As one of the bright, young up-and-coming drivers in sprint car racing, Missouri native Ayrton Gennetten is breaking out of his shell at just the right time.
With the return of Huset’s Speedway to the national scene and weekly racing events, and a plentiful of action popping up around the Midwest, the driver couldn’t pick a better time to rise to the competition.
“It’s even more completely different this year than it was last year,” Gennetten said. “With Kenny Brown involved in that POWRi deal is going to pay good money. Knoxville is upping their purse. Huset’s is upping their purse, too. Then you’ve got the guys in Illinois with MOWA. It’s crazy how much I’ve seen it evolve, and it’s only been like two and a half years.”
While the sport in the region is ever evolving, Gennetten will look to continue to has well. Over the past pair of seasons, he’s gained success and recognition in the 410 sprint car ranks.
In 2020, he won Rookie of the Year for the Knoxville Nationals and qualified for his first World of Outlaws A-Main at Lake Ozark Speedway.
Last season, the upward trends continued. Gennetten raced regularly at Knoxville Raceway and earned Rookie of the Year honors for the season. After hiring crew chief Chad Morgan at the midpoint of the year, Gennetten recorded his best World of Outlaws finish of his career, taking P4 honors at Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Texas.
“We have a good group with familiar faces and I like that we can keep it together,” Gennetten said. “It was about half the season on the money. It’s been a lot – I never really had a crew chief that wasn’t my dad. Now, we’re able to get more travel time in and race more places, and it also takes some pressure off of my dad. Having Chad frees up us to where we can go race more and it’s great to have him here. We think we have a good package that we can show off at Volusia.”
Gennetten’s season will start out with the DIRTCar Nationals at Volusia Speedway Park in Florida.
There, he’ll be chasing his second career top five with the World of Outlaws in five nights of racing at the regular, season-kickoff track.
Following the week, the crew will head back to Missouri where they are moving into a new shop for their race team. Depending on how things go, the No. 3 team looks to be back on the road by the first weekend of April.
“Our schedule as of now will start off at Volusia,” Gennetten said. “We’re just going to kind of see where everything is at. Then, we’re going to kick back up in April. We’ll start off with the Osborne and Lake Ozark swing and then we’ll try to hit Knoxville a couple times that month as well. We’re looking at going down to Lawton and Devil’s Bowl. It just kind of depends on what’s going on with our shop and how moved in we are.”
Whether they’re on the road ahead of time or not is uncertain, but if things stay going in the right direction, there’s no doubt that Gennetten could be standing in the winners circle as a first-timer on the national tour this season.
