SPEEDWAY, Ind. — Prior to first strapping into a USAC Silver Crown car late last season, Trey Osborne estimated that his big track experience was limited to running a sprint car at the three-eighths-mile Paragon (Ind.) Speedway.
Just a little over a year later, after a full season of competing at tracks all larger in size, Osborne has been honored as the 2024 Max Papis Innovations USAC Silver Crown Rookie of the Year.
With his accomplishment, Osborne (Columbus, Ohio) becomes the first Buckeye State native in 22 years, and seventh overall, to earn USAC Silver Crown Rookie of the Year honors, joining Jack Hewitt (1981), Dave Blaney (1984), Kenny Jacobs (1986), Gene Lee Gibson (1988), Todd Kane (1998) and Matt Westfall (2002).
Despite missing a pair of events, Osborne finished a solid sixth in the standings after starting 12 of the 14 events on the calendar. His season was highlighted by a pair of top-five finishes, one each on pavement and dirt, in his BCR Group/Flint Trucking – Duncan Oil – QS Components Kercher Chevy, featuring a Maxim chassis on dirt and a Beast on pavement.
“It’s definitely very cool to see my name on that list,” Osborne remarked when looking at the names of the past recipients. “I couldn’t do it without (crew chief) Malcolm Lovelace. He took a chance on me, and I think, overall, it was a pretty good year. I don’t know if we really had a goal for a points finish. Malcolm and I had talked about winning rookie of the year, but his biggest thing was that we kept improving every race, and not to plateau. We’re in a pretty good spot and I’m pretty bummed that the season ended. I wish we could keep going.”
After getting his feet wet with the team by making two series starts in late 2023, Osborne signed on for a full season USAC Silver Crown run in 2024. But the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
In February, Osborne was injured during a flip over the turn three wall during a USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship feature event at Florida’s Ocala Speedway, resulting in a broken vertebra in his back, plus a compression fracture in two more vertebrae while shearing off the top of a fourth vertebra. Sidelined with a back brace and a bevy of checkups, X-rays and MRIs, Osborne eagerly awaited the start of the season which was more than two months away.
Osborne estimated that he didn’t really feel like himself again until late in the season and had been racing with the pain on his mind all along. With that said, Lovelace, a former USAC Sprint Car competitor himself in the 1970s-80s, never wavered in his support for Osborne and even extended a helping hand to his other racing exploits.
“Without Malcolm, a lot of my sprint car season wouldn’t have even been possible because he kept me not only motivated, but he also helped me out by getting me a new seat after it got destroyed in Florida,” Osborne revealed. “A lot of my stuff was actually on those sprint cars, and all of it got destroyed. So, Malcolm helped me out with some new equipment and we talked multiple times a week about setups and thinking through ideas.”
Outside of Eldora, IRP and just a handful of practice laps at Du Quoin, the entirety of the 2024 USAC Silver Crown track slate was entirely new for Osborne. Five of his six top-10 results on the year came on pavement, three of which came at tracks in which he was visiting for the first time.
His best performance to date, a third-place finish cae at Hutchinson, Kansas’ Salt City Speedway.
“That really did a lot for our season, especially the third in Hutchinson,” Osborne remembered. “We worked for that, and I was pretty happy with that performance. We actually had an overheating issue and we weren’t really able to figure it out. We tried everything, then Malcolm said, ‘just run it.’ So we ran it, but unfortunately, we killed a motor doing that. But we did get a good finish out of it, so that was definitely a fun trip. The ride home definitely isn’t bad when you have a run like that.”
Osborne is now at a point where he can contrast and compare the various ways to approach anything that’s thrown his way, and with a year under his belt in the champ cars, he’s absorbed it all.
“In Silver Crown racing, it’s pretty much all half-miles and mile or bigger tracks,” Osborne explained. “That was definitely a lot to get used to, but I really like them now. It definitely takes a different driving style to run a Silver Crown car, but with the longer tracks and the longer races, you’ve got to go about it a little bit differently and just keep yourself within range whereas with the sprint car, you’ve just got to be on attack the whole time. You still have to be on attack with the Silver Crown car, but if it takes you a couple more laps to pass a car, that’s better than potentially wrecking the car. That’s especially true with only having 14 races a year. A DNF and a bad points night can really kill your whole season’s points run.”
Osborne is preparing to run it back, with even more gusto, for the same team in full season number two in 2025.
“At every race, I was able to build off what I’ve already learned,” Osborne acknowledged. “You just keep adding from race-to-race as you learn something. Next year, I’ll learn even more and I’ll be able to look back at the end of the season to where I’m at right now and go, ‘wow, I could’ve done things a lot differently.’ But as long as that keeps happening, I know I’m still getting better; that’s what really matters.”