By Alex Nieten
CONCORD, NC (January 7, 2026) – Chris Windom is set for year two with the World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Cars.
The 35-year-old teamed with Sides Motorsports in 2025 for his first tour with The Greatest Show on Dirt, and their plans are the same for 2026.
Last year proved productive for Windom as he climbed aboard the NOS Energy Drink No. 7S. The Canton, IL native tallied four top fives, including a personal best second place run at Atomic Speedway, and bagged 22 top 10s during the coast-to-coast journey with Jason Sides turning the wrenches. Windom came home runner-up among the whopping seven rookies that signed on for 2025, trailing only Garet Williamson.
“I felt like it went pretty well,” Windom said of his debut campaign with the World of Outlaws. “It took a little while to get going, but I felt like we definitely had some good success there at the midpart of the summer. Overall, I was happy with how it went, battling it out for the Rookie of the Year all the way pretty much down to the end in Charlotte.”
An area Windom and the Sides crew have circled to better in 2026 is Qualifying. An average time trial result of 14.11 left Windom fourth among the rookies. He managed to move forward plenty later in the night with the fourth-highest Feature plus/minus ranking among full-time drivers at plus-115. But an improved Qualifying effort will make finding the results they’re looking for an easier task.
“Yeah, I would say that’s definitely at the top of the priority list,” Windom said of Qualifying. “I have notoriously never been that great of a qualifier, but I feel like I’ve gotten better in the wing side of things. I just felt like it was never just one circumstance. It was trying to get the fueling of the engines right at certain times of the year. It’s so tough once you get past those two laps on the Outlaw tour. Your night is kind of set up. Obviously, you can still pass cars, but it’s so hard to come from beyond the third or fourth row and beat the caliber of cars that are at an Outlaw race.”
What has Windom eager to get 2026 rolling is the fact that this year will mark the first time since transitioning to Winged Sprint Cars that he won’t be jumping to a new ride. The move to wings began in 2022 with Hayward Motorsports. Then it was off to Lane Racing in 2023. Vermeer Motorsports brought him aboard in 2024. Finally, he landed with Sides in 2025 and appears to be laying the foundations of a steady home.
“It’s definitely going to be nice to come back in 2026 with the same car for the first time in my Winged career,” Windom said. “I think it really takes sometimes even more than a year to, first of all, build a notebook. That’s the case because I may be different than the last guy that ran the car, and I may want to do something different than what Jason is used to doing. I felt like we ran into that quite a bit this year. It really just takes the experience of being at the racetrack doing it and learning kind of what not to do and what to do.”
The longevity has Windom feeling confident as he enters his second season of competing at the sport’s highest level.
“That, I feel like, should speed up our process on getting up to speed and being faster right out of the gate because now we’ve been to most of all these tracks we’re going to again together,” Windom said. “We can go back and look at if we were good there or if we were bad there and what we can do to try and be better everywhere we go.”
Windom and the Sides Motorsports crew kick off the 2026 World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car season in just under a month on Feb. 4-7 at Barberville, FL’s Volusia Speedway Park for the Federated Auto Parts DIRTcar Nationals. For tickets, CLICK HERE.
For the complete 2026 schedule, CLICK HERE.
If you can’t make it to the track, catch every lap live on DIRTVision.