Jimmy Owens shared his thoughts on where he sees the future of Dirt Super Late Model racing, noting that the current rules limit experimentation and what the cars and the sport could become.
During an interview with Kenny Wallace, Owens was asked, “Do you think there’s anything else that is like big? Do you think anything else will come?”
Owens responded, “I feel like there’s lots out there and lots of improvements that can and should be made, but they’re putting us in a box and they’ve specified our rules. We can and can’t do this. And so they’ve took the ingenuity out of what our cars could become. And so, like you said, it keeps getting smaller and smaller: the improvements. That’s because they’re limiting us to what we can do.”
Wallace then asked a follow-up, “Do we need Lucas Oil and World of Outlaws and Flo? Do we need them to save us? Hunt the Front? Do we need them to save us because we could spend ’til we’re broke. Is it good or bad that they’re putting us in a box?”
Owens answered, “Personally, I don’t think so because it makes repetitious, you know what I mean? I don’t like that part of it. But then I see people that, ‘Man, we can’t run with this or that’ whenever they see something different on a car. … I don’t like it being in that box.”
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad for the sport, but I don’t like it,” he concluded.
Owens is not alone with his opinion. Warrior Chassis builder Mike Nuchols spoke to Dirtrackr’s Justin Fiedler about the issue at the end of 2025. He shared, “What’s wild is like ever evolving every single day, but the last three years we haven’t made as big of gain as we did like the first five before that. Like I feel like ’18 through ’20, man, we made leaps and bounds as an industry. Then once we hit COVID, we’ve kind of slowed down a little bit.”
“And then I said, Hoosier changed the tire, it made us learn a little bit and then once we kind of figured out the tires again, we’re kind of sitting here stale in a way as far as innovation and all that stuff goes,” he continued. “So the next step might be the CFD testing to try to get those little bitty gains out of this thing. But our surface changes every single lap, so I don’t know if all that 100% matters.”
As for why he believes there’s been this stagnation, he shared, “I said this to somebody the other day, ‘When Kevin Rumley can’t figure out how to make a frame go faster right now, I think they got our box too small.’ Once the suspension rules got so tight, the frame was the next object to change. ‘Cause Rumley changed the frame game in ’15. Okay, well we all figured that out and then he changed the suspension game. They told him, ‘No.’ So now we’re back to just a frame again. And I know he’s made a couple reversions and they’ve not went no faster. Or they’ve just not handled the way you wanted them to.”
“On the Super Late Model side of stuff, our box is too small,” he declared. “Now, I can take everything that Rumley’s told not to do and take it to a Steel Block race and use it. ‘Cause we still do deck height and all that stuff. All that fancy trickery that he was known to do. We can still do that in Steel Block racing. It’s kind of the Wild West a little bit. We can do different things over there than we can Super Late Model racing. I have a weird outlook that Super Late Model racing should not be the most in the box deal. It should be let’s run what you brung, keep the body rules kind of tame, but underneath that thing let’s just go. Like let’s figure out who is the smartest individual in this pit area.”
Mike Marlar also made similar comments back in 2024 following the Firecracker 100 that Ricky Thornton Jr. dominated. Marlar told Kyle McFadden’s FloRacing, “I love that the series has all these rules, but the rules are so tight, the cars are all the same. That means it comes down to the fine details, like shocks and spring curves and all those kinds of things.”
“Now the technology … I feel like I have to find the right guy or I’m going to get left behind. I have to have somebody in my corner. Josh (Davis) and Jerry (Sprouse) are some of the best mechanics. My car always finishes. We have the best maintenance program. But what we lack is we don’t have anyone that makes it go fast. I’m out there driving a car that handles like [crap] half the time and I have to deal with it. I’m not trying to whine. It’s just facts.”
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