Brent Marks is one of if not the hottest Sprint Car drivers in the country. The Myerstown Missile clicked off seven podium finishes in his last 8 races. He also won his last race on June 12th at Knoxville Raceway with the World of Outlaws. His average finish in those eight races is third. His worst and only finish off the podium was a 12th place at Eagle Raceway.

While he’s gotten extraordinarily hot, it was not the case at the start of his year. He struggled out of the gate in Florida with only two Top 10s at Volusia Speedway Park. He also struggled with consistency when the High Limit Racing season kicked off in March at the Dirt Track at Las Vegas. He finished 4th, 11th, and 19th. Then at Central Arizona Raceway he finished 23rd, 13th, and 16th. He was able to click off a couple solid runs at Vado and Route 66 with 4th and 6th place finishes. Then at Lucas Oil Speedway and Eagle Raceway in the middle of April, he finished 9th and 12th. Next, at Texas and Kokomo he finished 24th, 12th, and 14th to start off May. Things didn’t improve at Grandview in the middle of the month with a 24th place finish. However, at the end of the month he finished 8th at Lawrenceburg and then began his podium run at Butler with a 2nd place finish.

In 22 High Limit features he has 8 top 5s and just 11 top 10s with most of those top 5s coming over the last half month or so. His slow start put him in a hole in the Championship chase and even with his hot streak he still sits in 8th position, 183 points behind current points leader Rico Abreu.

Marks discussed his hot streak as well as his struggles early on in the season and what he believes has been the trigger that turned things around with The Dirt Parlor, “It’s been a tough stretch to the beginning part of the year, but we’ve been working extremely hard to to turn it around. I feel like we’re on the uptick there and getting things to where we know we can be. Feel like we’re doing a really good job right now and just trying to keep it up.”

When asked by host Don Martin on what he felt was hampering him and his team in the early portion of the year, Marks said, “A lot of things were just circumstantial. We’ve just been through a lot the beginning part of the year with sponsorship changes and just things not working out. And the stress of that just kind of weighing on my shoulders ’cause not only am I the driver, I’m team owner and all that too. So, there’s just a lot of extra stress that comes with that. You know, you’re just trying to keep the team going up and down the road. It’s really hard especially in today’s world. It’s just so hard to continue to do this.”

“There was just some things that needed to be cleared up on my end and I felt like once I got that figured out and the weight of that off my shoulders I felt like I could be Brent Marks the driver again instead of the guy who’s just having all the worry,” he continued. “That was probably a major part of it. This game is so mental and you have to be mentally prepared every single night to go out there and perform to the best of your ability and I just felt like I wasn’t quite there the beginning part of this year. That was one thing.”

“And then another thing was just stupid stuff. Getting involved with stupid accidents and run-ins that should just never happen. That got really frustrating, but that was honestly, really the end result of us just not performing the way we should have been performing. Back running in that part of the pack where we’re running around those guys that just run into each other all the time. Once we got away from that and started performing here, we’ve, obviously, had a lot better success.”

“There’s just a lot that goes into it,” Marks said. “It’s racing, man. It has its ups and downs. You go through a spurt of really bad things happening and then you go through a spurt really good things happening. It’s really difficult to navigate mentally, but I do the best I can and I feel like we’ve really started digging ourselves out of this hole that we were in the beginning part of the year.”

One of the ways that he’s refocused mentally is focusing on the here and now rather than looking ahead. He explained, “I don’t think about the next one too much anymore because If you think about it too much you get your nerves too worked up. You maybe start overanalyzing things too much. We did maintenance on the car today. I thought about a little bit of what I wanted to run setup wise. Got all that stuff down, but here on out, I’m not thinking about it ’til tomorrow. I need to save all that mental energy for the three-hour period that I need to perform. … I just try not to think about that too much.”

Marks will aim to continue the hot streak as he rolls into Skagit Speedway for three nights of racing for the Super Dirt Cup that culminates with the Jim Raper Memorial Super Dirt Cup Finale on Saturday, June 20th that pays over $100,000 to-win.

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