Eldora Speedway
Burdette making most of first touring bid
By Bryan Ault
Special to DirtonDirt
Colten Burdette (Tyler Carr photo)
ROSSBURG, Ohio (Aug. 31) – For Colten Burdette, the 2025 racing season is make or break.
The 32-year-old driver from Parkersburg, W.Va., knows he isn’t getting any younger. His dream of competing nationally on a full-time basis as a Super Late Model driver is dwindling with each flip of a calendar page. | RaceWire
“I'm getting up there to the age to where it's kind of time to s---or get off the pot, I guess,” Burdette said on Sunday before the Valvoline American Iron-Man Series-sanctioned Baltes Classic at Eldora Speedway. “You know, nobody's going to take a 40-some-year-old in their first year on the road.”
Burdette, though, is optimistic and at peace with whatever happens.
“We'll all end up where we belong one way or another, and I'm gonna keep doing this,” he said. “I work hard. I've put a lot of hours in at work to do this. I want to do it a certain way. My ultimate goal is I would love to travel up and down the road with these guys and do this for a living.”
Driving a Rocket Chassis owned by Steve Curtis, he chose to race the Valvoline American Iron-Man Series to get exposed to different tracks, different surfaces and face tougher competition.
“An idol of mine that I've looked up to in my whole career and talk to on a regular basis, he said, ‘If you want to do this and pursue this and do this at a higher level, you've got to get out of the local area, ‘cause anybody can win at their local tracks.’ You've got to go show that you belong at places you've never been,” Burdette said, declining to name the driver. “And that's what we decided to do.”
“Everybody talks about track championships and everything,” he added. “To me, they don't really mean nothing. Back in the day, I felt like they meant something because the local level of racing was so large. Today, in my area anyway, most of the track champions, every year, don't even win a race a year because all the drivers that are winning are out racing other things. So that doesn't really appeal to me.”
Burdette’s racing career began when he was 15 years old, racing mostly at Skyline Speedway in Guysville, Ohio. Several racers in modern times climb through the ranks in the modified division, but Burdette has always raced Super Late Models.
“I've never driven anything else,” Burdette said. “In 2014, my uncle bought a modified, and we raced it like six times until we put it up and never ran anything else again, never since. I've always loved late Model racing. It's all my dad's ever done. There’s drivers that come from all different classes and go to the top-tier of the late models and they usually excel in the classes that they were in. At the end of the day, I think it just comes to the talent and the dedication from any driver.”
Burdette was previously unable to race the series with his job as a lieutenant for the Parkersburg Fire Department. His full-time job at the fire department limits what he can do on the track. Previously, he could only work weekends.
But thankfully, with 10 years behind the hose, Burdette has reached enough seniority to make his own work schedule fit with his activities behind the wheel.
“This is the first year that I actually got weekends off with my job and we decided that we wanted to try to pursue something and Chris Tilley's (series), we like the way he runs things,” Burdette said. “I think, you know, maybe we travel too much, but we got to get races in, and I can't complain about traveling because, you know, I was told to go to places I've never been.”
“I put a lot forward to try to do this deal to try to show I belong,” he added. “If I can't show somebody in a couple years that this is what, you know, we deserve to be doing, then it just is what it is.”
Burdette stands second in the Iron-Man Series points, trailing Rusty Schlenk of McClure, Ohio by 35 points. After back-to-back top-fives at Atomic Speedway in Chillicothe, Ohio and Attica (Ohio) Raceway Park, he posted a 17th-place finish after engine gremlins on Saturday night at Butler Motor Speedway in Quincy, Mich.
“You put your head down, you work hard, you keep stuff going, through the hard times, you keep your head down and you keep digging,” said Burdette, who went on to finish 11th in a Baltes Classic 25-lapper Sunday night. “We've overcome a lot of those and rebounded in points. The night before last at Attica, we actually took the points lead back overcoming from some of them struggles and then last night, we don't even get to race because we blew the whole front of the motor off.”
“So now we're 35 points behind again after I just took the lead back,” he added. “And we've got a good little stretch here. There's only five races left. A lot of them, with the exception of here, are my strong suit. So, if we can sidestep some of the misfortune, we're going to give it one hell of a run.”
