Central Arizona Raceway
Wild West homecoming warms promoter's heart
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Wild West Shootout promoter Chris Kearns (Tyler Rinken)
CASA GRANDE, Ariz. (Jan. 9) — Amid the rumble of warming race car engines, Rio Grande Waste Services Wild West Shootout promoter Chris Kearns stood in Central Arizona Raceway’s pit area moments before the start of Friday evening's practice wearing his trademark cowboy hat — and an unmistakable smile. | Complete WWS coverage
The annual January miniseries Kearns operates with Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway owner Matt Curl and longtime WWS official Jason Babyak was officially back home in Arizona. Back, Kearns said, where it belongs.
“I felt that as soon as we announced it, from talking to racers and running into racers at races,” Kearns said when asked if he could sense a satisfaction among competitors and fans for the event’s return to the Grand Canyon State. “But yes, everybody, from the locals to the national-level people, they know this is where it should be.”
And Kearns offered how the development was hitting him: “It’s overwhelming, honestly.”
The Wild West Shootout — or at least a form of a January miniseries for Super Late Models using that name — is now in its 20th year. It was birthed at Central Arizona Raceway and run at four other Arizona tracks, but for the last four years it was contested five hours east at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park after the closure, in 2021, of Queen Creek’s Arizona Speedway, which hosted the event five Januarys.
Vado was a superb venue for the Wild West Shootout, producing consistently entertaining racing at a top-notch facility boasting wonderful amenities. But Vado’s elevation (nearly 4,000 feet above sea level) vs. Casa Grande’s (about 1,400 feet) contributed to colder weather — snow cancelled last year’s midweek show — that made drawing fans difficult.
From a financial standpoint, Kearns, 55, ultimately had to find a way to get the miniseries back to Arizona.
“I say all the time, I do this to make a living,” Kearns said of his racing promotions. “I don’t do this for the fun of it, or the sport, the love of racing. I do it to make money. It’s why I do it. And yes, we were in an amazing facility at Vado. We put on the (DirtonDirt) Race of the Year two out of four years we were there. But it’s pretty discouraging to look up in the crowd and see” and see so many open seats.
“This is a lot of work, but to me, the reward is, you know, a full grandstands and a packed pits. It just makes us feel better for all the effort we put in.”
Kearns said Vado’s lackluster attendance “was really about the weather. I mean, (track owner) Royal Jones was perfect to work with. The facility is unbelievable, obviously. The place races is amazing. The weather just kept people from coming. It just did.”
“And it’s going to be beautiful here,” he continued, noting that, after a decidedly chilly practice night (Friday’s high only reached the low 50s and dipped lower in the evening), temperatures were expected to climb each day with sunny skies prevailing. “It’s going to be mid-70s in a few days.”
Kearns knows the more comfortable conditions in Arizona will pay off at the turnstiles.
“It’s going to be a lot bigger crowd and it’s a lot more cars,” he said. “Which is a lot more work to do, but at the same time, yeah, it’s pretty exciting.”
A native of California’s Central Coast who now lives in Kentucky, Kearns was first connected to the Wild West Shootout in 2014 when he served as race director for two events run at Central Arizona Raceway under promoter Benji Lyons. He became co-owner of the miniseries the following year and ran it for two years at USA Raceway in Tucson, Ariz., before moving on to Arizona Speedway and Vado.
Kearns was awaiting the right opportunity to bring the event back to Arizona. An extensive refurbishment of Central Arizona conducted over the past year-and-a-half by track co-promoters Brad Whitfield and Jerry Petty opened that door.
“The story I tell everybody is that when we had to leave Arizona Speedway, this wasn’t even an option,” Kearns said of Central Arizona. “The track was unsafe and the facility was not capable of having a national event.
“What Brad and Jerry have done here … just putting the wall up, that already made a difference, but then the other improvements they made, it was like, ‘OK, now we can do it here. We can pull it off.’ ”
Kearns said last March’s event on the High Limit Sprint Car Series, a tour co-owned by racers Brad Sweet and Kyle Larson, at Central Arizona “opened our eyes” to Central Arizona’s potential
He “just watched and listened to everybody afterward and talked to Brad Sweet, and my son (Blade) talks to Larson a lot, and we just heard so much great stuff about it. That’s what did it.”
So much has changed at Central Arizona since it last hosted Wild West Shootout races more than a decade ago.
“That big pit booth out there was not there,” Kearns said. “The front ticket gate was not here. A lot of the new fencing you see was not here. That building that they call the pavilion (behind the concrete covered grandstand) wasn’t here. There’s a concert stage. There's more grandstands. There’s tons of concrete. There’s a new ramp going for the handicapped to the grandstand. It just goes on and on.”
The pit area space is immense, with the 120-plus cars over three divisions, including nearly 40 Super Late Models, signed in for Friday’s practice not even coming close to using all of the available real estate.
And the racetrack itself? It’s been largely transformed, not only changed by the new outside concrete wall but also a more D-shaped layout that allows cars to straighten out only briefly.
There is one trait of the track that Kearns and his crew have had to address: its width. In that vein, the experienced track-prep team he brings in for the miniseries — Fairbury Speedway’s Chad Bauman, Lewis Breeden and Cullen Breeden, Kokomo (Ind.) Speedway’s Reece O’Connor and Kearns’s son Blade — went to work on that project in the days leading up to Friday’s practice.
“I just noticed that the feedback I got is that the track was narrow, and it takes a lot of work to widen a racetrack so we came in and Brad allowed us to kind of do what we thought we needed to do,” Kearns said. “I mean, I truly believe I have the best track prep crew in the country. I always say that, and I mean it, and I had the five of them show up here on Monday and they just went to town working on it.
“We have all the equipment they could ever want — we got a couple of tractors sponsored, they already got two graders here, there’s three water trucks, they just bought a new heavy hitch and there’s a couple of tillers here. But we had to rent an excavator to widen the track.
“I think they widened it 8-10 feet. That’s just cutting a new groove in (by carving away the inside berm). The goal is to open up a lane on the bottom and then take some banking out of the top to slow the top down, because it’s just been pretty top dominant. Hey, when a track has this much banking, it’s hard for it not to be top dominant, so that’s what they're working on.
“Luckily, I feel the guys, like Chad and Reese and Blaze, they can watch and they can tell by the way a car’s entering, or by the way a car’s exiting, ‘Oh, we need to change this corner,’ ” he added. “It’s not just prepping the dirt, it’s actually shaping the racetrack.”
Kearns expressed his anxiousness to kick off the six-race miniseries with Saturday’s program headlined by a 50-lap, $25,000-to-win feature for the Super Late Models. He’s been at the track, after all, since Dec. 28, working with his team to make sure everything is in place for a successful event.
“I’m pretty particular on how I like to do things, so I like a lot of signage and I like to lay everything out,” Kearns said. “We brought our own office building in. We try and be self-contained so we bring so much stuff; we had three trailers right here full of stuff.
“I really couldn’t tell you what I did for two weeks, but we were literally busy every single day for two weeks, setting up our office, sitting up our internets, hanging our signs. We just had so much stuff to do. And Brad Whitfield has been perfect to work with because he understands that everything we want to do to change things makes us all better. Brad’s allowing us to bring in our own systems. He gets it that it’s going to make all of us better.”
The talented roster of Super Late Model drivers ready for Wild West Shootout action has Kearns pumped as well. He pointed out that the list is led by a half-dozen drivers — Jonathan Davenport, Billy Moyer, Bobby Pierce, Brandon Sheppard, Hudson O’Neal and Ricky Thornton Jr. — who have won crown jewel events at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.
“I think it rivals 2016,” Kearns said, ranking this year’s Super Late Model turnout to that of the event’s second year at USA Raceway. “That’s the year we had Davenport, (Don) O’Neal, (Darrell) Lanigan. It’s possibly even our strongest field ever, it really is. I’m excited.”
Correction: Fixes that Jason Babyak, sted Ben Shelton, is among miniseries owners.
