By T.J. Buffenbarger
(July 19, 2025) — After another day of intense racing and crashes large enough that owners of parts manufactures will be putting a down payment on a new summer cabin after this week in Ohio, here are my takeaways from the Night Before the Kings Royal.
- Leading into the Kings Royal weekend I felt the Big Game Racing team would have the fastest car on the property. My opinion of that has changed after watching Rico Abreu manhandle the field on restarts for three days.
Last night Abreu felt his car did not take off as well after an open red flag during the $100,000-to-win Jokers Jackpot. Tonight, Abreu looked just as dominant after an open red during restarts as he did before it during the Knight Before event with the World of Outlaws sprint car series.
Abreu’ s launch on restarts has been key all week in him building up a lead. Combine that with a lack of green flag runs that have kept the leaders out of sustained time in lapped traffic and you have a recipe for winning when one has a car that looks like it was shot out of cannon on every start and restart.
Tomorrow is a different game with the Kings Royal format, but if Abreu can put himself in position to be anywhere near the front tomorrow it could be a big problem for the rest of the field, especially if we see short green flag runs throughout features like we have seen all week.
The question becomes whether Abreu can sustain this success during the action Kings Royal? Abreu has run well leading into the Kings Royal, but since finishing in third and second place during the 2014 and 2015 events, Abreu has failed to crack the top five in the last eight editions of the Kings Royal.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, if Abreu could win the Kings Royal it could be the biggest post-race celebration we have seen in Eldora Speedway long history. To do that Abreu has to carry the same kind of momentum he has on Friday into Saturday’s finale.
- As I was headed to victory lane I missed most of the fireworks on the track between David Gravel and Kyle Larson including the post-race incident where Larson ended up backwards on the backstretch.
Afterwards both verbally sparred in post-race interviews, got sent to the World of Outlaws Command Center with longtime official Carlton Reimers, and continued to talk trash to each other on Twitter afterwards.
I’m amused and entertained by it. I don’t condone what happened on the backstretch after the race because neither of these guys won’t be the ones fixing the car when incidents like this take place. Most of those guys are not paid nearly enough to put up with their driver doing something like that with their car after the checkered flag. Thankfully neither car suffered any sort of damage this time.
They can and should talk smack to each other as much as they want as long as they keep in mind some of the arial acrobatics we’ve seen out of race cars this week while on the racetrack.
- The two sleeper picks for Saturday’s Kings Royal from my viewpoint are Carson Macedo and Buddy Kofoid. I know it’s a stretch portraying both drivers as underdogs going into Saturday’s Kings Royal, but from my viewpoint the list of favorites to win the event going in where Gravel, Larson, and Abreu, which was the shortest list I have come up with going into the Royal since the days of Donny Schatz dominance.
Macedo has improved steadily this weekend, scoring a runner up finish Friday at the Knight Before. We have seen open red flags on Thursday and Friday during the main events and with the Kings Royal being a 40-lap affair there is a high likelihood the crew chiefs will get an opportunity to adjust their cars during Saturday’s finale. Giving Phillip Dietz a chance to tune on Macedo’s car could make things interesting if it goes as well as it did on Friday.
Kofoid had to overcome being light at the scales Friday after qualifying, choosing to take a provisional to start the feature in 25th position and raced his way up to the fifth spot. Kofoid already has big paydays to his credit with both the High Limit and World of Outlaws series this year at Eagle Raceway and Huset’s Speedway respectively.
After a crash on Thursday Kofoid and the Roth Motorspors team went back to a car and package they typically don’t use on the half mile tracks but has been very reliable elsewhere. That car proved to be stout on Friday and would have been interesting to see how things would have turned out if Kofoid had not been four pounds light at the scales after qualifying.
The carnage of Kings Royal week 2025 continued into Friday with a pair of violent crashes. Kasey Kahne got up into the cushion after going through the depression in turn one, pounded the unforgiving Eldora Speedway concrete wall, and tumbled down the racetrack. Later in the race Aaron Reutzel got up into the catch fence before having Zach Hampton and Steven Snyder Jr. plow into his car with nowhere to go.
I’ve heard people refer to this as a rut, but it’s not really that. If you watch the cars idle through turn one you can see the shape of the depression when the cars roll through the corner towards the top of the racetrack and how it almost ramps the cars into an upward trajectory. Throughout the years there has been some form of bump in that general area of the racetrack, but the past couple of years either due to the speed of the field or that area getting worse, a lot of the calamity seems to be taking place around this spot on the racing surface.
Hopefully at some point that spot on the racing surface can be addressed, but it’s likely to be a large enough project that we won’t see happening this weekend with it. Until then it’s going to be a central talking point and whomever wins the Kings Royal on Saturday could be the person that finds the best path around it.