I-75 Raceway
Resurgent Weiss enjoys fulfilling victory at I-75
By Todd Turner
DirtonDirt.com managing editor
Ricky Weiss in victory lane with his team at I-75. (Josh James)
SWEETWATER, Tenn. (March 8) — Before Saturday’s Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series event at I-75 Raceway, crew member Tom Schramm had a modest request for his driver, Ricky Weiss.
“I told him, I said, 'I hate to ask you this. I need a huge favor. I need you to win this (race),’ ” Schramm recounted, using a saltier term for race. “Just there's a lot of people here I want to beat, you know what I mean? Like a lot of cars I wanna beat.” | RaceWire
The 36-year-old Weiss, the Headingley, Manitoba, native who races out of nearby Monterey, Tenn., considered the favor. Then he laughed.
“I said, ‘You know what Tom, there's a lot of good iron in this pit area here,’ ” Weiss said after the feature, recalling the conversation. “When we qualified good, I said, 'Well, that's a good start.’ We won our heat race. OK, I said, ‘If we finish top-five, that’s like a win to me.’ When I was running third, I was happy with third, and then I got second and then I (made a) run for the lead.”
Indeed Weiss overtook race-long leader Trey Mills on the 31st of 50 laps, then kept Daulton Wilson in check in the late stages for a $20,000 victory, the fifth-richest of his Super Late Model career.
Schramm’s reaction?
"He came through for me,” said the off-and-on Weiss crew member in his fifth stint with the team.
A fulfilled request and a fulfilling night for Weiss, back on his game after slipping a few notches in the Dirt Late Model pecking order in recent seasons.
"I mean, what better can you ask for?” Weiss said. “The car's in one piece and like I said, I'm just ecstatic for the year now.”
The victory gives Weiss his second straight Super Late Model victory, following March 1’s $7,500 Tuckassee Toilet Bowl Classic triumph at Clarksville (Tenn.) Speedway that ended a 17-month drought for the Sniper Chassis pilot in Super Late Model competition.
Two straight victories is vindication for the work of Weiss, the crew, Weiss’s father and other supporters who have helped Weiss improve his chassis and team.
“I’m just proud of my guys. We’ve learned a lot over the winter and found a couple of little minor things that seem to be probably bigger than I thought they were and our car's been really good,” Weiss said, adding that his car has shown more speed in 2025.
The driver who came up through the Upper Midwest’s WISSOTA ranks before reaching the national touring level seven seasons ago had been “questioning some of the stuff, some of the angles and measurements and this and that (of the Sniper cars). Just going over some of our older notes and everything and just trying to always make it better,” he said. “I mean, the second you think you're fast enough is when the competition blows your doors off. So we went to work and, like I said, got better and we're just trying to continue some success and have some fun.”
Weiss has been the one blowing the doors off the competition on consecutive Saturdays, but he admits his Super Late Model program has been inconsistent at best in recent seasons. Rising in the ranks as a protege to late Hall of Famer Scott Bloomquist 10 years ago, Weiss notched a career-high payday of $50,000 in winning 2018’s Sunoco North-South 100 on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series, then followed that by finishing in the top five of World of Outlaws Late Model Series points for three consecutive seasons (2019-21), including a runner-up finish to Brandon Sheppard in 2020.
In 2021, Weiss left the Bloomquist fold and launched his Sniper Chassis, partnering with Bruce Nunnally of Brucebilt Performance in Knoxville and adding more responsibilities to go along with his driving duties.
Winless in 2021, he won his first race in a Sniper on March 19, 2022, the first of three Super Late Model victories that season, one of them a $25,000 WoO triumph at a dirt-covered Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, the second-richest victory of this career. He won three more Super Late Model features in 2023, including the $20,059 Butterball Wooldridge Memorial at Richmond (Ky.) Raceway for the second straight season.
But Weiss scaled back from high-profile Super Late Model competition in 2024. He won seven times, once in a Limited Late Model and six times in a Crate Late Model, including three $10,000 victories. It was a necessity in part to try and popularize his chassis among the ranks of the lower-level Crate racers and to replenish his war chest.
“We excelled in the Crate stuff, so there's some big purses that, you know, really help ourselves, help our team, help put back into the pot to be able to make our Super better,” Weiss said. “And we pick up some customers on top of that. And now being able to put that towards our Super car and focus on what we got, I think it'll just build our program bigger and better, and we'll be able to do both until we get a full-time Crate guy.”
The Super Late Model landscape has also evolved since Weiss first arrived on the scene.
"It's just so much in this sport, everyone's so smart. I mean, back then you had to work for speed. Now you can buy speed,” Weiss said. “So that just makes it really tough — I'm not saying solo because I don't do this by myself, there’s a lot of people that help me, but I'm not like Longhorn or Rocket where they got a ton of other cars to judge things off of and just really been focusing on.”
Recent advice from a friend and a former race team owner resonated with Weiss.
“Ronnie Delk told me, he says, ‘Don't worry about all your cars. Worry about one car, work on one car, make one car fast.’ And we came here with one car,” Weiss said. “We broke a motor last night and I was frustrated because I had one car. Normally we'd just pull out the other car, but Tom and I and the guys, we changed the motor last night. It paid off.
"I mean, we’re racers, we're all competitive. We want to come out here and be able to win and I just didn't have that feel the last few years. There was nights I was competitive, but not to where I feel right now. We've done a lot of big changes. (Driver and engine builder) Vic Hill has helped me a ton, not just motor-wise, but setup-wise. Aaron (Lambert) from Penske (Shocks), Dennis (Wells), Andrew (Mohn) all from Penske has really helped me out a lot. Being able to pick up the phone any time of the night and calling them and getting once again a true answer, something that you know they want to see you do good, they wanna see their car in victory lane, and just having those guys in your corner means a lot.”
The crew’s hard work has played a role, too, Weiss said, and Schramm agreed the team has been productive.
Weiss is performing better “because he's got the equipment and he's got the help,” Schramm said. “It’s hard to get good help to do it at this level. Especially (with Weiss) running a very tight program. He likes his (stuff) a certain way. Not too many people can deal with that because he likes it a certain way.
“We seem to be working a lot better together. We're by ourselves every day, you know, just me and him for the last two weeks. And we have another guy, Travis (Wiesner), he's a huge part of the team. He keeps everything so organized it's unreal … that’s huge part of the program, having all the organization.”
Wiesner missed the I-75 victory because he works a mining job in Canada for three-week stretches, alternating three-week stints with Weiss and the team in Tennessee. If he’d have been at I-75 he’d have seen the boss come through in a big way.
Weiss, who thanked fellow driver Jimmy Owens for being a “standup dude” in pre-race discussions to decide on the best tire combination, made his first bid for the lead before halfway, working underneath Mills and nearly pulling alongside a few times. But eventually Mills edged back away.
“I thought I gave it away. I was really trying to race him. I didn't want to dirty him. I didn't want to use him up,” Weiss said. “The deal with this track is here, if you don't back up your corner, you just got no sidebite and drift the corner. And I didn't want to pile-drive him. So I was running real clean and when he was able to get just enough to get in front of my nose and take the air off and make a push, I thought it was over after that.
“But I definitely didn't give up. Just tried to learn a little more, do something different than he was doing and was able to get back to him and see where he was starting to fade and try to make up ground.”
Runner-up Daulton Wilson lurked behind Weiss in the final laps — “If I'd have done something stupid, he'd have pounced on me,” Weiss said — but the Canadian held on.
“My right-front (tire) was starting to give up there at the end, and I just didn't know how hard to push the lapped cars,” Weiss said. “I didn't want to do something stupid leading and take out a lapped car. I mean, they'd all laugh at you then.”
But the only laughter came when Weiss steered his car to the pits and Schramm began pulling adult beverages out of a carton on the pit box, tossing cans to team members, starting with Weiss after he climbed from the cockpit.
"I'm just proud of my team — ecstatic,” Weiss said, adding in victory lane that “this one is special and I'm proud to do it so close to the shop here in Tennessee.”
Another crew member put the oversized $20,000 check atop the car and snapped a few photos while fans waited for T-shirts.
“I mean, we've had some big ones,” Weiss said. “We obviously won the North-South, but that's been a hell of a long time and it just feels good to start the year off. I think we're finally turning it around.”
