T.J. Buffenbarger
(June 4, 2026) — Delayed by a half a day due to a late departure combined with an early wake up call for work, here are my takeaways from Wednesday night’s Race for the Million event at Owosso Speedway.
• The series name was different with the Race for the Million contesting the second of four rounds on Wednesday night at Owosso Speedway, but the result was the same with Kody Swanson piloting the famed 35-year old Rob Hoffman built sprint car best known as “Sea Biscuit” to a convincing victory.
Wednesday’s race was much closer than the Must See Racing event held last year on Labor Day weekend where Swanson decimated the field building a lead of over eight seconds over the second-place finisher.
Swanson’s victory on Wednesday featured a lead of 3.082 seconds at the finish over Aaron Willison, who was also Swanson’s pursuer in during that Labor Day program last year at Owosso.
While many of the outsiders from the Northwest and Florida would pivot their race cars through the center of the corners, which showed as an advantage in qualification, once the 55-lap feature began Swanson and Sea Biscuit proved again that their performance in the first round of the Race for the Million was an anomaly and were on their game Wednesday at Owosso.
With the first two rounds complete the primary storyline going into the next round of the series becomes Swanson’s and Myers attempt to win twin features at Berlin Raceway and hefty five figure bonus for doing so on Saturday, July 25th?
• While Swanson and Seabiscuit stole headlines again, Aaron Willison continues to show how impressive he is with another strong runner up finish. In a world without a dominant race car that is many of the drivers competing against it, I feel Willison would be getting more attention Nationally for his recent performances.
It has been a pleasure the place couple of seasons seeing Willison make the trip to the Midwest from Langley, British Columbia to compete in various events in the area. This year aboard a car Willison built and designed he was able to stay much closer to Swanson, and with more development time has me wondering how much performance they can find in car before Berlin in July.
• I have not attended Davey Hamilton’s Open Wheel Shootout or any of the World of Outlaws races that were held on pavement in the 1990’s, making Owosso’s Race for the Million event the strongest field of winged pavement teams and drivers I’ve seen in my lifetime in person.
I would have to go back to the races in tribute to Pat Beebe in Kalamazoo that were Wednesday night affairs featuring Auto Value Super Sprints and NAMARS midgets to find an event with wings on pavement that even came close to the equipment and driver quality on hand at Owosso.
It was fun seeing drivers such as Jeff Montgomery, Chase Cabre, Willison (who I had the pleasure of covering last year), and others that were names I’ve read for years and never had the pleasure of seeing in person.
The event as I arrived had a major-event feel to it. Winged pavement races in recent years, other than an unusually strong field of cars last Labor Day at Owosso, have at times been lackluster with 2-3 good cars leaving the rest of the field in their dust.
The best part was seeing fans flock to see the event with a large crowd that was about 10x the size or more than we saw at Owosso last year for the Labor Day race I’ve been mentioning throughout the column.
This would never have happened without Richard Feeler love of sprint car racing on pavement being strong enough to put up the Million dollars of his own money as a thank you for racers, and I was happy to see the quality of cars that gesture produced so far at Five Flags and Owosso.
• With all these great things going for it the Race for the Million series, whomever was handling event management and race directing for the Race for the Million dropped the ball on Wednesday.
Wednesday was the perfect example why pavement sprint car race racing on the major event level is light years behind the major dirt series>
After overcoming two oil downs thanks to the awesome track crew at Owosso Speedway and running very efficient qualifying session with both the midgets and sprint cars for a paved track (most are not setup well for pushing sprint cars, so qualifying at Owosso went extremely well) the program flow became erratic at best.
With the midget feature being pushed to the end of the program, there was 50 minutes of nothing happening on track between qualifying in the feature after 7:00 P.M. After four, non-stop 10-lap heat races it was another 45 minutes until the dash occurred. Instead of having relatively short intermission that included the dash redraw around between heats and dash/b-main like we see regularly with the dirt sprint car series, there was zero sense of urgency to get anything moving quickly as only four races were contested in an over 90-minute span. I felt bad for Owosso Speedway officials whom were hosting a great crowd for an event put on by a second party that was not very organized.
In that amount of time the midget feature could have been run twice over. Until the local track announcers fired up the crowd chanting “we want race cars” and got organizers to scrap on track driver instructions, I saw no action from officials running the event that could relate to a team member or race fan that might have to punch a time clock to go to work the next day.
This was highly disappointing after talking with Steve Lewis over the off-season explaining how the series intended on operating their programs. Both Five Flags and Owosso had quality fields and went the route of keeping fans hostage rather than providing a fast, entertaining show we see on a constituent basis now with major sprint car races on dirt on a consistent basis.
The good news is based on past history Berlin Raceway GM Jeff Striegel and his team tolerating a program run in that manner and have confidence the program will flow better there a month from now.