Outside of the drag strip the one type of racing that really knocks us on our ass is sprint car racing. We do not get a chance to see a ton of it in person but we love living vicariously through videos like this one that GoPro recently made of Kyle Larson. Like many modern NASCAR drivers, Larson has had a driving pedigree that included open wheel stuff on dirt. Larson has won a bunch of World of Outlaw races and competed in many different types of winged and non-winged sprint cars over the years. To boil it down, the guy is one hell of wheelman when it comes to going fast, sideways, on a banked dirt oval.
In this case that oval is clay and it is the “semi-banked” course at California’s Antioch Speedway. A quarter mile bull-ring of a track, you will see the Larson is busting his hump the whole way around with constant inputs on the wheel and the throttle pedal to keep the car doing what he wants it to be doing.
The beauty of this clip is that it is a quick one, coming in at a shade over 2-minutes. The lesson here is that it is a microcosm of what being a sprint car driver is like. Intense, hardcore, fast paced, and in some ways over before you even realized it was getting started.
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