SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Drake Edwards made a splash in his debut season of midget racing with success on the west coast along with a smattering of solid appearances on the national scene.
Edwards will have the opportunity to compete full time on the USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship trail for this past season’s championship team, CB Industries.
The 21-year-old Edwards earned USAC Avanti Windows & Doors Western States Midget Rookie of the Year in 2024 on the strength of a pair of victories at California’s Santa Maria Speedway and The Dirt Track at Kevin Harvick’s Kern Raceway while coming up just 11 points shy of the series title in a car owned by Jerry Petty’s team, Petty Performance Racing,
“It definitely exceeded our goals,” Edwards admitted. “At the beginning of the year, my goal and Jerry’s goal was to just get top-10 in the points and make laps. We had no idea that it would be as great as it was. Luckily, we were able to click off a couple of wins there, and the championship ended up being way closer than I ever thought it was going to be. It would’ve been really cool to get the championship, but all and all, it surpassed what I thought we could do.”
In a handful of USAC National Midget starts in 2024 at tracks he’d never laid eyes on before, Edwards was rock solid and proved to be a quick study. The only new track he got a second crack at was Ohio’s Eldora Speedway during the 4-Crown Nationals where he proceeded to finish ninth.
What began as an impromptu, unplanned excursion to compete with the national series turned out to pay major dividends when he came back “home” to race afterward.
“The week before Indiana Midget Week, we ran at Ventura (Calif.) that Saturday,” Edwards remembered. “Kyle Cummins was planning to take his cars to Midget Week, so I called Jerry that night after we were done racing and I told him that I’d love to go learn some stuff and be around those guys to see if we can figure some things out to bring home with us setup-wise. I’m glad we did because I ended up coming back from Midget Week, and the next weekend after, we picked up our first win at Santa Maria. After that, Jerry saw how much that improved me as a driver and with our setups after being around competition like that. We were able to come back later in the season to race at Eldora, the BC39 and the western swing. So, I think that was a very good call with us to go back east a little bit.”