Kevin Kovac's Take Five
Take Five: No conflicts in drawn-out Speedweeks
In a new feature appearing regularly on DirtonDirt, senior writer Kevin Kovac will offer readers five things worth mentioning from around the Dirt Late Model landscape (index to previous Take Fives):
No. 1: Everyone who hates conflicting national touring series events during Georgia-Florida Speedweeks should be pleased with the 2027 schedule after the World of Outlaws Late Model Series announced its dates today. The circuit revealed 10 events at three tracks — the first three-venue Speedweeks for the Outlaws since 2015 — that will stretch over the four weekends leading into Feb. 21’s Daytona 500, leaving the post-500 period entirely to the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series, which previously announced 12 races at three tracks (Florida’s All-Tech Raceway and Ocala Speedway and Georgia’s Golden Isles Speedway) set to run from Feb. 25-March 13. This year teams had to pick their national tour choice right out of the gate with Lucas Oil’s opener at All-Tech running up against the inaugural WoO weekend at Hendry County Motorsports Park in Clewiston, Fla., but that’s no longer an issue with Hendry’s WoO doubleheader moved up two weeks in ’27 to Feb. 5-6. It can be debated whether forcing to prospective national tourers to make their series choices from Day One is preferable to letting them delay their decisions until conflicts occur in the spring, but there’s no doubt that now all Speedweeks events have the opportunity to attract optimum fields.
No. 2: Three weekends of Speedweeks 2027 for the WoO remain familiar — Hendry’s two shows plus Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., hosting the Sunshine Nationals Jan. 28-30 and the DIRTcar Nationals Feb. 18-20 (following three nights of DIRTcar-sanctioned action) — but it’s the fourth that brings a new wrinkle. The tour is headed to Southern Raceway in Milton, Fla., for a twinbill on Feb. 12-13 that, with $12,000- and $20,000-to-win features, will represent the biggest Super Late Model event ever contested at the track now owned and operated by Hunt the Front’s Joiner family. (An $8,000-to-win non-point Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series race will also be part of the weekend as a Thursday tuneup for the WoO shows.) The 3/8-mile oval has presented a $20,000-to-win event with its unsanctioned King of the Sandbox in November 2021 won by Brandon Overton, but bringing in a national tour with its larger purse and high profile — a stated goal of the Joiners from the moment they took over the track in January — is uncharted territory for the facility. The largest touring Super Late Model events in the track’s history came in the early ‘90s when it was part of the first three seasons of the Hav-A-Tampa Dirt Racing Series when the tour was more Southeast-based before going more national later in its existence.
No. 3: Hunt the Front’s Joshua Joiner said the WoO dates point to his family’s initiative to “establish Southern Raceway as a destination racetrack and push the ‘race-cation’ aspect with the beach (along the Gulf Coast) being only 20 minutes away.” In that vein, the track is planning an ambitious stretch of racing during Speedweeks with the WoO action being part of the multiweek Gulf Coast Winter Nationals, a cornucopia of competition that will include special events for sprint cars, Crate Racin’ USA Late Models, IMCA modifieds and street stocks and position Southern as a multidivision Speedweeks venue much like the closed East Bay Raceway Park in Gibsonton, Fla., was in the past.
No. 4: If you’re wondering whether the Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series will schedule some non-point Speedweeks events in Georgia in 2027 like they did this year (though only one show beat the weather), Joiner said he’s “not 100 percent sure yet” about those races. There’s no longer any weekends without national tour dates between the Sunshine Nationals and DIRTcar Nationals like this season, so Hunt the Front would have to decide if they want to try some midweek programs that could fill the gaps between the weekends.
No. 5: What’s most striking about the WoO announcement is that Speedweeks now officially becomes a monster-sized stretch. This year’s expanded schedule — it was the first time the Lucas Oil Series ran its events after the Daytona 500 — had a two-weekend “break” from national tour racing, but in ’27 there will be seven consecutive weekends between the two national tours, making it more difficult for teams to rationalize taking time off. With Speedweeks now going from Jan. 28 through March 13, there are 22 national tour races scheduled over a 45-day span. The days of a diehard fan using vacation days to hit every Speedweeks Super Late Model event run at Golden Isles, East Bay and Volusia are over. How many people can attend them all with so many off days in between? It’s such a long period of racing that maybe Super Late Model races should be run in Florida and Georgia from the beginning of January through the end of March so a few dozen teams could just relocate to the Sunshine State for the winter. Call it the Snowbird Series. On second thought, scratch that idea. Speedweeks is long enough already.
