By T.J. Buffenbarger
The 2024 Chili Bowl Nationals are in the books. Here are my takeaways from a great week of racing at the Tulsa Expo Raceway.
- Anyone that has watched midget and sprint car racing in the past decade has the realization that Kyle Larson is a generational talent, and that Paul Silva is one of the best crew chiefs in this era of the sport. Their performance in the 2025 Chili Bowl Nationals I felt was more impressive than a lot of their major sprint car accomplishments.
Larson and Silva brought different car to the 2022 Chili Bowl than they had ran when they won the race together previously and were off the entire week that year. Even during the race of champions and in route to winning their preliminary night even someone as non-mechanically inclined as myself but has watched a lot of race cars go in circles over the years, could see that car’s attitude was less than ideal. After that preliminary feature I felt Larson would be prime to be challenged for the Chili Bowl title.
One of the keys I feel that helped Larson to victory this year was having a second car of his stable with Tyler Courtney driving. Courtney’s car appeared to have the same attitude as Larson’s during the Race of Champions on Monday, but when they competed again on Friday, I felt Courtney’s car looked considerably better in route to a third place finish than Larson’s on Monday. This was confirmed when Larson went out and won the pole position for Saturday’s finale.
Larson and Silva are like what we have seen with other great driver/crew chief combinations. You don’t want to give them a second chance to correct any weakness or mistakes they made. That second opportunity was parlayed into a third golden driller trophy on Larson’s mantle.
- While Matt Wood would have loved to take home a golden driller trophy of his own, Wood and the entire team had to feel good about their entire performance this week in Tulsa. For a team who’s primary focus is sprint car racing to have their regular driver in the sprint car, Shane Golobic, nearly picking up a preliminary feature win, Landon Brooks getting the team’s first preliminary victory at Tulsa, to having three of their entries finish in the top five with Golobic landing on the podium is remarkable.
The Wood team was as intriguing as it was successful at this year’s Chili Bowl Nationals. Having Landon Brooks, whose stock continues to rise steadily in the open wheel world with another standout performance all week on a big stage. Having Ryan Bernal, who has not been as on the radar in recent years, reminding us of his talent running up front all week and driving up to a top five finish.
It was evident this year sleeping on Matt Wood Racing when making picks for the 2026 Chili Bowl Nationals is not a good idea.
- While I saw some grumbling among competitors about the tight rules on tire soaking, one cannot argue how much that helped the racing surface this year throughout all the racing at the Tulsa Expo Center.
The racing surface and quality of the competition on track was the best we have seen in Tulsa from start to finish in very long time. There were other benefits as well such as not having such a late night on Saturday due to not having to work on the track as much to keep it from taking rubber.
Some will argue the stringent rules are not worth it because the lab will not catch all of the tire soaking offenders. While they won’t catch everyone, if you can catch 80-85% of the things out there look how much better the Chili Bowl and Shootout were this year because of it.
I wonder how many people that help prep racetracks across the country that stress over providing a good racing surface throughout the season see what happened in Tulsa and wish their tracks or the series that visited them would take on the same stance as the Chili Bowl did to help make their job easier.
Seeing what took place the past two weeks in Tulsa should be eye opening for everyone in the industry. We need to see more tracks and series take this kind of stance on technical inspections and tire soaking violations. I don’t want to see things go the route of what we see locally around me in Michigan on pavement where tires are impounded at the track and locked away to prevent alterations. A strict and stringent technical program has proven to be successful on one of the biggest stages in our sport and hopefully we see in trickle down to benefit others in the next year or two.