Cushion Drift is a documentary channel about American dirt track racing: sprint cars, late models, midgets and modifieds, and the people who built their lives around them. Every video is a long-form story, twenty-five to thirty-five minutes, researched from race results, newspaper archives, sanctioning body records and first-hand interviews. No hot takes, no crash compilations, no ranking a man's worst night. What we cover: the drivers who came out of the bullrings and changed the sport, from Steve Kinser and Jan Opperman to Tony Stewart and Kyle Larson. The tracks, why some half-mile ovals became institutions and why others were paved over. The money, what a sprint car season costs and how a family team survives. If you grew up on Friday nights at the local dirt track, you know why this matters. If you never have, this is the way in. New documentary every week. Subscribe for the drivers, the tracks and the money behind dirt racing.
Cushion Drift
In 1985, 13-year-old Jeff Gordon was too young to race sprint cars in California. Sixteen months later, his whole family had moved to Pittsboro, Indiana.
This is the story of that decision. Jeff Gordon started in quarter midgets at five on a makeshift track at the Vallejo fairgrounds, won more than two hundred quarter midget and kart races by the age of twelve, and then ran out of cars he was allowed to drive. His stepfather, John Bickford, appealed the age rule and got him onto the All Star Florida Speedweeks in February 1985, where a thirteen-year-old qualified eighteenth out of fifty-four against grown men.
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Cushion Drift
On the night of August 5, 2013, Tony Stewart was leading a sprint car race in Oskaloosa, Iowa, that paid no championship points to anybody in it. Five laps from the end, a lapped car spun in front of him and collected the top three.
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Cushion Drift
In 1972 Jan Opperman is believed to have won forty-four of the ninety main events he entered. Believed. Nobody was keeping his record.
He was the original outlaw of American sprint car racing: long hair, a dead brother's western hat, crosses on his helmet, and a refusal to belong to any sanctioning body that might have counted his nights. He was paid in cash at the end of the evening. He collected no points because he was eligible for none. Promoters put him on the poster because the name sold more tickets than a championship standing ever would have.
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Cushion Drift
On August 6, 2016, Bryan Clauson took the lead of a midget race in Belleville, Kansas, on lap thirty-nine. It was the 116th race he had started that year, and the year was not close to over.
He was trying to start 200 races in a single calendar year. Not 200 laps. Two hundred separate races, in five different kinds of car, across a country three thousand miles wide, which averages out to a green flag roughly every forty-four hours for fifty-two weeks.
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Cushion Drift
On April 12, 2020, Kyle Larson said a racial slur over an open microphone during an online race. Two days later he had no team, no corporate sponsors and no end date on his suspension. Twenty-six days after that he was sitting on a starting grid in Iowa. This video is not about the apology. It is about the people who put him back in a race car, and about a sport with no central authority to stop them. NASCAR's suspension covered events sanctioned by NASCAR. Sprint car racing is not one of them. The World of Outlaws belongs to a private company, USAC is a separate body with its own rulebook and its own officials, and a Friday night dirt track answers to whoever owns the ground it sits on. When Larson raced at Knoxville Raceway on May 8, 2020, the grandstand was empty, 48 teams were allowed in at five people each, and there were roughly 380 people on the entire property.
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Cushion Drift
In February of 2000, Earl Baltes told a room of fellow promoters that Eldora Speedway would pay one million dollars to win a dirt late model race. The race was set for that October. It rained. Baltes was a bandleader before he was a promoter. He led a sixteen-piece outfit called the Melody Makers, bought a dance hall in western Ohio and renamed it the Eldora Ballroom, and in 1954 cut a quarter-mile oval into the ground beside it. By 1958 it was a half-mile of banked clay. He had no racing background at all, and what he understood was not racing. This video is about one promise and what it took to keep it. The million was the fourth number he had put on a poster before the money existed: four thousand dollars for the first World 100 in 1971, fifty thousand for the first Kings Royal in 1984, a hundred thousand for the first Dream in 1994.
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Cushion Drift
Steve Kinser started last at Daytona on February 19, 1995, and crashed on lap 27. Ten months earlier he had beaten Dale Earnhardt in a stock car. Kinser won 20 World of Outlaws championships, the first in 1978, the year the series was founded, and five straight between 1990 and 1994. He won the Knoxville Nationals twelve times and took feature wins at 142 racetracks. They called him the King of the Outlaws. On April 30, 1994, he ran an IROC race at Talladega, the series where twelve drivers from twelve kinds of racing share twelve identical cars nobody is allowed to adjust. He led the last 25 of 38 laps at an average of 186.323 mph. Dale Jarrett finished third, Al Unser Jr. fifth, Dale Earnhardt eighth, Rusty Wallace ninth, Mark Martin twelfth. Kenny Bernstein put him in the No. 26 Quaker State Ford for 1995.
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Cushion Drift
Kevin Ward Jr. died at Canandaigua Motorsports Park on August 9, 2014, after climbing from his car under a yellow flag. The track was still running. Ward was twenty years old, from Port Leyden in Lewis County, New York, and he had been racing since he was four. In 2012 he was Rookie of the Year in the Empire Super Sprints. On lap fourteen of a twenty-five lap feature at Canandaigua, in Ontario County, his number thirteen car went into the wall after contact with the number fourteen of Tony Stewart, the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion. Ward got out and walked down the racing surface toward the oncoming field. He was struck and killed. This video is about the part that is almost never explained: why a young driver believed that getting out and walking was a normal thing to do. Dirt racing had a confrontation ritual that had gone unchallenged for decades, and in August of 2014 no sanctioning body in the United States had a rule against it. You will also learn why the footage cannot settle the argument.
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