CONCORD, N.C. — Donny Schatz is ready to roll.
After several seasons where he and the Tony Stewart Racing team have struggled with the development of the Ford Performance sprint car engine and what he termed “a reset” within the team, the 10-time World of Outlaws champion is confident it will be a different Donny Schatz on the track when he kicks off his 28th season Feb. 7 at Florida’s Volusia Speedway Park.
“Obviously, you haven’t seen the Donny Schatz I would like to see in the last couple of years,” he said during the World of Outlaws media day at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “All I can say, is the performance hasn’t been there and my personality hasn’t been there. It is a snowball effect, when it rains it pours.
“There have been a lot of things. We didn’t have the best performance and kind of struggled to get things going the right way. You have to have a reset and start from scratch and get back to where you know you want to be. You know how to get there, you just have to start making better decisions. It just doesn’t seem like — we had good performances at a few places, but we gotta put that package back together.
“A lot of things in my life had changed in a drastic manner and I probably didn’t cope with it as well as I should have. We all make mistakes, we all have errors, we all cope with things differently. The first step is that you acknowledge that you have to get going down the right track, so I did We spent the last six months or so tracking to get back going down that right path. Right now, it looks pretty good and I am pretty excited to get things started.”
Schatz believes he and veteran crew chief Steve “Scuba” Swenson, have turned a new page and are ready to lead their team on a winning path.
“In anything you do, one of the key elements is having great people. It doesn’t matter whether it is in business,” Schatz said. “Anything you do, you have to have great people. I sit here today and look back on the last 28 years and I have been surrounded by some of the best people that there are in this industry. The best fans. I have been surrounded always by great people Let’s not waste any time here.
“We gotta get back to the top where we want to be. It takes leadership from Scuba. Scuba has been very good with it. You gotta have someone who has a personality like I am. He and I are both the same, we are not scared to have confrontation, which we do quite a bit,” Schatz added. But when you take someone who is passionate about what they do, you are going to have that. If you have two people who agree all the time, that’s probably not going to work out, you would probably agree somedays that things were no good.
“I am fortunate to have Scuba. He’s a great leader. He is great with the guys. The more we have been through the trenches the last couple of years, the more it has built both of us up to where we look back at that, it is just a hiccup in the road. Things are like that sometimes. Now, we know what not to let happen.”
Schatz said an offseason testing program helped his team find performance it had been lacking.
“We have a really good handle on it now, but there’s not anything on the race track that has been the turning point,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of testing since we ended the season here in Charlotte last fall. That has probably given us more good data for what’s to come than what we had in the prior three years and that’s why I feel great about what is going forward.”