Seavey Secures USAC Career Triple Crown! 2024 USAC National Sprint Car Review
Speedway, Indiana ………In a span of two seasons, Logan Seavey and Abacus Racing went from being among the newest driver/team combinations in the sport to becoming USAC Career Triple Crown champions.
After Seavey and Abacus teamed up to capture the 2023 USAC Silver Crown and USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship titles, they added a sprint car to the arsenal and showed no signs of letting up in a historic USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship season from start-to-finish in 2024.
Seavey (Sutter, Calif.) is now one of only eight drivers who can lay claim to being a member of the USAC career Triple Crown club alongside Pancho Carter, Tony Stewart, Dave Darland, J.J. Yeley, Jerry Coons Jr., Tracy Hines and Chris Windom.
Meanwhile, Noblesville, Indiana based Abacus Racing became just the second entrant to post championships in USAC’s Silver Crown, National Sprint Car and National Midget divisions, a feat previously only accomplished by the duo of Mike Curb & Cary Agajanian.
On his path to a 107-point edge in the final championship tally along with a $50,000 title prize, Seavey led the points for 42 of the 44 events – a span of eight months and 13 days between February 13 and October 26, both of which are all-time series records for the duration of holding the point lead.
Along the way, Seavey totaled 14 series victories in 2024, equaling the all-time USAC National Sprint Car season record set by Tom Bigelow in 1977. Furthermore, in July, Seavey became the first driver in 39 years to record four consecutive USAC National Sprint Car feature victories, a feat that hadn’t been achieved since Rick Hood’s similarly impressive 1985 campaign.
The 2024 USAC National Sprint Car season was the second busiest on record with 44 events, second only to the 51 held in 1977. During the run, Seavey led the series in feature wins (14), laps led (364), top-fives (31) and top-tens (38).
What makes this season all the more impressive is the fact that this was Seavey and Abacus Racing’s first foray into sprint cars together. Just as their first season in USAC Silver Crown and Midgets wound up, the Sprint Car too resulted in a resoundingly dominant performance and a title by year’s end.
“It’s unbelievable,” Seavey stated. “That’s the goal we set when starting this sprint car team, but we surely didn’t expect it to come in the first year. There’s hundreds of people who play a part in making these things go around to run the whole season, and to come out on top is unbelievable.”
Guided by Team Principal Brent Cox, Team Manager Kirk Simpson, Crew Chief Ronnie Gardner, plus Daniel Whitley, Trevor Reed, Liam Haigh, Johnny Cofer, Chris Mansell, Chad Vermeil, Missy Vermeil and partners, John Lunsford and Ken Gauze, the team found comfort right away and the chemistry was perfectly composed.
In February at Florida’s Volusia Speedway Park, despite engine troubles and a timely weather delay, Seavey and Abacus persevered to sweep the night and become the first to win multiple USAC AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship features in a single night for the first time since Bud Kaeding at Terre Haute more than 22 years earlier in 2001. To add to that, Abacus became the first entrant to win their first two USAC National Sprint Car main events on the same day since Max Dowker at Winchester (Ind.) Speedway in 1975.
“Heading to Florida, we were optimistic, but wanted to be realistic,” Cox explained. “After two podium finishes to start the season (at Ocala), we ran into engine troubles on night three. Luckily, rain saved us and we could make the engine change and be ready for both races at Volusia to be run on the same night. Without a third engine in the trailer, we won them both after an energetic conversation between Logan and I earlier that day when he said, ‘we are in a hole.’ Well, I said, ‘we are not in the hole; we are standing next to it.’ I will remember that conversation for the rest of my life. It was hard because, as a team, we were not prepared as maybe we should have been. We are not the biggest team, and likely never will be. We work hard to take the resources we have to make it work. I always say, ‘I don’t want to be the biggest; I want to be the best.’”
With the point lead now securely in their hands, Seavey and Abacus continued their winning ways at Indiana’s Bloomington Speedway, Terre Haute Action Track and Circle City Raceway during the month of May, the latter of which was the earliest in a season (May 23) that any driver had picked up his fifth win of the year since Larry Dickson on May 10, 1970.
Seavey carried his winning ways in Pennsylvania during June’s Eastern Storm by winning at Big Diamond Speedway one year removed from missing out on a transfer spot there. To close out the week, Seavey scored a photo finish triumph over Briggs Danner at the smallest track on the schedule – the 1/5-mile Action Track USA.
Seavey began his streak of four-straight USAC Sprint wins at Illinois’ Macon Speedway on the final weekend of June before landing three-straight at Indiana’s Lincoln Park Speedway to kick off July, the last of which served as the opening night of NOS Energy Drink USAC Indiana Sprint Week Presented By Honest Abe Roofing. Seavey very nearly became the first driver since Parnelli Jones in 1961 to run his win streak to five with the series but came up a car length short to Kyle Cummins at Kokomo (Ind.) Speedway.
Seavey added wins at Lawrenceburg Speedway and Circle City Raceway en route to his first Indiana Sprint Week title. At Lawrenceburg, he started 11th on his way to winning a race featuring seven lead changes among four drivers, tied for the most lead swaps ever in a USAC Indiana Sprint Week feature.
With 13 wins in the books, Seavey and Abacus had to wait another 11 races across two-and-a-half months before hitting paydirt again in October at Lawrenceburg’s $20,000-to-win Fall Nationals, tying Bigelow’s single season mark. Although coming up just shy of the win record, the team was able to clinch the championship one night early in the penultimate round at Oklahoma’s Red Dirt Raceway.
It was a surreal moment for the young and hungry team who has already reached heights in their two-year span that so few others have even come close to accomplishing.
“They put a lot of faith and belief in me that we could come out here and do this,” Seavey praised. “All the parts and pieces, and all the hard work that goes into coordinating a race team, it’s pretty unbelievable to only go full-time in this sport for two seasons and have three championships on their end. All the press in on me for the Triple Crown, and I’m obviously super excited about that, but the team definitely deserves the praise too.”
It certainly aids the situation when a driver can cross over to three different series with essentially the same supporting cast surrounding him, especially when that group has clicked as successfully as this one.
“Just having Ronnie and Kirk to work on this thing gives me so much confidence,” Seavey reiterated. “I’ve raced with Ronnie in the past on a few other cars, and getting to work with Kirk this year, he’s been a huge part of this effort to keep us on our toes and making us think a little bit differently on things, and was a key to help us in places where Ronnie and I may have struggled in the past. I already had confidence to go into the tracks where we’ve already been good at in the past. I feel like it really filled the void of the places I hadn’t been good at. Just having two guys over there that are really smart and really good at what they do was the key to what we had going on this year.”
Elsewhere, for the first time since 2012, each driver finishing inside the top-10 of the series standings also won at least one feature event: Logan Seavey, Brady Bacon, Daison Pursley, Kevin Thomas Jr., C.J. Leary, Mitchel Moles, Robert Ballou, Kyle Cummins, Justin Grant and Matt Westfall.
For the third consecutive year, Brady Bacon (Broken Arrow, Okla.) finished as the runner-up in the standings, adding five wins to his credit. In May at Circle City, he made it 14 consecutive seasons with a USAC National Sprint Car feature win, breaking the mark of 13-straight years set by Sheldon Kinser between 1974-1986. In June at New Jersey’s Bridgeport Motorsports Park, he became the winningest Eastern Storm driver of all-time with victory number seven. He followed up with his first win at Port Royal (Pa.) Speedway in a decade as well as his first Indiana Sprint Week win in three years at Terre Haute in July.
In September at Arkansas’ Texarkana 67 Speedway, Bacon earned his 50th series win as a driver for the Dynamics, Inc./Hoffman Auto Racing in the same state where he earned win number one for the team. Bacon capped the year by capturing a $10,000 bonus as the first two-time champion in the three-year history of the 10-race Bubby Jones Master of Going Faster series presented by Spire Sports + Entertainment. He also netted his crew chief, Matt Hummel, $2,500 as the champion.
Third-place points finisher Daison Pursley (Locust Grove, Okla.) made, perhaps, the most impressive drive of any non-winner with the series in 2024, advancing a series record 21 positions in a 23rd to 2nd charge at Bloomington (Ind.) Speedway in May. He also notched his first two career points-paying USAC National Sprint Car wins at Iowa’s Knoxville Raceway in June and at Ohio’s Eldora Speedway during the 4-Crown Nationals.
En route to fourth in the standings, Kevin Thomas Jr. (Cullman, Ala.) won five times with the series, including the inaugural Justin Owen Memorial at Lawrenceburg in April for his first series win in 19 months. He became the fourth different driver for Rock Steady Racing to score the Spring Showdown at Indiana’s Tri-State Speedway in May. He was triumphant on his 33rd birthday in June at Pennsylvania’s Williams Grove Speedway after Briggs Danner ran out of fuel on the last corner of the last lap. KTJ added a Smackdown prelim night score at Kokomo in August before bagging a $20,000 payday in September after becoming the first five-time winner of the Haubstadt Hustler at Tri-State.
Five years to the day after his most recent Ocala victory, C.J. Leary (Greenfield, Ind.) won again at the D-shaped Florida oval in February. For good measure, the fifth-place points finishing driver also was standing tall as the winner of the non-points inaugural Stoops Sprint Car Invitational at The Dirt Track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a 10-car, 20-lap invitational. Leary once again led all series drivers with 10 fast qualifying times, the third time he has achieved the feature, and the only driver to do so more than once.
Mitchel Moles’ season was highlighted by an Eastern Storm title in which he recorded five top-five results in a six-night span. Furthermore, one year after becoming the first ever USAC National Sprint Car winner at Illinois’ Macon Speedway, the Raisin City, California native became the first ever repeat series winner at the 1/5-mile dirt oval for his only series win of the year on the road to a sixth place finish in points.
Robert Ballou (Rocklin, Calif.) was on the winning side of the most electrifying finish of the year when he erased a half-straightaway deficit to Kyle Cummins on the last lap to win the opening night of #LetsRaceTwo in May at Eldora. His first series win in 18 months proved to be the closest finish of the USAC season – .016 seconds. In June, Ballou also became the third driver to surpass 500 career USAC National Sprint Car feature starts, joining Dave Darland and Brady Bacon.
Joining the brand new Petty Performance Racing team for 2024, Kyle Cummins (Princeton, Ind.) progressively jelled to become a consistent frontrunner. After calling his shot in July by declaring over the PA system, “we’re going to win at Kokomo,” he did just that 24 hours later for the team’s first win. Cummins and company added one more win on Friday the 13th in September at Circle City.
Justin Grant (Ione, Calif.) experienced perhaps the strangest stat line in the history of USAC National Sprint Car racing by finishing ninth in points despite winning nine times! Inconsistency plagued his bid for a third-straight series title, but when he was on, he was on. He won the opening two rounds of the season in Ocala and rounded out the year with a win in the season finale at Red Dirt to become just the fourth driver in USAC Sprint Car history to win both the opener and the closer in a season, joining the likes of Pat O’Connor (1956), Steve Butler (1986) and Brady Bacon (2020).
In May, Grant bewildered the crowd by winning at Eldora, then promptly stuffing his car into the turn three wall and flipping over on his cooldown lap. He then won his 50th career USAC National Sprint Car race in May at Knoxville as well as the Indiana Sprint Week round at Tri-State. He picked up the prelim opener of Smackdown at Kokomo, then became the first 4-time Smackdown championship night winner two nights later with a lucrative $35,000 top prize.
Matt Westfall (Pleasant Hill, Ohio) snuck into 10th in points on the final weekend of the year after making the biggest charge to win during the 2024 series season. Starting 13th on the grid at Red Dirt, Westfall patrolled the bottom to the lead and to a highly popular win. Amid the process, it was the furthest back any driver had started and won a race with the series since Kevin Thomas Jr.’s 14th to 1st charge at Indiana’s Lincoln Park Speedway in 2021.
Briggs Danner (Allentown, Pa.) posted his first three victories of the USAC National Sprint Car season in 2024. In June at Grandview, he became the first Pennsylvanian to win a USAC National Sprint Car feature since Frankie Kerr 25 years earlier in 1999 and the first Pennsylvanian to win a series race in his home state since Paul Pitzer at Reading in 1979. Danner went on to cement his status as a winner outside the confines of the Keystone State as well by capturing the Indiana Sprint Week finale in August at Bloomington and the inaugural Greg Staab Memorial at Lawrenceburg in October.
Hunter Maddox (Bedford, Indiana) raced his way to Rookie of the Year honors with the USAC National Sprint Cars in 2024. Maddox, who cut his racing teeth on dirt bikes, made 25 feature starts and finished 18th in the standings.
