anything that comes through the door and makes money.
Thirteen drivers reached victory lane with the series in 2025. Mitchel Moles finished a career best second in points, winning once in a photo finish .021 second victory over Cummins in September at Indiana’s Paragon Speedway, which erased his 61-race winless streak with the series. Furthermore, Moles led all driver with 15 fast qualifying times, tying Kevin Thomas Jr. (2018) for the most quick times in a single season with the series.
Logan Seavey took third in the standings with nine triumphs to his credit in 2025, which included some of the most lucrative events on the schedule, including $10,000 at Volusia and Red Hill Raceway, $20,000 at Tri-State’s Haubstadt Hustler, $30,000 at Lawrenceburg’s Fall Nationals and more than $43,000 in the season-ending Western World at Central Arizona Raceway, in which he swept both nights. He also added scores at Lincoln Park, Lawrenceburg and Bloomington during the summer months. Seavey also led all drivers with 249 laps led in events.
Kevin Thomas Jr. rolled to four wins and a fourth place finish in the standings. His four victories included a $15,000 payday at Iowa’s Knoxville Raceway, a repeat victory at Pennsylvania’s Williams Grove Speedway, a Tri-State Speedway Indiana Sprint Week win and his fourth Smackdown Friday night win at Kokomo in the past five years.
Highlighting the year for KTJ was his third career USAC Indiana Sprint Week championship worth $25,000. He also set a new USAC National Sprint Car record with 29 consecutive top-10 finishes, surpassing Chris Windom’s record of 24 set in 2018.
Justin Grant’s tumultuous season included the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. He led all drivers with 11 feature wins. In June at Action Track USA, Grant and his TOPP Motorsports team’s 51st win together made them the winningest driver/entrant combo in series history. It was also there he clinched his first career Eastern Storm title.
In July at Lincoln Park, he surpassed Chase Stockon as the series’ Ironman with his 325th consecutive series feature start. In the very next event, Grant broke his left foot in an accident at Lawrenceburg. After missing four races, he bounced back in August to become the first five-time Smackdown champion at Kokomo for a $31,000 payday.
In September at Missouri’s Lucas Oil Raceway, Grant became the winningest driver in USAC National Sprint Car history with his 63rd win, surpassing Dave Darland. The victory was also Grant’s 100th across the board in USAC competition, the eighth driver to do so.
To cap off the year, Grant earned his first Tony Hulman Classic in his 16th try at Terre Haute in October.
Briggs Danner added four wins to finish sixth in points, including a clean sweep of the Indiana Sprint Week round at Kokomo in July with a last lap pass of Robert Ballou in the feature to win by a 0.196 second margin. Danner followed up with another Kokomo win on the opening night of Smackdown in August, plus first career triumphs at Tri-City and Eldora in September.
Seventh-place points finisher C.J. Leary reached victory lane once on the series trail in 2025, ending a drought of 66 races and 17 months without a win. He did so by beating Mitchel Moles to the line in the closest finish of the series season by a single car length 0.173-second margin in July at Circle City.
Jake Swanson, likewise, hit victory lane once in 2025 during the series debut at Amarillo, Texas’ Route 66 Motor Speedway in October, giving Daming Swanson Motorsports its first USAC win while finishing eighth in points. The moment was extra special for Swanson following the unexpected death of car owner Joe Daming in early 2024 at the age of 47.
Swanson’s first USAC win as a team owner came two years after his most recent series win, and quite fittingly, in the 47th race of the season.
Chase Stockon supplied car owners Tom and Laurie Sertich their first USAC National Sprint Car win in a mesmerizing Indiana Sprint Week round at Terre Haute in July.
Stockon did so while nursing a couple broken bones in his right hand courtesy of a crash one week earlier at IMS. The win ended Stockon’s 160-race, five-year absence from USAC victory lane, and came during his 500th career series start.
In what was the closest Rookie battle in USAC National Sprint Car racing history, Gunnar Setser prevailed over Hayden Reinbold by a four-point margin to earn the Max Papis Innovations Rookie of the Year award.
On a partial USAC schedule in 2025, Brady Bacon posted three wins at Ocala, Eldora and Knoxville. Daison Pursley tallied two wins, first in the Ocala Winter Dirt Games finale, and another during a historical September night in which he won Midget, Sprint Car and Silver Crown features in one night at Eldora, joining Jack Hewitt, Kyle Larson and Logan Seavey as the only drivers to achieve a USAC 4-Crown single night sweep.
Robert Ballou ended a 14-plus month absence from USAC National Sprint Car victory lane during round two of Indiana Sprint Week at Lincoln Park Speedway in July. However, just a week later, Ballou suffered a back injury in a crash at Bloomington that sidelined him for the remainder of the season. Despite competing in just 15 of the 31 events this season, Ballou led all drivers with 15 heat race wins.
Carson Garrett became the series’ only first-time victor in 2025, picking up the win in what was his 96th career USAC National Sprint Car start during the Sprintacular at Lincoln Park in early July.
