Chris Ferguson appeared on The Dirt Parlor Podcast last week, where he recapped his solid Show-Me 100 weekend, but also reflected on his friendship with the late Scott Bloomquist and discussed what he learned from the dirt late model legend to improve his race craft, but also how he had a profound impact on him off the track.

Almost an hour into the discussion after going over the Show-Me 100 with hosts Gordy Gundaker and Don Martin, Gundaker asked Ferguson to discuss his time with Bloomquist and how much he learned from him.

“For me, getting in his cars really was a surprise. It was out of nowhere,” Ferguson recalled. “I had a relationship with Cody and I built Scott’s seats when I used to work at ButlerBuilt. So I knew that I had a relationship. We did inserts for him and built seats. It was a surprise ’cause I started the year out running the World of Outlaws and I’d won Lucas and Outlaw races before, but when you get on tour it’s a whole different deal. And I didn’t have no full-time guys and we were trying to race a tour and work. Had a little bit of success. I think I was maybe 7th or 8th in the points come May, June. Man, just ran terrible at Eldora and wasn’t having fun.”

“I remember I ran a World of Outlaw race at Bulls Gap and I’d ran good for how bad I’d been running that year. I think I maybe ran like 5th or 6th,” Ferguson continued. “But it’s a track that I know and I should run good at. And Scott was there. Scott pulled up in front of my hauler with his truck. He was just there watching. He wasn’t racing. Said, ‘Follow me back to the shop, let’s talk.’

After the race, Ferguson shared that he and his dad drove 45 minutes to Bloomquist’s shop, “And I talked to Cody a couple times about is this even an option? Everyone always asks, ‘Scott selling cars or is he not?’  And we went back to his shop after the race, which is hilarious, because my dad’s the first one to go to sleep in the pits, the first one to get up. So after the race we’re driving 45 minutes to Scott’s to really talk about it. And it’s so crazy because that was the year that Scott got hurt. I was actually going to buy his car that he won the Show-Me with, but then he ended up getting cleared to race, which who knows if that was the right call or not. I didn’t get a car.”

However, later that year he got a call from Bloomquist with the opportunity to build a car, “And then he calls me, ‘Sweet’s got three cars in Michigan. And one of them’s mine and the other two can be yours. Just go pick them up.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ Just chassis. And I’m like, ‘Am I hearing this right?’ So my dad gets up at 3:30 every morning, drives straight to Michigan with an open trailer. They put one in the back of the truck and two on the open trailer. Drives straight to Michigan, loads them up, drives straight home. It was like 40 hours. It was 18 hours up there. I think he said he slept 3 hours. That was in July, August.”

Ferguson then shared that Bloomquist did have one major condition to get the car: “I’ll never forget, Scott was like, ‘If you’re going to race this car you got to come build it.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, but we all work. So how does that work?’ And that’s whenever the real craziness happened. I spent like four weekends with Dad, Tadpole, my brother, Cody, and Scott, where we would drive up on Thursday or Friday, work until Sunday and come home and come back to work. And when I say work, I mean we started at 9:00 PM and worked ’til 7:00 AM on Scott’s time and Cody’s time.”

“And we got that car done. We got it done for the Dirt Million,” Ferguson recalled. “But when we built it there were so many things that we would start doing, we’d get halfway through it, Scott would be like, ‘No, no, no, no. Take that [crap] off. We got to start over.’ But what was cool he was explaining why he does certain things. And Cody would explain why this works, and this is how you do it. When it was all said and done we built that car at his shop and we debuted it at the Dirt Million, which was a couple weeks before the World. I ended up making the show. ”

It was not a perfect debut as Ferguson was still getting adjusted to the setup specifically the swapped clutch and brakes, “The first night we debuted the car, I stabbed the clutch in qualifying instead of the brakes because they were swapped. I drove into the fence so I qualified like next to last.”

Despite the set back in qualifying, Ferguson found success quickly and knew he had something special with the car, “When we went to Mansfield, the field split like in the heat race, and I drove right through the middle and I was like, ‘Holy! This is cool. I’ve never had this feeling. This is like wow!’ To see Scott’s success, it makes sense. This was a different feeling than I’ve ever felt. And then I ended up making the show and stuff.”

“Then over the course of time, I won a month later at the Cotton Pickin’. I passed Billy Moyer with two to go to win. Scott called me and was like, ‘Man, people like you aren’t supposed to go down there and win in the black slick’. And then 2019, we build the other car, go to the Dream and run fourth. And then it was off to the races for a couple years.”

Next, Ferguson dove into some of the things he learned from Bloomquist. He said the biggest lesson was self-reliance, “The entire time I was working with Scott and working with Cody and even then Cody Sommer and everybody that was there, Shane and Sarah. The biggest thing Scott taught us was to not really rely on anybody else. I see why a lot of people had problems racing like that because when you’re racing for a living, you got to be able to go get bumpers and all these parts. The way Rocket [and] Longhorn does it, you can go buy the car ready to go, you can buy the nose ready to go. That don’t happen at Team Zero. Shane did a great job having parts and stuff and Scott did too, but you really were expected to do things yourself. Not only that, but I think he respected us because we figured it out, with his help don’t get me wrong. He told me when I first got in his cars, ‘I’m not here to baby sit you.’ And I’m like, ‘Fine. I’m cool with that.’ But he always told me, ‘If you find something that’s better I expect you to tell me ’cause I’m going to be an open book to you.’

“He said all them races that Jimmy won, we never talked. They may have talked, but they were massive competitors. I’m sure Jimmy knows this, but there was a lot of races that Scott ran second to him, I think after that, for my relationship with him, he was cool with me if I won, but if he came over there to ask, he wanted me to be transparent,” he added. “So, he taught us that there was ways of looking at 100-lap races with the cars, and fuel burn-off, and tires, and even there was adjustments we made from that first feature to the second [at the Show-Me] that my dad was explaining to DJ, ‘This is what Scott always said when it’s rough.’ And it’s cool that all those things still stick.”

He even recalled on specific moment where Bloomquist pulled him aside, “And then also the driving wise. He told me one time-. I passed him early in a feature in 2021, and he come over after the race ’cause I finished fifth or something. ‘Why the hell were you driving that hard?’ ‘I thought I had to go.’ He was like, ‘No you didn’t. See the four cautions under 20 to go? You could’ve picked off five right then instead of charging and blowing your tires off.’ I thought about that and I’m like, ‘He’s right. If you’re there at the end that’s all that really matters.'”

“He greatly affected my racing,” Ferguson added. “I got to learn more about the race cars. Learn more about the way that he treats people as far as the people that he liked and the people that he wanted to work with. He kept his circle pretty small for the most part. I think that’s why he was so successful for a long time. And even the things I got to see away from the track was really cool.”

Outside of the track, Bloomquist also left a mark, He remembered one moment from PRI, “There was one year that I was working for Butler and we helped out a lot of drivers back then before they were in the trouble they got in with losing the business. And we went [to] PRI and it stuck out to me. Scott was one of the only people that he brought a big old poster for us to hang up and couple shirts and thank you cards. I was like, ‘There’s a lot of people that get free seats when I was working there, especially through Genie and Brian. And none of them brought nothing to the booth, but Scott did.’ This is the main guy in dirt late model racing. He’s not too good to do that. That stuck with me.”

“It affected me and it changed me racing-wise. And then also I got to see the cool side that not a lot of people get to see,” he concluded.

Ferguson is in action this weekend at Eldora Speedway for the 32nd Annual Dirt Late Model Dream. He started it off with a solid start getting a fifth place finish in the FloRacing Night in America race on Wednesday night. He’s back in action tonight for preliminary action for the Dream, where $30,000 is up for grabs to the winner of the feature.

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