Tough Road For Schatz To Make 27th Knoxville A-Main

Donny Schatz in action at Knoxville Raceway. (Ashley Zimmerman photo)

KNOXVILLE, Iowa – Donny Schatz has a more difficult path than normal to traverse if he wants to keep his streak of consecutive championship feature starts alive at the NOS Energy Drink Knoxville Nationals presented by Casey’s.

Schatz, a 10-time World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series champion and 11-time Knoxville Nationals winner, came up one spot short of locking in to the big show during FVP Hard Knox Night Friday.

The Fargo, N.D., native finished fifth in the 25-lap feature, a race which only sent the top four into the $195,000-to-win ‘Granddaddy Of Them All’ and left Schatz on the outside looking in – for now.

He’ll line up 11th in Saturday’s Micro-Lite Last Chance Showdown, needing to pass seven cars in 22 laps at the half-mile black clay oval in order to qualify for his 27th straight Knoxville Nationals finale.

All that came as a result of a forgettable preliminary performance on Wednesday, where Schatz was a complete non-factor and finished 14th in the Last Chance Showdown that night, not even making the main.

His frustrations continued 48 hours later, despite the fact Schatz wheeled the No. 15 Tony Stewart/Curb-Agajanian Racing sprinter from 15th to fifth in 25 laps and seemed to have speed for the first time all week.

“I don’t know if I have any good thoughts,” said Schatz of his Friday run. “My mom always told me that if you can’t say [anything] nice, don’t say it.”

Schatz actually lined up sixth for the final green-white-checkered restart Friday and had a nose into fourth coming off turn two on the first lap of the short sprint, but couldn’t hold on and ended up losing out to fellow veteran Daryn Pittman, another past Outlaws champion.

“I thought we had a chance, but it wasn’t enough,” Schatz lamented. “There was a lot of crazy stuff happening on the restarts. If we would have gone [forward] on the first one, I think we’d have been alright, but we got jammed up on the first start and ended up stuck for a bit. That hurt us.

“At least we rolled for the first time all weekend, but we’ll have to try and get through the hard way.”

Can Schatz make a run through the Last Chance Showdown and have a successful Nationals in the end?

He did it in 2013, when he won the B, started 21st in the grand finale and won the whole thing for his seventh victory in eight years at the time. But he believes this go-round won’t be as simple.

“We’ll have to see what the racetrack is like,” Schatz noted, after being asked if he felt he could race in through the alphabet soup. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do. You can go to a show with 35 cars, be off a fair ways, and still be alright, but you can’t do that here in the B-Mains and A-Mains at the Nationals and think that you’re going to be alright.

“My guys will go and do what they can … and we’ll just see where the cards fall at the end of it.”

With severe weather threatening Saturday’s finale program, track and series officials are targeting a three-hour window from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Central time to complete the remaining features.

An E-Main, D-Main, and C-Main will precede the Last Chance Showdown – where Schatz will battle 23 others trying to make the Knoxville Nationals – before the championship feature takes center stage.

Every lap of Knoxville Nationals week streams live on DIRTvision, the exclusive home of the World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series.