Obituary
Sooner champ's death dims racing's rising star
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt.com staff reporter
Hayden Ross (center) in victory lane. (Travis Barnard)
Kip Hughes couldn’t deny the hunch his four-year streak of consecutive Complete Well Testing Sooner Series championships might come to an end in 2022. Entering the season, the Enid, Okla., racer had amassed 26 career tour victories, far and away the tour’s winningest driver.
But facing up-and-coming racer named Hayden Ross, who as a teen displayed skills beyond his years, Hughes sensed his run of dominance was about to reach the end of the road.
“I kept telling him all along, the last couple years — and you can ask David Brown, their crew chief — as soon as that kid gets his first win, we’re all in trouble,” said Hughes, who’s also the promoter of Enid Speedway. “Because once he gets the first out of the way, he’s going to take off like a bat out of hell.”
Last year, Hughes narrowly edged Ross in the Sooner Series title chase by 95 points. But by the end of 2021, Ross had already turned the tide in a way that Hughes deemed inevitable. Ross, at the home track of Hughes, captured his first Sooner Series race in the tour’s third-to-last race of the season.
Sure enough, Ross assembled a 2022 season worth remembering, powering to seven Sooner Series victories and the tour’s championship in addition to the Southern Touring Series title. But five days after clinching the titles, Ross was dead.
Thursday morning, Hughes had been one of the first to receive the devastating news that Ross, 20, died in the wee hours that morning from injuries suffered in an ATV accident on the property of his Muskogee, Okla., home.
Little did Hughes know that Ross’s arrival as his fiercest competitor — the budding star’s first series victory last fall — would also serve as Hughes’s most enduring memory of a jovial rivalry that ended far too soon.
“That picture I shared this morning (to Facebook), I walked out over there (to Ross’s trailer) and said, ‘We’re all (screwed) now. It’s on now,’ ” Hughes said. “Hayden said, ‘Oh, I know.’ I congratulated him or whatever. His mom, I think, took that picture because they were so excited they kicked my butt. I dropped my head kind of ashamed, and he’s there smiling next to me. That just kind of sets the tone as racers.
“They wanted to outrun me so bad, they can’t stand it. I wanted to outrun them so bad, I couldn’t stand it. But at the end of the night, we were at each other’s trailers drinking beer and shooting the (bull), you know what I mean? We all respected each other, and loved each other.
“When someone is so young, so good, and has so much ahead of him, it just makes it hurt — makes it sting — even worse,” Hughes added, his tone downshifting to a heavier, somber reflection. “Our little Late Model series we have, our entire group that travels around all the time, everybody likes each other. Everybody helps each other. Everybody takes care of each other.
“There’s nobody that sits there and cusses somebody out. We may (complain) about somebody, but that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to (complain) and moan about your brother or sister, or your mom or your dad, and it’s the same kind of deal. That’s what’s really bizarre, in a sense. Everybody is just devastated. There’s no other way around it.”
Ross, who turned 20 on June 27, had been on the fast track to greater success, on and off the racetrack. Away from the racetrack, he helped his father, Brady, operate the family’s construction company, Ross Construction, and this fall enrolled at Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology to pursue a degree in construction management.
On the racetrack, “he left one helluva footprint down here (in Oklahoma) for a 20-year-old kid,” Hughes said, whose words shed light on more than Ross’s sheer racing resume.
“Everybody loved him,” Hughes added. “I can’t think of a time he drove anybody dirty or questionable. Sometimes you say, ‘Oh, remember that one time he screwed over so and so?' I honest to God couldn’t tell you a time he drove anybody dirty. He was just good. Really, really good.”
Though Ross wasn’t a rookie — he launched his Late Model career in 2018 — the Oklahoman’s maturity accelerated so rapidly this season that Brown, his crew chief, had seen this kind of potential before.
“I’ve been around racing my whole life. I’ve seen where Billy Moyer was on top of the world, to Bill Frye and Terry Phillips. … I’ve seen all the top talent,” Brown said. “I knew that in a few years, (Hayden) was going to be really, really good. I could tell he could want it. With so many good cars, it’s not easy. I could tell he wanted that. He got better and better.”
Ross, a third-generation racer who competed in go-karts and motocross before his Late Model career, followed the footsteps of his father, Brady, and great uncle, Tom Laster, the 1979 National Championship Racing Association champion. Ross not only had racing in his blood, but the right sphere of influences who helped heighten his trajectory.
One of his mentors was National Dirt Late Model Hall of Fame driver Bill Frye of Greenbrier, Ark., who came out of retirement to field the Ross team’s backup car last month in a Sooner Series event at Thunderbird Speedway in Muskogee.
Frye remembers the time he helped Ross in his first test session at Thunderbird in 2018, recalling the then-teenager acted as if “he had no fear of the place.”
“It didn’t bother him at all, the speed of Muskogee,” Frye said. “That place devastates a lot of drivers. I mean, it’s fast. I guess I admire his courage and his competitiveness.”
“It wasn’t like he was running over people. It was his consistency. He could hold his line. To me, what makes a race car driver is his concentration. You have to be focused on that race car with what you’re doing. That’s all you can think about when you’re in that race car. It was like he could get in that car and drive it beyond his years with the focus he had. He used that focus. I’m sure he learned that from motocross and racing other stuff. He had that in him.”
In the Sept. 23 Sooner Series at Thunderbird with Frye in competition, the Hall of Fame driver started behind Ross in the feature and figured to toy with his mentee.
“I thought about jacking him up just to say I shoved him once,” Frye said through a laugh, but he could never keep up with Ross to play lighthearted games.
Over time, particularly as Ross started to emerge as the driver to beat within the Sooner Series, Hughes, too, “tried playing games with him so he could drive me dirty.”
“And he just wouldn’t do it. Ever. Never would do it,” Hughes said of Ross’s abstinence from entertaining the act of roughhousing, even in moments Hughes knew he crossed lines in heated battles for the win. “I could never drive him dirty. We’d touch and stuff, and that’s racing. I’d never do anything intentional — move him out of the way or what not — because he never did that.
“He was a really, really good racer. They wanted to win a championship really, really bad, and they got two of them. They went out and earned it. Kudos to them for that. Hands down one of the best group of people I’ve ever been around racing. And I’m not taking anything away from anybody else. I’m just stating facts. They’re just really, really good people. The kind of people you want to be around.”
In fact, Hughes had built such an attachment to Ross and his team, the Sooner Series rivals had plans to travel together to Oct. 21-23’s World of Outlaws Case Late Model Series three-race swing at Humboldt (Kan.) Speedway, 81 Speedway in Park City, Kan., and U.S. 36 Raceway in Osborn, Mo.
“You never really had just Hayden. You had the 66 group,” Hughes said. “They were all equal. Obviously Hayden was the driver, but they were all good people. Everybody was just equal. … They were, and are, a close group.”
Ross and Hughes also had plans to trek to Las Vegas (Nev.) Motor Speedway and compete in the Nov. 10-12 Duel in the Desert with the XR Super Series.
“My gut feeling was that if he went out there without me, they’d be pretty good. If I went without them, we’d be pretty good. But to go out there together? I just think we know each other so well, and push each other so much, that we’d make each other that much better,” Hughes said.
“It doesn’t seem real, but you know it’s real,” Hughes said of Ross’s death. “It’s just numbing. Our little series has definitely taken a huge blow. Every weekend, it’s our group together. Hell, I probably spend more time with my family than I do with my own.
“We’re always gone racing. I just feel terrible for his family and everybody that helped him on the race car. There’s not a bad person in that group.”
Brown said that each time Ross won a race, he’d lobby him into buying dinner that evening. More times than not, Brown would find Ross requesting a chili cheese dog or some Mexican dish.
“He liked that,” Brown said. “He liked to eat, and he ate a lot this year. … This year he wanted to win every race.”
Brown also mentioned that three flat tires on separate occasions robbed Ross of three potential wins along the way this season, and proceeded to add that Ross had it what it took to win a dozen or more races.
Shannon Prophet, a crew member on the No. 66 Ross Racing team, believed that “in the next year or so Hayden would have been winning Lucas Oil (Late Model Dirt Series) or World of Outlaws races.”
“That was his goal,” Prophet said. “He wanted to be up there with them, and he wasn’t far from it. It’s sad.”
On June 13, Ross made his national-touring debut at perhaps the most daunting racetrack in America, the Belleville (Kan.) High Banks half-mile, with the XR Super Series.
Ross finished ninth amid a 21-car field, mixing it up with the likes of Scott Bloomquist and Shane Clanton as the highest finishing non-touring racer. At the Lucas Oil Series-sanctioned Topless 100 at Batesville Motor Speedway in Locust Grove, Ark., he came one spot shy of starting his first crown jewel feature.
Next year the team had plans to run the Comp Cams Super Dirt Series and integrate more national-touring races into their schedule, a blueprint that would have gotten Ross that much closer to one day competing full-time with either the World of Outlaws or Lucas Oil Series.
“The future was bright,” said Brown, adding that Indiana racer Joe Godsey will fill the vacated seat of the No. 66 Ross Racing entry in select races the rest of the 2022 season and likely drive the car regularly next season. Godsey recently ended a five-year run with Bentonville, Ark.-based Roth Motorsports.
The memories of the car’s former driver, meanwhile, will endure with those who knew Ross the closest, namely Hughes.
“He pretty much went out and kicked our ass this year,” Hughes said. “The title of champion he definitely deserved it. That’s one thing they can’t ever take from you. They’re aren’t many 20-year-old series Late Model champions out there. He’s one of a few. He’s in an elite group, and rightfully so. He deserves it. For a 20-year-old kid, he left one helluva footprint down here.”
