Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Dreaming big, AK Race Cars scaling up
Austin Kirkpatrick built his first Dirt Late Model after the 2014 season when he was a college student barely beyond the legal drinking age. He’s been dabbling in the car-construction realm throughout the past decade, employing his mechanical bent in an effort to come up with a better mousetrap for himself and, in recent years, a handful of other racers.
But now, at 33, the native of Ocala, Fla., who lives in Charlotte, N.C., has larger goals for his building pursuits. He wants to become a serious player in the division’s chassis game.
“We’re trying not to be a little boutique garage race car mechanic,” Kirkpatrick said. “We're trying to be legitimate and, you know, try to throw our name in the hat as an actual chassis manufacturer. We’ve got some big dreams and aspirations that we’re aiming for.”
To that end, over the past year Kirkpatrick has been increasing his workforce, investing in new machinery, doubling the size of his shop in Salisbury, N.C., and scaling up the production of his AK Race Cars. He’s put his own driving career to the side so he can focus on the design and streamlining of his product and building his customer base, which has begun to grow as he heads into his first spring operating a full-fledged chassis business.
Kirkpatrick sees an opening in the Dirt Late Model world that he’s striving to fill.
“I think the market’s screaming for a third viable (chassis manufacturer) option, and right now, there’s just two,” Kirkpatrick said, referring to the chassis juggernauts, Longhorn and Rocket, that currently stand as the division’s mass producers. “And, I mean, it’s just, you know, out of necessity that a lot of these guys go with one of the two options. We’re trying to do things a little bit differently and we’re trying to be a third option and hopefully we can start increasing our size of the pie.
“I mean, right now it’s kind of at this point where it’s almost a one-horse race (with Longhorn separating itself as the highest-volume company), and whenever you get a monopoly, it’s not good for the customer. I think there’s some things that we can do better. I feel like with some of the experience I have, some of the difference in strategy, in mindset, that I have, and the people that are in our corner have, it will allow us to do things in a way that’s probably better for the sport long term.”
Kirkpatrick brings an engineering background into his leadership of a Dirt Late Model chassis business. A 2015 graduate of the University of Florida, he owns a business degree but he started his college studies taking engineering classes and went in that direction with his professional career. He took a job with an automotive manufacturing company in California shortly after graduating and spent several years there before relocating to North Carolina in late 2019 to continue in a similar position.
The roughly five years that Kirkpatrick worked in the automotive industry gained him valuable experience that he’s transferred to his Dirt Late Model construction endeavors, which he began with the debut of his first homebuilt car in 2015 — he won a Southern All Star Series feature with it that October at Talladega Short Track in Eastaboga, Ala. — and subsequent designs in 2018, ’19 and ’20 that he put together for himself while racing on a limited basis.
“I had a few (work) opportunities that I was lucky enough to get and allowed me to kind of get access to some cool tools that I’d never been exposed to before and get good at some computer programs that have been really helpful going forward,” Kirkpatrick said. “It allowed me to get some experience running some machines that are the same kind of machines we’re going to be using to build parts for the race cars. It kind of allows me to have another tool in the toolbox that is helpful for running a Dirt Late Model company.
“Like whenever I’m designing parts, I know what machines we’re going to be using. I know what the constraints of those machines are so that I know how to design them so that it’s easiest to make them, which allows us to make the parts quicker, more repeatably and more affordably.”
Kirkpatrick’s analytical mind has long drawn him to designing race cars. His early attempts produced some success and increasingly showed his ingenuity but also were part of a learning process that has led him to today and his entrance into the chassis-building business.
Looking back on his first home-built car, Kirkpatrick remembers thinking “it was super cool,” but he conceded that “the thing was pretty vanilla” compared to not only what he’s building now but his designs in the 2010s and later. He famously made waves, of course, in 2020 when he brought out a car that featured a straight-axle front end and promptly drove it to September victory at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C., but after he ran well that November in the World Finals at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C., the sport’s rules makers banned the concept.
“I made a few random cars here and there after that whole project got disallowed,” Kirkpatrick said of the early- to mid-2020s. “I kind of describe that time as my … you know how people, when they graduate college, will go travel for a year or two to kind of figure things out? I feel like the straight-axle car and the subsequent cars were kind of that for me. I had to really go off the island and really try some crazy s--- and learn a lot about kind of how things work, and then I kind of came back to mainland and built a quote-unquote production car, which is what the Rev1 (his current AK Race Cars design) is. It kind of incorporates some of the things that we knew worked from some of the other experiments and what the collective has generated over time. It’s a car that's going to be a lot more all-purpose and good at everything rather than specific things.”
Coming up with a chassis that’s able to perform well for a driver across the vast span of track sizes, shapes and surfaces has become Kirkpatrick’s focus. He previously concentrated on tailoring his designs for specific tracks that he personally wanted to conquer.
“That thought process that I had was pretty flawed, trying to make a car that was just good at one thing,” Kirkpatrick said. “Originally I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about making a car that’s good at some random racetrack in some random state. I just want to go to these tracks that I like going to, the Eldoras and the Charlottes, and I’m just gonna make a car that’s good at those places.’
“But what the flaw in my logic was, you can’t even just make a car that’s good at Eldora, because Eldora and qualifying and Eldora and the heat races and Eldora in the feature are all completely different racetracks. Eldora on the top, Eldora on the bottom, Eldora on the middle, are all different racetracks. And so you still have to make something that’s good at a big spectrum of different conditions or else it’s not going to be good.
“Like, if you build something that was really good at, quote-quote unquote, Eldora on the bottom in the heat race, it’s not going to be good in the feature or in qualifying or on the top,” he added. “So our quote-unquote versatile car now is better even at our specific-use cases that we were trying to build a car for prior.”
Kirkpatrick is beginning to gain traction with his AK Race Cars Rev1 model that he debuted midway through the 2025 season with driver Kyle Strickler of Mooresville, N.C. (He brought out a second car later in ’25 that was fielded by his longtime friend and sponsor Robert Abercrombie of Deming, N.M., and driven by R.C. Whitwell of Tucson, Ariz.) He said he and his staff, which now numbers four full-timers, have built 22 chassis through the end of March. Kirkpatrick picked up a notable customer heading into the 2026 season in Greg Bruening’s Decorah, Iowa-based Skyline Motorsports with driver Tyler Bruening and Dallon Murty of Chelsea, Iowa, and he said AK’s “circle of influence is getting bigger” with the addition of clients from the WISSOTA ranks, on the Comp Cams Super Dirt Series and both “out west and up north.” The latest driver joining the AK roster is Tanner English of Benton, Ky., who has a new car that he’s looking to race for the first time this weekend.
“We’re clicking right along and we’re getting quicker and quicker and our (construction) processes are getting more and more dialed and our finishes getting better and better as we as we go,” said Kirkpatrick, who noted he has “several cars on back order” and is looking to further break into the Crate Late Model ranks. “These things look really nice and they’re really quick right out of the gate, so the more of these we get out, the better and better everything’s going to get. We’re just gonna be slowly but steadily scaling up so that we can start building more and more cars rather than one or two here and there.”
Kirkpatrick is “trying to kind of bootstrap this thing right now” to grow and scale up his business without seeking outside investor money so “we can kind of do things the way we want and not have to answer to anybody.” He’s looking to make smart financial decisions to keep the momentum going.
“We just ordered a fire laser, which is a CNC cutting machine that allows us to cut all of our flat plates and our bodies and decks and cockpits and all the tabs and stuff that go in the cars,” Kirkpatrick said. “So now we’re insourcing that so we’re able to save money in the long term. It’ll also allow us to rapidly iterate and prototype things quicker.
“We’ve got me and four full-time guys, but we’ve also got several guys that moonlight over at the shop that are just, you know, kind of engineering-type guys that just enjoy being around dirt racing still and come help out with random projects here and there. So we've got a lot of bench strength on the engineering and the design, a lot of people that are just involved in the shadows that are real smart people that are in the industry but aren’t full-time.”
Kirkpatrick said he takes inspiration from billionaire Elon Musk, whom he views as being “very, very in the weeds on a lot of the engineering decisions with his business projects.” He tries to follow that process with his enterprise, taking the lead on the design aspects of AK in a way that he believes can lower the cost of his cars by eliminating the need to employ expensive outside engineers.
“In building this company, like, I’m extremely involved on the engineering side,” Kirkpatrick said. “All of the jigs and the chassis and all the components and all of the fixtures are all designed by me. We aren’t having to pay people to figure that stuff out, so it allows us to kind of pass those savings along to a customer and charge a more affordable price and not have to bake the pricing of the additional engineering into a lot of the parts. I feel like it’s definitely a strategic advantage that we have.”
Driving isn’t on Kirkpatrick’s mind these days. It’s all about building the brand for him.
“I’ve been having too much fun working on helping everybody else out and building cars and building a business,” Kirkpatrick said. “And from a time standpoint, there’s just no way for me to also try to field a race team. I may jump in a few cars here and there throughout the year just to, you know, make sure that I don’t completely lose it, because it is useful when we go test for me to be able to jump in a car and say, ‘Yeah, this thing’s too tight. Yeah, that’s too free.’
“That's another thing that I feel like I’ve got going for me is, I have driven these cars at a high level before and so I know kind of what they feel like when the drivers say things. I understand what they’re saying and I know what they’re feeling. Some of these crew chiefs have never driven a race car before so they kind of have to just believe the driver at face value and they have to just take everything they say and just kind of like filter it through their experiences of listening to these drivers, whereas, having driven these cars before, it allows me to kind of have just a unique perspective also from a crew-chiefing side.”
Kirkpatrick pointed out that a chassis builder can be financially successful “building 20 cars (a year) if you’ve got one guy (as an employee) and he’s smart about he’s sourcing material and how he’s got his stuff laid out,” but he’s striving for more. He’s young, smart and ambitious, and he’s wants to make a major mark on Dirt Late Model racing.
“I feel like dirt racing has been a great home for me and it’s allowed me to meet a lot of really cool people and kind of given me a lot of purpose in life,” Kirkpatrick said. “And so I want to make as big of a positive impact as I can, and so if we’re building hundreds of cars a year, then it allows us to have a much bigger impact and allows us to employ more people, it allows us to go be able to afford to go do more cool R&D projects and develop at an even higher level. So I think our goal is, we don’t have like a limit on how many cars we want to build. I’m not sitting here saying, ‘Oh, I want to build, you know, 80 to 90 cars every year.’ I want to build as many as we possibly can.
“That’s dictated, obviously, by market demand,” he continued. “We gotta put our money where our mouth is and go perform and put a good product out there and show people that we can help improve their program in order for them to want to trust us to build cars for them. Hopefully somebody we’ll be building hundreds of these things and be a household name in the Dirt Late Model chassis industry.”
Kirkpatrick expressed his good fortune to have a wife, Dyllan, who is fully behind his dreams of making it big in the Dirt Late Model industry. The couple have an infant son at home after welcoming their first child, Nolan, last May, so there’s plenty going on in the Kirkpatrick household, but Dyllan handles the majority of those baby duties.
“She’s as supportive as somebody could possibly be to somebody that spends over 100 hours a week in a shop and just barely ever comes home and is just full speed ahead on a business,” Kirkpatrick said. “She’s extremely supportive and takes care of what we got to take care of back at the house so that I can continue to try to try to get this thing going and keep scaling up.”
There’s still a long way for Kirkpatrick to go, and the road will certainly be difficult. But he’s primed for the long haul.
“The further I get down this journey and the harder I realize it is, the more I realize why a lot of people haven’t done it in the past,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s a very, very, very difficult journey, and it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of hours and it requires a lot of things to go your way. We’ve been really fortunate to get some breaks and to have some people put their trust in us and we’re doing everything we can to keep scaling and do what we got to do to keep our customers happy, but the longer I go, the more I realize why there’s only a few that can handle being at the top of mountain and why there’s a lot of, you know, these little chassis companies that kind of just play in the local and regional game.
“We’re trying to play the game to the best of our ability and at the highest level we can. It’s definitely harder than I thought it was gonna be, but we’re up for the challenge. I like waking up every day and building race cars so it’s gonna take quite a while before I get burned out.
“There's always a need for kind of new, fresh perspectives, and there’s kind of an old guard (in the sport) that will need to be replaced by some young blood and some some fresh perspectives and new ways of doing things,” he added. “And I think as technology evolves, and this AI becomes more and more of an everyday tool, and some of these cool things that we’re able to do on the computer become more and more accessible and useful and understood, it’s just going to be a more and more useful tool to get implemented into what we’re doing as a chassis manufacturer. I feel like we're kind of on the leading edge on that front and I think that it’s just gonna continue to pay dividends in the long run.”
