Last week, we learned about the Chili Bowl Nationals, a dirt-track midget racing event that takes place in Tulsa every year in January. There’s a lot of drifting. There’s a lot of cars rolling. The event’s open to anyone, so you get a range of competitors from everyday schlubs to, well, Chase Elliott.
And in between those, you get the best dirt track racers the world has to offer, including Rico Abreu.
Abreu is only four feet, four inches tall. He isn’t the typical size for a professional athlete. And yet, in auto-racing, where cars can be modified to one’s size, one can make that work, and Abreu does.
Now, before we talk more about Abreu: When I used the word “midget” above, I was referring to midget cars, a small, open-wheel type of racecar. Wanted to clear any confusion up on that point, and hopefully ease any alarm.
But Abreu.
Abreu’s evidently a stud on dirt tracks. He won the Chili Bowl in 2015 and 2016. He was 13th at this past year’s Knoxville Nationals. He’s got great hair. He currently drives mainly midget cars and sprint cars (similar to midget cars, but often with wings on top), and he’s got a brand for himself, getting sponsored in Tulsa last week by Rowdy Energy, Kyle Busch’s brand.
It’s unclear where Abreu’s career’s going to go in the long term—for the time being, it sounds like it’s just midget cars and sprint cars—but he did run a full season in NASCAR’s Truck Series back in 2016, finishing 13th in the standings. But this part of the nature of auto racing—namely, the fact that someone can make a career in these sort of wildcard events, unaffiliated with NASCAR or IndyCar or any of the other big touring series—is unique in sports, and arguably not marketed well enough by those large touring series themselves, who while directly unaffiliated would probably benefit from it in the same way European soccer leagues benefit from unaffiliated cups and things like that.
Abreu did not win the Chili Bowl this year. Kyle Larson did. But man, whole world of this that goes unnoticed until you start following dozens of NASCAR fans/writers/drivers on Twitter because you decided to blog about NASCAR.
