SPEEDWAY, Ind. — The 3,333 points Kyle Cummins garnered in the final 2026 USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship standings seems fitting for the Princeton, Indiana, racer who’s run variations of the 3 on his car for nearly a quarter century of sprint car racing from the 3c to the 3R to the 3p.
In 2026, he piloted the Petty Performance Racing/Avanti Windows & Doors – JUGO Superfoods/Mach-1/Stanton Chevy No. 3p to a second straight series title on the strength of a career high 11 wins, 351 laps led, 35 top fives, and 45 top tens in 48 feature starts, all of which ranked No. 1 throughout the season.
Across a historic two-year span, Cummins has accrued a pair of USAC National Sprint Car titles, 21 wins, 567 laps led, 73 top fives, 89 top tens, and 97 starts, all categories in which he ranks number one among all series drivers on his way to backing up his first crown in 2025, while earning around $289,000 in total prize money for the year.
“I think I’m more excited about this one than I was the first one,” Cummins revealed. “I was always saying that just one would be cool. You can have a lucky year and it felt like everything went our way last year. To come out this year and back it up, I don’t know if everything went our way, but we definitely had a really good season.”
Cummins was focused on a different approach this year. After getting a first title under his belt the previous year, Cummins was dialed in on winning races and letting everything else take care of itself as far as the points were concerned.
“This year, because I won the championship once, every race I go to, I wanted to win,” Cummins explained. “Last year, I got real nervous and I really started points racing. If I was second and third, I kind of just stayed there because I was like, ‘hey it’s going to be a good points night.’ This year, I didn’t care about that at all. I was just trying to win races and it seemed like, this year, it’s worked out pretty good in staying consistent. If you know the team behind me, they want me to push the entire time. That was the big stepping stone from last year to this year.”
Cummins and crew were also compelled to tinker and experiment with new setups and combinations, especially in the early part of the season leading up to the busy and grueling summer months, namely USAC Indiana Sprint Week.
“It was a season where we tried a bunch of stuff just trying to get better for the bigger races,” Cummins admitted. “It was kind of a fun back-and-forth season of just trying stuff. We tried things at all the tracks we went to before Indiana Sprint Week. We were always kind of doing like a test session mainly to get good for Sprint Week.”
The 2026 season for Cummins and PPR could be summed up by saying that this was a checkbox type of year. There were many items left on Cummins’ radar that he was all in on crossing off throughout the year.
He notched his first ever USAC win at the Terre Haute Action Track’s 1/2-mile during April’s Jim Hurtubise Classic, then returned in July to score the USAC Indiana Sprint Week round there at the Don Smith Classic.
In May, he checked off his first USAC triumph at Eldora Speedway’s 1/2-mile during #LetsRaceTwo then came back to The Big E in September to corral the 4-Crown Nationals. Adding to it, he also reigned for the first time at Knoxville Raceway’s 1/2-mile during May’s Corn Belt Clash.
“I was excited at Terre Haute and thought that was cool, but then to come back again during Sprint Week, I was probably more excited than I had been in a long time to win twice there,” Cummins fondly recalled. “Then, Eldora during the 4-Crown, that was even more exciting because it might be luck to do it once, but if you do it twice, you’ve got a pretty good car there. To knock those off was pretty exciting, and then Knoxville. To win those races I wanted to win and then to win them twice, that was definitely a cherry on top of the season for me.”
Also mix in an Eastern Storm championship and an Indiana Sprint Week title for Cummins in 2026, the latter of which was where most of the season’s groundwork was geared to by the team.
“Our goal was to win Sprint Week,” Cummins said without hesitation. “Then, to be able to knock that off the list, that was something that I hadn’t done. That week seems like it’s harder than the whole year.
“For the whole year, if you have a couple of bad weekends, you can have a weekend off where you can sit and analyze the car and go through it. If you’re off at Sprint Week, once you start off, it’s really hard to get back on when you’re going back to back to back. During that week, everything has to work out right and everything’s so tight because there’s only a few races.”
All of the aforementioned major wins and crowns were accomplished for the first time after so many years of trying. Five of them came on half-miles after only having one total in his career entering the 2026 season. Getting good on the bigger tracks has been a key to Cummins’ championship seasons, and a portion of his skill set that he now excels at after previously trying to find his footing.
“To win a USAC championship, I feel like you’ve got to be good at the three-eighths-miles,” Cummins noted. “You’ve got to be good at the quarters, but three-eighths-mile tracks are the ones you’ve got to be good at. The three-eighths to half-miles are where I kind of struggled. Now, I feel way more comfortable running a half-mile race track and I feel that we’re going to finish in the top three or top five for sure. Having a really good car on the big tracks is super important.”
In 2026, Cummins also collected his second consecutive Larry Rice Classic victory at Bloomington Speedway in May, then was victorious in the Eastern Storm opener in June at Grandview Speedway. He picked up a second straight score at Butler Motor Speedway, followed by the Sprintacular at Lincoln Park Speedway. He won again at Lincoln Park in late July during Indiana Sprint Week as well as the opening night of Sprint Car Smackdown in August at Kokomo.
Along the way, Cummins garnered an all-time record of 45 consecutive top 10 finishes in USAC National Sprint Car competition, spanning from the second race of the year at Volusia to the second to last race on the schedule at Central Arizona Raceway. That completely obliterated the former record of 29-straight top tens set by Kevin Thomas Jr. just last year in 2025.
On the path to the title, there was little resistance, and the pressure to perform was a fraction of what it was just one year ago, admitting the title race didn’t even register on his radar until August. After taking the point lead in the eighth round of the season in early April, Cummins never lifted as he backed up his dream season with another dream season in 2026.
With team owner Jerry Petty, and core team members Cameron LaRose, Zach Fields, and Kasey DeRenzy, it’s been a dream come true the 39-year-old Cummins after one of the finest two-year runs in series history.
“It’s been two years of a dream season,” Cummins stated. “A lot teams put in a lot of effort, but my guys go the extra mile. It’s kind of what makes me want to get up on the wheel a little bit extra just to reward them a little bit.”
Despite the fulfillment of back to back dream seasons, it was announced shortly after the final race of the campaign that the Petty Performance Racing national team was shutting down and would not continue into 2027. Thus closing the curtain on one of the most successful combinations and eras in USAC National Sprint Car history, albeit a relatively brief one.
