Because he has gone through the grind before, he knows that much is decided by how one performs during Indiana Sprint Week. Leary took home one of the coveted rocking chairs as Sprint Week king and it propelled him toward a championship.
“During Sprint Week you have seven or eight nights of racing and people from all sorts of discipline and they travel from all over the country and race in our backyard,” Leary noted. “It is hot and they are long nights. The competition is fierce and you have to take it one race at a time and do the best you can each night and scrape up all the points you can from the heat race and qualifying and then the feature. Luckily enough, I have won it and it is one of the hardest things to do in racing. You must put together eight races without any DNFs.”
In so many ways this mini-series highlights one of the great dilemmas faced by highly competitive people. Every fiber of your being wants to win, but sometimes claiming a championship requires a more measured approach. Leary is very aware of this tradeoff.
“Do you want to win races, or do you want to win championships?” he asked. “Rarely does one guy do both. You have to think about what is more important. I think about Levi Jones a lot when I think about that. He always qualified great and podiumed us to death. He won his share of races, don’t get me wrong, but he was that really consistent guy.”
Leary is always in the hunt given his penchant for finishing races and he may be USAC’s best qualifier. There is an easy explanation for that.
“I really enjoy qualifying,” he said. “I like the speed. I like putting it on the line when you are out there on your own.”
However, there are inherent problems when you are consistently on the top of the speed chart and face the standard six-car invert that is central to USAC events.
“There is that fine line,” he acknowledged. “In 2019, if we would not have qualified so well, we would not have won the championship. But it is really hard to win from the third row anymore. If you put Brady (Bacon) or Justin (Grant) on the front row it is hard to beat those guys. It is also tough on other guys if you put me and Kyle Cummins on the front row, too.”
Leary admires drivers such as Jones, Donny Schatz, Brady Bacon and Brad Sweet, who have managed to string titles together.
“It is a testament to their teams,” he said. “I think that’s why Brady (Bacon) has been so good. He has worked for the same guys for so long and they have perfected the trade. That is something I have tried to put together, but it seems like it hasn’t worked out for me yet.”
Like many of USAC’s top stars, Leary finds plenty of work outside of sprint cars. He’s back in the Silver Crown Series with owner Terry Klatt and keen mechanical minds Bob East and Dave Brzozowski. It could easily be argued that he was the surprise of last season. Everyone knew he could win on the dirt, but his strength on the pavement caught many off guard. He destroyed the field at Wisconsin’s Madison Int’l Raceway, but it is also fair to suggest that he had a chance to win in nearly every round.
Entering the 2022 season, Leary had won twice in the series, both coming on half-mile dirt ovals. Klatt had captured an entrant’s championship and had recently split driver assignments on dirt and pavement. He was about to make a change. One person behind the move was East.
East and Leary had worked together several years ago with Frank Manafort Racing. It was not a happy time.
“I have always thought really highly of Bob and my family has long been friends with the East family. After the FMR deal we kind of had a bad falling out, so I was shocked when I saw his name pop up on my phone,” Leary explained. “He was calling me offering the ride. I didn’t expect it at all. I took it immediately. One, I thought we could patch up our relationship, and two, I felt we could win races together.”
East has seen this scenario play out hundreds of times and can point to his own racing career as an example. Thus, East scoffed at the notion that things needed to be patched up.
“Look,” East said. “I didn’t hold that against him. It just was not working. I have raced for the same guy three or four times before. It doesn’t matter. If it isn’t clicking, you have to make a move.”