SPEEDWAY, Ind. — With a focus solely on the pavement tracks throughout the 2025 USAC Silver Crown National Championship season, Jake Trainor’s performance earned him Max Papis Innovations Rookie of the Year honors.
The pavement specialist from Medway, Massachusetts started all six asphalt track events on the 13-race schedule this past season en route to a 19th-place finish in the overall series standings aboard the Klatt Enterprises/Wilwood Disc Brakes – Brown & Miller Racing Solutions – Klotz – Hoosier Tire/Beast/Ford.
Trainor became the first Massachusetts native to capture the USAC Silver Crown Rookie of the Year award. In fact, across all three of USAC’s national divisions, he’s the first Bay Stater ever to collect the Rookie of the Year distinction. He’s also the first pavement only competitor to corral USAC Silver Crown Rookie of the Year since Derek Bischak in 2019.
“It’s kind of crazy; I was not expecting it at all,” Trainor said of being named the series’ top Rookie. “It’s really cool with the history of the USAC Silver Crown series and to do it for Bob and Terry Klatt, and all the history they’ve been able to accomplish together. Just to be able to do it with them, it’s really special. I’m very grateful for Bob and Janice East and Terry taking a chance and giving me an opportunity this year.”
Trainor’s finish of fifth at Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park was the best among all series Rookies on the season and proved to be his best result of the year. In fact, he dug deep after starting 16th by climbing up 11 spots to score a top-five finish in the longest race of the season at 146 laps and 100 miles on the .686-mile paved oval.
“That run at the Hoosier Hundred was really cool,” Trainor fondly recalled. “That race in itself, there’s a lot of history behind it. We didn’t qualify all that great and we weren’t having a great day up until the race. I knew we had the speed to be up front. That’s why it was so discouraging to qualify in the back. But I was able to drive up through the field, which was really fun.”
The longer distances coupled with the challenge of figuring out a new type of race car while simultaneously visiting an array of race tracks he’d never before laid eyes on proved to be his biggest hurdle to overcome.
“It’s a different style of racing with longer races and the different feel you get with such a long and heavy car like that,” Trainor explained. “It was a challenge for me to learn the new racetracks on the go. I was really struggling with that as I tried to learn both the race track and the race car at the same time.”
Trainor is a first-generation racer, with his introduction to the sport coming from sitting in the stands with his dad as a six-year-old. Trainor remembers a chance meeting at Connecticut’s Thompson Speedway’s World Series event in which a promotional booth for the Little T Quarter Midget Club was set up in the midway.
One thing led to another, and Jake’s father soon sold his prized Corvette, and with the money, purchased a quarter midget, starting him on the path toward a racing career.
After quarter midgets, Trainor stepped into Eastern Midget Association competition by the time he was 11 at tracks based around the North Carolina area, then began with the northeast United States based NEMA Lites series where he eventually became a two-time series champion in 2021 and 2022.
Trainor works full time for Matt Seymour Racing at the team’s Marlboro, Massachusetts shop, maintaining all of the team’s midgets and sprint cars on a day-to-day basis. Trainor has won numerous midget races for the Seymour team at IRP, and this past May, captured his second career victory in the Little 500 sprint car race at Indiana’s Anderson Speedway with the team.
