From Charles Krall
Brownsburg, IN – Winning championships never gets old; just ask perennial winners such as Rick Hendrick or Roger Penske. While Hendrick and Penske are the measuring stick NASCAR and IndyCar owners aspire to, Bob East’s championship record building short track open wheel cars dwarves both of them — combined. His Beast chassis carried Midget racer Brad Kuhn to two titles in 2009: the USAC National Midget Series championship and the POWERi Midget Series championship, pushing the total for the prolific Beast Silver Crown, Sprint Car and Midget chassis to over 50 championships since the company’s inception in 1988.
Bob East revolutionized the midget chassis in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The Beast midget chassis has carried the likes of Jeff Gordon, Stevie Reeves, Tony Stewart, Kenny Irwin, Jason Leffler and Kasey Kahne, Dave Darland, J.J. Yeley and Bobby East to countless victories and eleven championships. Kuhn becomes the tenth driver to score a USAC Natioanl Midget championship driving the Beast chassis over the course of the past two decades.
“We congratulate Brad on a great 2009 season, and we’re very proud that he and the RW Motorsports team chose to compete the entire season in the Beast chassis both on pavement and on dirt,” East said. “We’ve had some of the very best drivers in the country win USAC championships in our midget chassis and Brad is now a member of that club.”
For Kuhn, racing the chassis doesn’t provide him an advantage over the competition since many of the top runners in the USAC National Midget Series also run it. But he surely didn’t want the competitive disadvantage not being in a Beast would bring.
“On the pavement side, year in and year out Bob had the best stuff out there no questions asked,” Kuhn said. “Even if you unloaded somewhere and were a little off, all you had to do was go see him or give him a call. He’d tell you to maybe swap out some springs and shocks and it would get you right back in the hunt. He’ll always help and that’s awesome when you’re running for a championship.”
Kuhn also made the switch to the new four-bar dirt Beast chassis in 2009, and that proved to be a vital part of his run to the championship. It also provided him with his only USAC victory of the season at Bloomington’s quarter-mile high-banked oval during Indiana Midget Week and two POWERi victories at Morgan County Speedway and Junction Motor Speedway.
“It was our first time with the four-bar dirt midget and we were very happy with it from the time we first unloaded with it,” Kuhn said. “Every night we were competitive and we had a chance to win. I think we could have had a couple of pretty major wins on dirt if it wasn’t for some bad racing luck along the way.
“A lot of what you see in racing is monkey-see monkey-do, so everyone went away from the four-bar cars when the coil cars got popular,” Kuhn said. “But Bob went out on a limb and spent a lot of time and effort developing the four-bar car and with the anti-roll bar it actually makes it a five-bar car. We couldn’t have been happier with it. We were in the hunt everywhere we went with it.”
The strength of the Beast chassis – both the pavement and dirt midgets as well as the Silver Crown and Sprint car chassis – is they are easily adaptable to virtually anyone’s driving skills and styles.
“Everything depends on the driver’s style,” Kuhn said. “Bob has developed a car for the masses. It’s very consistent. Bob sells to a wide range of drivers with a lot of different styles and you always see them up near the front. A lot of cars are built for one driver and then someone else gets in and the car suddenly isn’t anywhere near as fast. You don’t see that problem with the Beast. You get in it and you have a chance to win.”