“The cool part was to be able to work with those guys on a different level, not as a competitor but as a guy who truly wanted to make things better than it was for me as a driver or for a team or a race track,” Jones said. “My goal was to get us to where tracks wanted to book races with us and be financially successful.”
One thing that became apparent was that his time at Rural King provided good training.
“When I was there, I had to deal with part-time employees, full-time employees, families and real life,” he noted. “Then you throw in the aspect of customers. Real people. The old dude who gets sick in the bathroom, and the drugged-up lady who is stealing stuff. The biggest thing for me was to understand that some people just want to be mad.”
It was a perfect lesson.
“I knew enough to know that nothing is ever enough. In racing we say it all the time, we eat our own,” Jones noted. “But there is so much passion, intensity and desire in what we do that there needs to be a man everybody could vent to. Drivers, a guy working on a car, a parent and the guy who just lost $30,000 on an event. All of those people needed someone to go over the good, the bad and the ugly with.”
Still there were surprises.
“One of the things that just blew me away was how people dealt with USAC,” Jones said. “USAC isn’t a furry ball or a magical thing up in the air. It’s people. I would say no one you dealt with in the past works here anymore. It isn’t the same people, but you had to fight things that had happened long before. The other thing is that fans always thought we set the purse. No, as a sanctioning body you sell the show to the track and the track gets the same invoice whether there is one person in the stands or a million there. You hope there are a lot of people so we can rebook this race and make it even bigger and better.”
Jones’ work caught the eye of Roger Penske and as a result he now leads the former Indy Lights Series, which was recently rebranded Indy NXT. When he arrived, some key personnel had no idea he had raced. He soon realized that many of the components he faced in his new role were familiar, and his time at USAC had prepared him well.
“The biggest change is that now this is everybody’s business,” Jones said. “This is their job and livelihood. At USAC there were a group of people who did it professionally, a group of people who did it for fun and people who didn’t know why they did it. So there were different viewpoints. Now everything is less tangled.”
Among the many other drivers who have become prominent racing officials, Mike Hess is the racing director for the World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series and dirt late model veteran Steve Francis has taken Shuman’s former post with the World of Outlaws Late Model Series.
This story appeared in the Feb. 15, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
