Donny Schatz has raced on the World of Outlaws tour for 27 straight seasons, and that streak isn’t coming to a close this off-season.
The 10-time World of Outlaws champion will be back on the tour to chase another title.
“Once you get that knowledge in the Sprint Car world, the premiere drivers were the Steve Kinser’s and the Sammy Swindell’s and Doug Wolfgang’s, the guys that ran the World of Outlaws,” Schatz said in the World of Outlaws press release. “That was what my goal and my vision and dream was as a young child. So, getting into racing and doing all that you realize that under this World of Outlaws banner the man with the vision was Ted Johnson. I got the great fortune of meeting Ted.”
Schatz captured four wins in the 2023 season, including his sixth-career Kings Royal win at Eldora Speedway in July.
However, his standards are high, and he knows that he and his Tony Stewart Racing team can be better.
“We’ve had some challenges the last several years,” Schatz said. “Part of the engine development program has been real tough on all of us. And I’m not getting any younger, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any slower. Things have changed. This and that. It’s on all of us. It’s not just having performance lacking from engines. Ford has worked hard on getting us what we want. We’ve made some changes We had to change the person doing it halfway through some of this stuff.”
Schatz becomes the eighth driver committed to the World of Outlaws tour in 2024, with High Limit going national and creating a second country-wide series.
Each Series – at the time this was written – have eight committed drivers so far.
Other World of Outlaws commits include Big Game Motorsports’ David Gravel, KCP Racing’s Gio Scelzi, Shark Racing’s Logan Schuchart (Shark split its pair of cars and are sending their second car, piloted by Jacob Allen to the High Limit tour), Stenhouse Jr.-Marshall Racing’s Sheldon Haudenschild, Sides Motorsports Landon Crawley, and Brock Zearfoss and Bill Rose driving as car owners.
“We have all these pieces to the puzzle that got scattered out across the table,” Schatz said in the release. “And now I feel like we have them all in the same spot where we can see the colors and align the corners… I know what I’m capable of. I know what my guys are capable of. I know what our equipment is capable of. We’ve got that stuff in a way better position than we were, and the guys feed off me. You’re going to see a different Donny Schatz in 2024. I need to lead my guys better. My focus has maybe been a little shifted for reasons outside of racing or this or that. I worked on it hard trying to make sure we got all of that right. You definitely will see better results.”
Regardless of competition, Schatz is determined – and driven – to compete for some more hardware.
“When I wanted to win Rookie of the Year and did, I didn’t win a race that year,” Schatz said. “Then you want to win a race. Then you win a race. Once you achieve a goal, that doesn’t mean you feel complete. I wanted to win a championship. I won a championship. All it did was fuel the fire to want more. You want to do it again. I think the thing that’s hardest to portray to young guys, to fans, to whoever is just because you’ve won one championship doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it anymore. You don’t have less desire. You actually have more. I’ve won 10. I want to win 11.”
