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Brady Bacon (69) battles C.J. Leary at Kokomo Raceway. (Paul Arch Photo)

USAC Sprint Car Review: Best Of The Rest

INDIANAPOLIS — While Logan Seavey cruised to the USAC AMSOIL National Sprint Car Championship, there were plenty of other highlights during the 44-race campaign.

For the first time since 2012, every driver finishing inside the top-10 of the series standings also won at least one feature event: Logan Seavey, Brady Bacon, Daison Pursley, Kevin Thomas Jr., C.J. Leary, Mitchel Moles, Robert Ballou, Kyle Cummins, Justin Grant and Matt Westfall.

For the third consecutive year, Brady Bacon finished as the runner-up in the standings, adding five wins to his credit. In May at Circle City, he made it 14 consecutive seasons with a USAC National Sprint Car feature win, breaking the mark of 13-straight years set by Sheldon Kinser between 1974-1986. 

In June at New Jersey’s Bridgeport Motorsports Park, he became the winningest Eastern Storm driver of all-time with victory number seven. He followed up with his first win at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway in a decade as well as his first Indiana Sprint Week win in three years at Terre Haute in July.

for the Dynamics, Inc./Hoffman Auto Racing in the same state where he earned win number one for the team. Bacon capped the year by capturing a $10,000 bonus as the first two-time champion in the three-year history of the 10-race Bubby Jones Master of Going Faster series presented by Spire Sports + Entertainment. He also netted his crew chief, Matt Hummel, $2,500 as the champion.

Third-place points finisher Daison Pursley made, perhaps, the most impressive drive of any non-winner with the series in 2024, advancing a series record 21 positions in a 23rd to 2nd charge at Bloomington (Ind.) Speedway in May. He also notched his first two career points-paying USAC National Sprint Car wins at Iowa’s Knoxville Raceway in June and at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway during the 4-Crown Nationals.

En route to fourth in the standings, Kevin Thomas Jr. won five times with the series, including the inaugural Justin Owen Memorial at Lawrenceburg in April for his first series win in 19 months. He became the fourth different driver for Rock Steady Racing to score the Spring Showdown at Indiana’s Tri-State Speedway in May.

He was triumphant on his 33rd birthday in June at Pennsylvania’s Williams Grove Speedway after Briggs Danner ran out of fuel on the last corner of the last lap. KTJ added a Smackdown prelim night score at Kokomo in August before bagging a $20,000 payday in September after becoming the first five-time winner of the Haubstadt Hustler at Tri-State.

Five years to the day after his most recent Ocala victory, C.J. Leary won again at the D-shaped Florida oval in February. For good measure, the fifth-place points finishing driver also was standing tall as the winner of the non-points inaugural Stoops Sprint Car Invitational at The Dirt Track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a 10-car, 20-lap invitational. 

Leary once again led all series drivers with 10 fast qualifying times, the third time he has achieved the feature, and the only driver to do so more than once.

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Mitchel Moles (19AZ) and C.J. Leary (15x) at Kokomo. (Dick Ayers photo)

Mitchel Moles’ season was highlighted by an Eastern Storm title in which he recorded five top-five results in a six-night span. Furthermore, one year after becoming the first USAC National Sprint Car winner at Illinois’ Macon Speedway, the Raisin City, Calif., native became the first ever repeat series winner at the fifth-mile dirt oval for his only series win of the year on the road to a sixth place finish.

Robert Ballou was on the winning side of the most electrifying finish of the year when he erased a half-straightaway deficit to Kyle Cummins on the last lap to win the opening night of #LetsRaceTwo in May at Eldora. His first series win in 18 months proved to be the closest finish of the USAC season – .016 seconds. In June, Ballou also became the third driver to surpass 500 career USAC National Sprint Car feature starts, joining Dave Darland and Brady Bacon.

Joining the ew Petty Performance Racing team for 2024, Kyle Cummins progressively jelled to become a consistent frontrunner. After calling his shot in July by declaring over the PA system, “we’re going to win at Kokomo,” he did just that 24 hours later for the team’s first win. Cummins and company added one more win on Friday the 13th in September at Circle City.

Justin Grant experienced perhaps the strangest stat line in the history of USAC National Sprint Car racing by finishing ninth in points despite winning nine times! Inconsistency plagued his bid for a third-straight series title, but when he was on, he was on. He won the opening two rounds of the season in Ocala and rounded out the year with a win in the season finale at Red Dirt to become just the fourth driver in USAC Sprint Car history to win both the opener and the closer in a season, joining the likes of Pat O’Connor (1956), Steve Butler (1986) and Brady Bacon (2020).

In May, Grant bewildered the crowd by winning at Eldora, then promptly stuffing his car into the turn three wall and flipping over on his cooldown lap. He then won his 50th career USAC National Sprint Car race in May at Knoxville as well as the Indiana Sprint Week round at Tri-State. He picked up the prelim opener of Smackdown at Kokomo, then became the first 4-time Smackdown championship night winner two nights later with a lucrative $35,000 top prize.

Matt Westfall snuck into 10th in points on the final weekend of the year after making the biggest charge to win during the 2024 series season. Starting 13th on the grid at Red Dirt, Westfall patrolled the bottom to the lead and to a highly popular win. 

Amid the process, it was the furthest back any driver had started and won a race with the series since Kevin Thomas Jr.’s 14th to 1st charge at Indiana’s Lincoln Park Speedway in 2021.

Briggs Danner posted his first three victories of the USAC National Sprint Car season in 2024. In June at Grandview, he became the first Pennsylvanian to win a USAC National Sprint Car feature since Frankie Kerr 25 years earlier in 1999 and the first Pennsylvanian to win a series race in his home state since Paul Pitzer at Reading in 1979. 

Danner went on to cement his status as a winner outside the confines of the Keystone State as well by capturing the Indiana Sprint Week finale in August at Bloomington and the inaugural Greg Staab Memorial at Lawrenceburg in October.

Hunter Maddox raced his way to Rookie of the Year honors with the USAC National Sprint Cars in 2024. Maddox, who cut his racing teeth on dirt bikes, made 25 feature starts and finished 18th in the standings.

Editor’s Note: This was part two of a review of the USAC AMSOIL National Sprint Car Championship season.