By Richie Murray
Speedway, Indiana (April 20, 2026)………Three years ago, Brandon Carr moved to the United States. Two years ago, he made his dirt track debut. A little over a year ago, he took his first laps in a midget.
Now, this year, the Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England native is set to take on a full season of USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship racing for Keith Kunz/Curb-Agajanian Motorsports.
In 2026, the 18-year-old Brit will compete for KKM at all 29 events on the schedule and is among the drivers who’ll be vying for Max Papis Innovations Rookie of the Year honors with the series.
Carr made five USAC National Midget feature starts during the 2025 campaign, but the transition from paved road courses to dirt ovals certainly had its share of learning curves. For year two, he enters the season more confident after getting a full taste of the nuances of dirt racing during the last season.
“I’m really excited to be able to compete again for KKM,” Carr said. “The first year was a bit hard to learn the dirt and all that stuff. So, this year, I understand it a lot better, and the guys of KKM have helped me a lot. We actually get to push forward and show what we’ve learned in the last year.”
For much of Carr’s racing life, he’s competed in karts. Since the age of six, he’s raced on each side of the pond in his native England and in the United States. In the karting discipline, he’s nailed down such impressive accolades as the Florida Winter Series Championship (2017), British Kart Championship (2022), Kart Masters Championship (2022), and Stars Championship (2023).
More recently, when he hasn’t been on dirt, Carr has been competing in pavement late models. This past March, he was the inaugural IHRA Pro Late Model winner at Virginia’s Pulaski County Motorsports Park.
Although he counts Jeff Gordon as the racer he most admires, dirt racing wasn’t a part of Carr’s personal racing vocabulary until quite recently. Gordon, of course, captured the 1990 USAC National Midget title before going on to an incredible NASCAR Cup Series Career where he was a four-time champion in 1995-1997-1998-2001.
Now residing in Mooresville, North Carolina, toward the end of the 2024 season, Carr jumped in a micro sprint. From there, plans were made to run a midget at the Chili Bowl Nationals in Tulsa the following January.
But first, Carr’s actual initial dirt midget race came indoors at the Southern Illinois Center in Du Quoin in December 2024 in a 4 Kings Racing ride. Despite missing a transfer spot to the feature that night, Carr liked what he experienced, and soon, he had a full order of dirt racing on his menu.
“It’s all been karts and no car stuff, no dirt stuff,” Carr explained. “And then, all of a sudden, we jumped on dirt and we liked it. So, we’ve just kept pushing towards it.”
Carr’s sponsor, J. Davidson Scrap Metal, has been a familiar sight on the sprint cars and midgets of fellow Brit racer Tom Harris who has assisted Carr in his introduction to the dirt. Since then, the learning process has never wavered as Carr continues to increase his comfortability on dirt.
“Just getting comfortable with being able to throw it in the corner and be on the gas flat out at the speeds we go and then be confident that it’s not going to flip over or you are not going to slide off the top of the track or into the wall,” Carr cited as the first part of the equation of a dirt midget. “Getting to grips with all that and how much gas and brake to use at the same time, just little techniques like that that I hadn’t used before or learned before.”
While Carr will be on the hunt for his initial USAC National Midget win in 2026, he has already picked off a win with POWRi in October 2025, leading all 30 laps of the Charlene Meents Memorial at Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Port City Raceway.
“That was great,” Carr exclaimed. “We had three nights, and the first night I just struggled a little bit of trying to learn the track. On the second night, we had a lot better run but still made mistakes on my end that made it a bit more hard work in the race. On the last night, the team just told me just go for it; we’ve got nothing to lose. We got a good qualifying lap, had a good heat race and that put us on the pole for the feature. Then, I just didn’t make any mistakes and kept it calm on the bottom and on the top.”
Paul Bates is believed to be the most recent Brit to win a USAC National Midget feature event, doing so in 1968 at California’s Cajon Speedway. Now, Carr will take his shot.
Carr will start off his USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship season in 2026 beginning with back-to-back nights at Indiana’s Kokomo Speedway for the Kokomo Grand Prix on Friday-Saturday, April 24-25.