KNOXVILLE, IOWA – As the No. 2 Big Game Motorsports car rolled around the high line of Knoxville Raceway piloted by David Gravel, the eyes in the crowd were beaming down onto the white No. 15 entry of 10-time Knoxville Nationals champion Donny Schatz.
It had been four years since Schatz – who gathered 14 straight top-2 finishes between 2004 and 2018 – had taken the right turn to get to victory lane from the scales at the famous half-mile dirt track.
The Tony Stewart Racing car, decorated in retro CarQuest colors, had just passed Tyler Courtney for second place on the track when a caution flew for Carson Macedo. The next restart with 11 laps to go would be the final one of the night.
Gravel, being the leader, got the jump for the green flag and put some space between himself and Schatz in the first part of the last stint. Even though sprint cars don’t have rear-view mirrors, the 15 car behind a leader at Knoxville carries a massive weight.
It was setting up to be a potential back-and-forth battle between the pair of drivers.
“Typically, I don’t like running the top lap-after-lap, but there was nothing telling me to go low,” Gravel said. “(I should’ve) searched a little bit, but I thought if I searched and messed up, I would lose a lot of ground, but you live and learn.”
Schatz had one hell of a run coming off of turn 2 with four laps remaining when they eventually crossed the starting line.
“We didn’t really get to race,” Gravel said. “He kind of slid me and I got tight off of (turns) 3 and 4 and wasn’t really able to answer back. It kind of threw my mojo off when he did pass me.”
The pass had turned into a run with the type of speed that only Schatz has shown consistently at Knoxville since the turn of the century.
10-time turned into 11.
“I didn’t drive like I should have at the beginning there. I was driving like a – I don’t know what you’d even call it – there’s no words for it. I could hear him telling me to just gather it up and settle down. It worked.”
Schatz’ father, Danny, passed away earlier this year in June after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
“This means a lot,” Schatz said in victory lane. “My family’s all here. I didn’t know if we were going to get there. We fell back to seventh or something early – I just couldn’t control the wheelspin. Scuba (Schatz’ crew chief Steve Swenson) can read me like a book. He knew when I didn’t say nothing on that stop, that he’d better do the 911 on it and he did. Hats off to them, they did an incredible job.”
The Knoxville Nationals win for Schatz comes as the first under the power of a Ford Engine. The company began it’s sprint car engine manufacturing program as part of Tony Stewart Racing’s switch over to the blue oval.
Toyota Racing Development is also in the process of developing a sprint car engine and had one in the race driven by Australia driver Kerry Madsen, who finished P15 in a Roth Motorsports entry.
Schatz’ crew took a swing, as he called it, to start the race with the motor. In the midst of his drop to the seventh position, however, the motor started smoking during the first portion of the race.
“(The smoke) was a byproduct of how we had the motor fueled,” Schatz said. “I probably shouldn’t (say) this, but one thing that we tune the motors with – especially with Fords – is there’s a lot more different nozzle configurations that we can use. We ran a completely different configuration tonight than we did (in our prelim).”
Schatz pulled in for his mid-race pit stop frustrated at how the first 25 laps had gone, but it ended up being just what he needed.
“Naturally, when we stopped and I had lost five, six, or seven spots and that’s why I was frustrated,” Schatz said. “I told my guys I felt like we made the wrong move with the nozzles, but it came back around the other way at the end of the race. I guess I just had to bide my time on that. When you load them up with fuel like that, it also causes them to blow some oil out and that’s what you see with the smoke in the beginning. We got everything up on a fine line up around the edge.”
The move to Ford came with a lot of frustration for Schatz and Co.
It’s a reason that OEM battles haven’t surfaced more prevalently with sprint car racing during the boom in popularity in the better part of the past decade. The overwhelming majority of cars in the field Saturday night and around the nation run Chevrolet motors.
Sprint cars, as a racing vehicle, are so different from other forms of motorsports, with intricacies that can change how the motor performs on a dime. Schatz referenced his attempts in the first half of the race to control the wheel spin of the race car and how difficult that was for him – arguably the best sprint car driver in the world.
Toyota has been trying to perfect its motor in recent years and invest more in the sport as well with teams like KCP Racing’s No. 18 (Gio Scelzi) and Ridge & Sons Racing (Aaron Reutzel). Both of those drivers ran Chevrolet motors Saturday – Madsen held the lone Toyota.
“This is huge for everybody that’s been a part of this program,” Schatz said. “It’s been a lot of years in the making. There’s been a lot of heartburn, a lot of swear words, there’s been a lot of things. But, it’s also pretty rewarding to sit here and say, ‘that motor has won the Knoxville Nationals.’ To sit here and win one of the biggest races of the year (with Ford), I’m pretty excited about it.”
Schatz related it to the driver’s preference as well. One motor may work great for one driver and not for a different one.
“Everybody’s dealt with COVID.” Schatz said. “That changed the whole dynamic of where we got our parts made and where Ford got its parts made. It’s pretty rewarding at this moment – I don’t think we’re going to sit here and brag about how great it is. We go to a lot of different race tracks and it’s always performed real well on the bigger tracks. It’s getting to where I feel like it’s good for me. That doesn’t mean it will be good for someone else. Tony’s had multiple drivers in (his second car) and one guy liked it, one guy didn’t.”
Consider this the monkey off the back for Ford and Schatz alike.
There will always be doubters and those that say the motor doesn’t have enough power to win races, but most will be silenced after Saturday.
Schatz cleared the hurdle which alluded him for five years and that’s something diehard fans will never forget.
“When you’ve won 10 championships and 11 of these Nationals, you’re a confident person,” Schatz said. “You know what you need to feel and what you need to do. I’ve got to work on it myself, and with these guys. I’ve made it very clear that some of our struggles have just been from lack of communication. Some of it on my part – some of it on other parts, but we’re human. I’m not afraid of saying my faults. The nice thing about being in this light is that everyone can see every damn one of them.
“I try to be perfect but it never works,” said Donny Schatz.
