Steve Francis Q & A at World of Outlaws Late Model Series Media Day

Steve Francis is in his second year as the Series Director for the World of Outlaws Late Models. This Q & A is from a one-on-one interview done on Media Day, which was held in Concord, N.C. at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Francis shared some things about the upcoming season.

by Rhonda Beck, WISNC Creations/BeckRacingMedia

2-01-2024

Rhonda Beck: Steve, good to see you here. You are doing this World of Outlaws Media Day again and they’ve set it up a little differently this year. Reporters can be here or on Zoom for the press conference. Media from various organizations, like the National Motorsports Press Association, are involved as well. Anything to say about this event and the year ahead?

Steve Francis: Well, our sport is growing and growing and growing and we’ve reached a point where, let’s face it, racetracks are tapped out and team owners are tapped out and this at least gives them some footage and some legitimacy. They have something to take to the sponsor and show we’re legitimate; we’re not just some backyard thing. We don’t want to lose the grassroots of our sport, but yet we need to have accessible drivers that are still elevated. This is the first step to doing that. We have a lot of things planned for the next two years, things we’re going to try to do for these race teams and these drivers and make them heroes. That’s a lot of our plan with this, and this is just the first step of it.

RB: ?I talked to you last year about scheduling and you have quite a slate of races again this year. Are there any you’re looking forward to?

SF: Well, I’ve done the Gopher 50, but really looking forward to that event this year. I’m looking forward to the Ultimate, the Talladega race--the Alabama gang deal 100 down there. You know, we changed some of the purses on there. The teams have asked again, and we took money off first place. We want 10-12 guys or their car owners to be good at the end of the year so we’re not trying to make it a super difficult deal for the team owners. We’re trying to make it easier for them. This media day is tool one that they can use. It’s a great way to take things to prospective sponsors and show them. And show them you can do this and we can do these things. It’s just the next step of elevating everything.

RB: Someone commented the other day on other regional series paying 10 grand and yet competitors go to the World of Outlaws and Lucas races to compete for the same amount of money. I said those series traditionally started earlier than a lot of the other ones, but I think there’s a prestige to being able to run with those top competitors on the tour.

SF: And definitely there is. What I’m proud of is we have a great group of very established race teams with Bobby Pierce, Chris Madden, Brandon Sheppard, Kyle Bronson, Brian Shirley, Dennis Erb. That group has been racing for a long time. Even though Bobby and Kyle aren’t very old; they’re both 20s, 30s. But then you look at the class of rookies we have that is a completely different younger group. So that shows that we’re trying to turn those guys into heroes and just keep that food chain going. That’s the goal of this. Those guys can’t go broke doing it their first year. They have to be able to do this a couple of years. They’re going to take their lumps out on the road the first year and they all know this.

RB: I’m from around this area now and I see places like Ultimate Motorsports & Rv Park on the schedule and Jimmy Owens now being connected with Koehler Motorsports. Anything to say about that track or other races?

SF: You know, Bobby Koehler has been kind of a shot in the arm for the dirt late model world, and especially in this Virginia-Carolina region. He’s injected a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal money, and he wants to do it. He’s put a couple of good race teams together and he’s kind of got it going on here. We’re really looking forward to that Memorial Day race there; we built a purse in that thing. When we got to talking about it, Bobby said, “let’s just take a clean sheet of paper and build something a little different, a little unique.” And that’s what we’re doing. And the Gopher 50, we’re doing something way different there, with the Fourth of July weekend. We’ve got the big, huge fireworks display on Thursday night, we have a Dylan Scott concert after the race on Friday night and we finish the weekend up on Saturday night with a $50,000-to-win event. We’re trying to do things—we never want to take away from the racing because the racing is the main thing--but we want to subsidize it and subsidize the promoters and the race teams in any other way we can.

RB: What would you say about the cost of equipment and everything? I’ve talked with some of the guys who have been in the business for many years and they often talk about the cost of things. You recognize all of that?

SF: Yes. I hate to say this. And I 100% agree that the cost of things has gotten astronomical, but so has going to McDonald’s anymore. I’ve used this example a lot: You used to go get a two-cheeseburger meal for $4. That thing’s probably $8 or $9 now. So everything has went up. But also, you look at our purses and they’ve went up too. But the sport is hard; it’s a lot more work. I go back to my earlier days, and I wonder how we ran—I mean, I think 1992 or ‘93, somewhere in there, I ran 108 races that year with a Dually pickup and a small enclosed trailer going to hotels at night and stuff. You get back and think how did we manage to pull that off? But then a lot of the nice toterhomes, they take a lot of time and clean-up. That’s an extra day and a half a week, cleaning this thing, washing this thing, restocking this thing. It’s definitely more professional than it was back then.