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The nascent IHRA Stock Car Series aims to become a premier division for the literal Saturday night racer and while every new tour that pops up delivers some type of similar creed, this one does come across as different in some significant ways.
For one, the series is utilizing a Limited Late Model and Pro Late Model rules package for both divisions as opposed to the Late Model Stock Car and Super Late Model with both using spec AFCO shocks with no bump stops, bump springs or coil-binding.
There’s also age limits, 14 for Pro Late Models and 16 for Late Model Sportsman, all designed to bring cars out of sheds that have been sitting on stands with an older age aggregate compared to CARS Tour and ASA style racing that features a lot teenagers on their way to ARCA and the NASCAR Truck Series.
No digital dashes allowed and tires can only be used if purchased at the current or previous IHRA event with codes that must match the file on record. They don’t want teams mocking up three or four times during a practice period.
Series director and assistant director Tim and Daniel Horton say these are very deliberate decisions. And while the Hortons say they are open to tweaks, it’s going to take some very convincing arguments to move them off what has already been published.
“Nothing is off the table,” said Daniel Horton, who is also Tim’s son. “But we’ve chosen these rules for the racers and are trying to save them some money. The AFCO shock is a great package and retails for $400.
“We want to get them off bump stops, which a lot of these races are on, only because that’s what used at the next level. Our racers generally are the ones that don’t have, or don’t have access to a pull-down rig, and we used the Late Model Sportsman name because we want this to be a throwback to the late 90s, early 2000s era for these cars.”
Tim says there are teams going down to the Snowball Derby in the next couple of days with $30,000 invested in their shock programs and said their decision was based on looking at local tracks Limited Late Model car counts and a record car count for the Pro Late Model Snowflake 125 at Pensacola next weekend.
So basically, on paper, IHRA Stock Cars will pay larger purses for ‘economy’ classes than what the premier divisions pay.
The obvious question, and one racers have asked more than any other over the past week since the IHRA Stock Car Series was announced, was ‘is the money real’ because pavement racers are a skeptical lot. Also, accounting for all the known finances of the series, it’s operating at around a 1.2 million dollar loss in its first season, without accounting for any series sponsorship.
The money is based on the very real business success of series owner Darryl H. Cuttell, who owns the Ohio-based Darana Hybrid electrical-mechanical contractor, that famously does work for the likes of xAI, Tesla and SpaceX.
Those who know Cuttell say that motorsport of all kind is his passion, and in the absence of an heir, racing is his legacy. Cuttell is famously a thrill-seeking, buying a power boat and setting a speed record in the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout at 242 mph … and nearly killing himself by beaching it shortly thereafter.
Over the past year, he has purchased the IHRA Drag Racing sanctioning body, numerous tracks, tractor pulling and power boat series, at an unrelenting pace that has raised red flags across the larger racing community.
Tim also used a word that other people have used about Cuttell – legacy.
“He’s purchased seven or eight drag strips now, repurposed them, and made deep investments into the infrastructure of the sport,” Tim said. “This is his passion. He views it as a chance to establish a legacy. He’s done really well with his business and this is his idea of fun.
“He owns several drag cars, power boats. He loves motorsport.”
And while the IHRA purchase resulted in Cuttell hiring executives to run it, and then parting ways with many of them before the season was over, the Hortons have worked for him for five years at Darana Hybrid.
“He’s the best boss I ever had,” Daniel said. “He expects, like any private sector business owner, that we are a high-performance company that expects high-performance employees. I’ve seen where people say ‘how can he run all these different series and his business,’ but dad is the series director for Stock Cars, Leah Martin is keeping watch over everything as IHRA president, and he has employees for each segment of his business.
“You could ask me stuff about the power boats, and I can probably answer them, but Darryl has people running that too.”
In any case, the Stock Cars Series was the result of the Tennessee based Hortons building a Pro Late Model that they intended to run at the likes of Nashville Fairgrounds and Highland Rim when the motorsport obsessed Cuttell stopped at their shop one day.
“What is that,” he basically asked.
Cuttell, who never met a car he didn’t want to drive fast, said he wanted to race and that turned into a conversation about where these types of cars race and the back-and-forth eventually conceived a Stock Car Series to run alongside the other new IHRA ventures too.
Then there’s the schedule, which has three CARS Tour conflicts and also runs head-to-head with the prestigious Martinsville Speedway Late Model Stock race.
On its face, this looks like competition for CARS Tour, doesn’t it?
“I can see why it looks like that,” Daniel said. “We have nothing but respect for the CARS Tour. There are a lot of teams that have these kinds of cars that just can’t go CARS Tour racing and a lot of them just have the cars sitting on jack stands. I feel like we can have a different market.
“Our racers have full-time jobs. We want to give these guys one day shows with a shorter schedule, and a place to race, but also race for good money too.
“If you look at our schedule, you’ll notice that we scheduled around our Drag Racing Series. It wasn’t that we scheduled intentionally against anyone else. We aren’t concerned with what other series are doing just because we think we’re doing something else for a different kind of racer.”
The schedule is entirely comprised of track rentals, where the series pays the tracks to be let in and race, and then hand the keys back over.
That includes now defunct Memphis Motorsports Park, which is a shell of its former NASCAR hosting self, having not hosted races since 2022. Its SAFER Barriers are now at Stafford Motor Speedway.
Daniel Horton says they cannot speak on behalf of the owner of the track, and that those announcements are forthcoming, but IHRA expects a quality season finale at the track in October.
One last note about Cuttell is, that while some of his track acquisitions have resulted in disputes over contracts and payments, none of which resulted in legal action, IHRA racers all swear by what he does for them.
As one person connected to Drag Racing told Short Track Scene:
“He is incredibly rich. He is intensely serious about giving drag racers a great experience. He feeds the teams. He knows their names. He welcomes them. He has invested a lot of money in the right aspects. He is trying to save racers – save the sport – from escalating costs. … He sees a void in the marketplace and has moved to fill it.”
Now, it seems that Cuttell is moving to do the same in the pavement short track space.
The racing series does not yet have a broadcast partner, but the Hortons say ‘stay tuned’ for that announcement as well.
Matt Weaver is the owner and founder of Short Track Scene. Weaver grew up in the sport, having raced himself before becoming a reporter in college at the University of South Alabama. He also has extensive experience covering NASCAR, IndyCar and Dirt Sprint Cars.
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